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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

International Journal of Educational Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures

Representing learning lives: what does it mean to map learning

journeys?
Julian Sefton-Greena,b,*
a
London School of Economics & Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK
b
University of Oslo, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Blindern, 1161 Oslo, Norway

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history:
Received 27 October 2015 ‘Learning lives’, a double articulation both describing lifelong and life wide learning and the
Accepted 12 May 2016 role learning plays in developing identity, relies on a process of portrayal. The vocabulary
Available online xxx used to make sense of learning across contexts and over time is spatial in origin and
metaphorical in application. Key terms include: mapping, connecting, navigating, tracing,
Keywords: pathways, vectors and networks. I suggest that we are now developing ways of
Learning lives representing learning that depend significantly on forms of narration, the filmic gaze
Map and a visual frame making the concept of a “learning journey” more visible. Yet as we
Learning journey
appear to capture and represent complicated forms of learning in “non-educational”
Narrative
contexts so the paradigm of studying such learning as movement is thrown into question.
Context
Habitus ã 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: mapping learning

the mapmaker’s work is to make visible

all them things that shouda never exist in the first place . . . like borders,
like the viral spread of governments (Miller, 2014, p. 17)

I have recently been involved in several projects that have followed or tracked individuals and cohorts of young people
over extended periods of time and across a wide range of social contexts (Erstad, Gile, Sefton-Green, & Arnseth, 2016;
Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016; Sefton-Green & Brown, 2014). As, in their different ways, these studies have analysed the
ways that learning identities (Wortham, 2005) are positioned and enacted across different social contexts or explored how
young people construct career trajectories for themselves (Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997), it is clear that a common way of
accounting for “learning lives” (Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013 and see Section 1 to this special issue) is to draw on a
cartographical language and talk about maps or mapping. Indeed, there is a whole vocabulary used to make sense of learning
across contexts and over time, which is fundamentally spatial in origin (see also Ingold, 2015) and therefore, I suggest,
metaphorical in application. Key terms in this vocabulary include the ideas of: mapping, navigating, connecting, tracing,
pathways, vectors and networks as well as the more common, learning journey and, at its most contentious, the role of
education in social mobility.

* Correspondence address: London School of Economics & Political Science, Houghton Street, [18_TD$IF]London WC2A 2AE, UK.
E-mail address: julian@julianseftongreen.net (J. Sefton-Green).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2016.05.003
0883-0355/ã 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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This article reflects on the hidden assumptions and values implicit in any vector or trajectory based paradigm found in
this kind of language and considers why the idea of mapping may be so popular at this time. Whilst mapping might appear to
offer a helpful and progressive way of making sense of some of the key transitions in young people's learning lives, I also want
to open up some of the limitations in the language and in particular suggest that the current popularity or interest in the term
and its application may well derive from a broader cultural interest with the documentary gaze, big data and forms of digital
surveillance and therefore carries with it a set of associated challenges. The more that we live in a world that can be
reconstructed via digital traces across a huge variety of virtual, personal, social and institutional life (Schneier, 2015), the
greater our capacity to appear to “know” how individuals appear across social contexts and therefore the greater our belief
that we can track or map the processes involved in this travel. However, this article will question the relationship between
these changing ways of knowing and the validity of using cartographical language to describe any such relationships.
Indeed, a key aspect of mapping itself is that it draws on a particular mode of representation (Corner, 1999; Cosgrove,
1999a) that is, of course spatial but (usually) two-dimensional and linear. Using such modes of representation as a way of
understanding learning across contexts both stretches this metaphor and illuminates the discussion. The second theme will
thus be to explore the tension between traditional ways of understanding learning across contexts through forms of
narrative (Bathmaker & Harnett, 2010; Trahar, 2006) and more strictly, narrativisation, (that is the act of constructing
narrative through talk, see Goodson, Biesta, Tedder, & Adair, 2010; Goodson, Loveless, & Stephens, 2012) with emerging ways
of representing learning across contexts as diagrammatic charts and maps in several recent instances of educational
research. As big data makes the discipline and theory of network analysis (Scott & Carrington, 2011) more accessible, new
forms of representation seem to be emerging (Lima, 2011) that, on the surface can look like ways of mapping learning across
contexts.
Finally, I want to reflect on how maps constitute ways of knowing, (originally captured by historiographical studies of the
relationship between early maps and the colonial imagination, Cosgrove, 1999b; Luke, 2014). I want to take the insights from
that early work into the critical understanding of how early maps constituted a power/knowledge relationship, that is the
role maps themselves take on in claiming knowledge of a place, in order to examine why education research might be
interested in mapping learning across contexts. My concern is to disentangle any notion of the predictive and, with reference
to young people, to disavow the teleological. By this I mean that the research I shall explore inevitably frames young people's
learning as a form of travel—to and from starting and finishing points. A map, as the historiographical studies show, must
impose as much as it may explain and therefore may only appear to illuminate the complexity of understanding learning
across contexts. Like many (all?) discussions of learning, maps are no more than forms of representation.
In particular, I am concerned that this language of movement and of travel is another set of clothes to dress up a
fundamental understanding of learning as a form of transfer, of taking from one place and applying in another. Whilst the
concept of transfer has received a considerable amount of critical attention and is highly contested (Beach, 1999; Bransford,
1998) and indeed is not the focus on my current argument in the sense that the term is mainly understood in the literature, I
do want open up the idea that the metaphor of mapping and tracing learning journeys does carry within a residue of such a
deeply held apparently common-sense principle of educational theory, that as we follow learners or trace their learning we
are in some sense explicating learning as a kind of “crossing-over”.
The article first of all explores the relationship between the visual and the conceptual in studies of how learning might be
charted: questions about the practicalities of representing learning. It then goes on to examine the role of narration in
learning—fixing what might be thought of, as time-based maps, thus exploring what it means to represent movement and
change. Finally, it speculates about contemporary modes of representation derived from cinematic or more accurately
documentary gazes as well as forms of representation produced through big data; all of which suggest new kinds of
representational maps but which, I argue, need to be taken as cautiously as we now know to a do in respect of the ideological
work done by conventional maps.

