The Relational Habitus

Researchers in psychology, education, and anthropology have engaged for several decades in thinking about how to relate persons, tools, speech acts, goals, tasks, culture, and history in dynamic learning settings. The use of the relational habitus, proposed by Stone, Underwood, and Hotchkiss [this issue], provides an analytical lens to examine how people learn in formal and informal settings. Going beyond Bordieu’s [1989] notion of habitus, which includes psychological dispositions of individuals developed through interactions, the relational habitus includes the intersubjective relations of self, tools, tasks, and others. Understanding the relational habitus of a given setting helps explain variations in the social organization of meaning making and variations in learning. The relational habitus includes an orientation to others and mutual perspective taking in communication. Learners are influenced by their own actions with others, with tools, and tasks, and also by affordances of the situation they are learning in. The lens of the relational habitus therefore enables a deep understanding of learning, while at the same time it requires a deep understanding of the local cultural practices, models, and goals. Research that aims to use the relational habitus as an analytical lens will require tools of inquiry and analysis that get at the deep, structural aspects of a setting, as well as the surface structure of what is evident in interactions. How do we go about figuring out how people learn? The turn in the last few decades to intersubjectivity in context has produced much sociocultural research related to this question. Gone is the dominance of the model of the isolated individual in a Skinnerian paradigm. Instead, researchers across fields are now grappling with how to put together the seemingly kaleidoscopic interaction of persons, tools, and tasks in settings, in order to understand how people learn, what they learn, and how and why thinking changes. Attempts to put this all together require a commitment to understanding contexts that goes beyond individual psychological dispositions. The authors argued that more than just habitus, as proposed by Bordieu, relational habitus helps us understand people’s behavior and also informs the study of learning in contexts, because the relations of people, tools, tasks, and situational structuring are taken into account. Humans are born into relatedness, and this relatedness includes not only relations with others, but also relations with tools, goals, tasks, culture, language, and history. The authors focused on the ‘negotiated production of knowledge in the world’ to show how students in the relational habitus become competent members of a learning community. Learning and development are, as the authors noted, observable phenomena in contexts of human activity. The relational habitus, as it is proposed, is an attempt at understanding the total ecology of learning. It is important to highlight that ecology is taken seriously in this approach. Ecology is the set of relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their environment, which for people typically includes settings, tools, tasks, language and speech acts, goals, and history. Taking an ecological approach suggests that we also need to expand the lens of the focus of study, and that culture must be taken seriously.Stone et al. provided the tool of the relational habitus to add to our understanding of learning, and more specifically, ‘why and under what circumstances students are willing to consider different genres for concepts and ideas as resources for producing new knowledge’. This is a very specific goal, and using the lens of the relational habitus helps to distinguish why learning and changes in meaning making happen in some environments and not others. The authors boil this difference down to an intersubjective experience of relationship among learners, tools, tasks, and the situational structuring of contexts. Intersubjectivity is organized through interpersonal relationships, and it must be studied as ‘cultural, dialogical, and relational’, that is, in context, with appropriate analytical tools. Comparing the relational habitus of one learning situation to another can help the researcher understand how learning is different or similar across the situations. They propose the relational habitus as a lens to understand how small-scale ‘local’ cultures (i.e., classrooms, work settings, not a large culture such as ‘American’ culture) influence the ‘interactional, intersubjective processes of meaning-making in learning activity’. Relational habitus is there when individuals, tools, and the tasks they engage in become active environments where each is expressed, engaged, and possibly transformed. The point of proposing a relational habitus is that engagement in the relational habitus qualitatively transforms the ways that people interact with the world and the way the world interacts with people. And this engagement produces ongoing and constantly emerging transformations in the ways that people experience meaning, and the meaning of tools and tasks that people engage in. The relationship of people to a thing gives a thing its meaning; how the tool is used in interaction is the meaning in that particular context. Tasks come to make sense through intersubjective processes in context. The notion that learning activities are socially organized, and that there is change in perspective and meaning making is not new. It is helpful here to briefly review just a few of the major research endeavors in the study of learning in cultural settings. Many researchers in sociocultural theory have looked at learning and development in cultural contexts, and some have provided theoretical and analytical tools to do such research. For example, the activity theorists, such as Leont’ev, Luria, Vygotsky, and those who were influenced by this work, took very seriously the notion of history, cultural place, and people’s experiences in order to interpret their responses to questions, and to account for how their thinking changed over time. Activity theory has influenced decades of research on learning in psychology, anthropology, and education. Michael Cole was one of the first to bring Vygotsky’s thinking to the United States. The early work by Cole, Gay, Glick, and Sharp on The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking [1971] continues to be influential in our understanding of variations in learning and development across settings. Theirs was the first work to combine anthropological, linguistic, and psychological experimentation techniques to understanding cognitive processes cross-culturally. With fascinating results framed in a very deep ethnographic understanding of the local Kpelle culture, the authors concluded that the contextualized study of learning must combine ethnographic methods and experimental psychology. This work arguably laid the groundwork for cross-cultural studies of learning in context. Linking this to the article by Stone et al., it is clear that classrooms, or other learning settings, are cultures, and the cross-cultural approach of Cole et al. [1971] applies to them. The work of Cole and his colleagues since the publication of this seminal volume in 1971 has also proven to be quite useful and influential in understanding how minds learn and change in formal and informal