2. Charting learning—fixing relations in time and space

One of my recent attempts to chart learning consisted of a diagrammatic representation of the social and cultural
catalysts and disconnections that, I argued, influenced the pathways to a creative career (in this instance I was examining
young people who are entering diverse fields of digital creativity from coding to computer game animation, Sefton-Green &
Brown, 2014). We had interviewed nearly 40 people from their mid-teens to early 20s all of whom were either expressing an
interest in, or who had started studying for, or who had actually found employment in these fields. The purpose of the study
was to examine the kinds of factors that influenced career choice, interest development, opportunity, motivation and the
development of domain-specific expertise. Here is an extract from one case.
As is conventional in these kinds of charts, the axes (in my case, People, Places, Identity and Futures) are set against a
timeline (again not untypically broken into school stages) derived from analytic concepts. Although I would make the case
that these four axes themselves emerged from a process of coding interview data and represent a way of organising,
clustering and categorising ideas and themes as Fig. 2 demonstrates, it is of course disingenuous not to acknowledge that the
language used to describe these concepts derived from my interest in this topic and the argument I wanted to make. The use
of a chart-like template to layout these linguistically derived concepts as a way of summarising discrete unbounded
experiences is a profoundly and analytically driven process of representation.

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One challenge for this kind of representation is whether it enables the learning life to be read and understood through the
use of graphical and spatial (and in this case additionally, a use of colour in that each axis was colour-coded) conventions that
are significantly different from other forms of representation—most traditionally through narrative (see below). Here the
publication included around 40 charts like Fig. 1 and the aim was that readers could use the template in order to compare and
contrast different individuals. There are obvious methodological caveats: for instance, did the original interviews generate
equal amount of data in each category, for example around people so that a simple comparison of an axis might reveal
significant patterns? However, even setting these kinds of concerns aside, the question remains whether this kind of visual
comparison enables a conceptual comparison to be made any easier and whether the primary axis of the timeline which
essentially structures the positioning of the other data over-determines the positioning and significance of these
experiences. And finally we need to ask how the concept of an event (a term taken from Literacy Studies, Street, 2001) defines
its boundaries or is defined in particular ways. How, as noted above, does the idea of an experience being discrete or named
as such, come about in the context of the flow of everyday life?
A key puzzle then is whether this form of mapping (in this case perhaps charting might be more exact) seemingly external
phenomena (an experience, a technology, an event) is given meaning through a form of visual representation and secondly
but separately, whether there is any internal coherence to the idea of representing the flow of everyday life in this abstracted,
diagrammatic fashion?
Maps are usually read through a series of visual conventions often contained in a key where certain symbols come to
stand for topographical features. In the work discussed above, events had to be summarised in text boxes. It is not quite clear
whether this kind of shorthand convention can allow for the quick reading of movement across time and space more
effectively than more extended text—which it should be noted formed a key part of piece of work in any case. My charts were
inspired by the work of Brigid Barron and her colleagues who attempted to lay out key experiences over time for individuals
in digital youth media programs (Barron, Gomez, Pinkard, & Martin, 2014). That study used a series of pictograms (p. 87) to
help with the process of reading their maps (see for example, p. 128–129). Helpfully, the study also included highlighted
sections of text from larger interviews or field-note observations to show how text boxes as significant moments had come
into being.
Barron et al.’s work raises a similar set of challenges. Part of the problem in representing learning experience as a map or
chart is that for some categories phenomena do not equate. For example, whilst it is possible to note when a particular piece
of technology enters an individual’s life, trying to capture the nature of its use, particularly when such use might include
wider forms of social participation is difficult to represent. Equally whilst a timeline appears to give meaning to some events
(before or after attending a course or acquiring a particular piece of equipment) as, Lemke (2000) noted in key article from
15 years ago, the meaning of timescales for learning cannot be reduced to a simple cause and effect, before and after. The
meaning of experience for individuals and the way that such events are processed across different experiences of
participation needs to take account of intensity and significance as much as it needs to measure when something actually
took place. Almost paradoxically it seems, this is not as well captured by marking experiences against a timeline as might be
expected. In fact, using the timeline as a way of organising growing up might militate against other ways of perceiving