learning contexts. A major theoretician in the cultural study of situated learning and development is Barbara Rogoff. Spanning six decades, Rogoff’s work has consistently aimed at understanding how people, especially children, interact with others, tools, and tasks in cultural settings. There is not space to review the entire Rogoff oeuvre here, but most apropos to the discussion of relational habitus is her seminal work on guided participation (laid out in her 1990 volume Apprenticeship in Thinking) and her recent book on The Cultural Nature of Human Development [2003]. Inspired in part by activity theory, Rogoff [1990] argued that the individual cannot be understood separately from the social world. She sees the development of thinking as a cultural process, where people engage in social interactions with peers and also learn from those who are more experienced. Rogoff [1990] also demonstrated how children are guided through learning processes, and that development happens as they increase their participation in daily activities, including those in school. The later volume, published in 2003, argued that development itself is a cultural process, and that people and cultures change through dynamic processes of social interaction. Rogoff gave innumerable examples of how people engage with cultural tools and tasks to create learning environments, including unintentional learning environments. My reading of Stone et al.’s relational habitus is that it would fit well with Rogoff’s argument about taking culture into account. The relational habitus provides a specific analytical tool to examine just how participation is changing in learning settings and how cultural factors are affecting earning, context, and any developmental outcomes. That is specifically what the idea of relational habitus adds to the existing literature: a lens to examine specific learning environments and ‘movement’ in them through intersubjective relations. Stone et al. referred to movement as shifts in social organization and psychological change in a sociopsychological space. A student may shift from one social organization to another, for example when a child shifts from a peer-oriented group to a teacher-peer-coordinated group. Movement is not neutral: there is a moral charge to movement that involves people’s expectations for behavior. The relational habitus of the student in a peer-oriented group shifts to a different relational habitus when a teacher becomes involved. And the movement that happens is change that can be studied by researchers who want to understand learning processes. The relational habitus has serious implications for methods. A relational approach requires a different kind of analytical toolkit than some other approaches. By now video technology is widely available, and there are ever more sophisticated software tools for analysis. Video is essential for the close analysis of verbal and nonverbal acts so critical to understanding learning and change in the context of learning interactions. However, having good tools is only one part of the process. The researcher is also served by having cultural knowledge of the local context under study. For example, in this article, the authors used examples from a classroom where they have knowledge of the teacher’s patterns, and his ethos for learning interactions. They use this knowledge to interpret the students’ interactions. The authors knew when the students used a particular kind of question that their teacher had used, and they could interpret the students’ acts through that cultural lens. Analytically, the relational habitus is similar to activity settings analysis [Gallimore, Goldenberg, & Weisner, 1993; Greenfield, Maynard, & Martí, 2009; O’Donnell, Tharp, & Wilson, 1993] except that the relational habitus aims to analyze the specific aspects of learning and change through the intersubjective aspects of the setting. Gallimore et al.’s [1993] anthropological approach to activity settings suggested we examine personnel, tasks, scripts for tasks, materials available, goals and values, and people’s emotional experience at doing the tasks. O’Donnell et al.’s [1993] community psychology approach highlighted physical space available for activities and the resources available, such as funding sources. Greenfield et al. [2007] combined aspects of these approaches to examine learning environments in everyday life across time and space as they were enacted by Zinacantec Maya families in Chiapas, Mexico. An activity settings approach asks: ‘Who are the personnel and how do they relate to each other?’ ‘What are the rules for organization and behavior?’ ‘What kinds of materials are available?’ ‘What are the goals for the activity? And what is people’s experience of the activity setting?’ This kind of research required an intimate knowledge of the culture and its people, as the work of Cole et al. [1971], Rogoff [1990, 2003], and Stone et al. imply is necessary for a deep understanding of how environments afford learning. Relational habitus goes beyond activity settings analysis to look at the intersubjective experience of the individuals involved. Engaging in learning settings and experiencing shifts in social organization with psychological movement is an intersubjective process. And it is this intersubjective process that is precisely how people become functioning members of their communities. The relational habitus is meaning making and perspective making. It is a part of what is ‘taken for granted’ in relation to how individuals, tools, and tasks interact as a system. It is also inherent in subjective processes that are negotiated in goal-directed activity. Human interaction affords constant learning, and the relational habitus affords a lens by which to examine complexities of human behavior, learning, and change. The relational habitus is not only a useful lens to study learning, it is another reminder that it is critical to take into account people’s goals, values, and culture in order to have a deep, ecological understanding of their practices and what they mean to the people engaged in them

Biology · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Context (archaeology) · Developmental psychology · Epistemology · Ethnography · Habitus · Lens (geology) · Sociology · Anthropology · Cognitive and psychological constructs research · Community Health and Development · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Representations and Identity

• The Cultural context of learning and thinking

  Cole Cole, Michael Cole•The Cultural context of learning…•1971

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• The social construction and subjective reality of activity settings

  Open Access•Ronald Gallimore, Claude Goldenberg et al.•American Journal of Community…•1993

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• Activity settings as the unit of analysis

  Open Access•Clifford R O’donnell, Clifford R O'donnell et al.•American Journal of Community…•1993

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• Social Space and Symbolic Power

  Pierre Bourdieu•Sociological Theory•1989

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• Implications of Commerce and Urbanization for the Learning Environments of Everyday Life

  Open Access•Patricia M Greenfield, Ashley E Maynard et al.•Journal of Cross-Cultural…•2009

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