[(Fig._1)TD$IG]

Fig. 1. A section of Anton’s progression into creative careers (Sefton-Green & Brown, 2014; p. 88).

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[(Fig._2)TD$IG]

Fig. 2. Categories of analysis taken from Sefton-Green & Brown (2014, p. 44).

change and growth so that in our concern to measure or log the moment of change we stop paying attention to how learning
unfolds.
The maps also have the effect of isolating the individual however much events, activities, things and places are marked
because the focus on the individual subsumes these external phenomena to the role they play in the individual’s
development. But is this not an unhelpful and overly cognitive way of representing the learning journey in that participation
in wider networks seems difficult to capture in this way? The question here is whether this difficulty is a failure of
representation – that more attention to layout, icons and so forth and more fluency in reading these kinds of Charts – would
lead to capturing the complexity of social interaction: or, whether this form of mapping and of paying attention to individual
change and progression in this way fundamentally misrepresents what is going on and, by implication, might ask whether
the whole project of a learning as a journey and thus of capturing learning across contexts and over-time in this way is a
misplaced ambition.
However, even if the narrative of change and transformation as a way to account for learning may be thrown into doubt
there is clearly a desire to capture learning-over-time, as a process—as well as across contexts. Social network theory
approaches offer a way to capture interaction between groups of people in relational terms that also can be represented as a
diagrammatic map. For example, de Haan, Leander, Unlusoy, and Prinsen (2014) recently attempted to capture the on- and
off-line social networks of young people from different immigrant communities as a way of analysing the role of shared
interests in developing different kinds of learning. Similarly, I have tried to map whole group and individual member, friend
and peer relationships in order to make explicit social capital and other economic resources in young people's lives
(Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016). Unlike the charts discussed above, here there seems to be a different kind of convention
at work so that the spatial relationship describing the conceptual principle is more effectively captured by what is actually a
homologous distribution of nodes and lines in the “map”. It is true that the reader needs to do preparatory work making
sense of the key in order to see how these relationships articulate the argument of both sets of authors, just as in the problem
with the previous discussion, the mapping does not entirely make sense if read intuitively.
Whilst technically speaking social network analysis preceded the widespread use of computers, in practice the capability
to map these spatial relationships depends on digital technology to transform sets of interpersonal relationships into visual
traces (Lima, 2011). On the other hand, the kind of charting of influences and determinants does not necessarily require
computers to produce the representation although it is unlikely that scholars and readers might imagine in these kinds of
spatial frames without the now more popular and familiar computer-generated diagram. Drotner (2013) has drawn
attention to what she calls the “processual” as both a theoretical and analytical interest in the digital age and one, which is
reliant on the capacity to manipulate data and thus represent processes in visual form. It is difficult to disentangle our
interest in capturing a version of learning as process from our new-found capabilities to do this. In the case of the social
network studies learning is conceptualised almost as a by-product of social relationships: it is the social practice that defines
the parameters of the educational transaction. De Haan et al. make a persuasive case that understanding the flow of social
capital, friendship patterns or cultural resources as a set of relationships seems to make it possible to interpret the
significance of the kind of learning going on. Whereas the charts in the first section above, might perhaps conform to Deleuze
and Guattri’s notion of tracing the real world, these kinds of social network diagrams act more as modes of mapping (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987), and perhaps enable us to conceptualise processes in ways that we had not previously imagined. The
network metaphor enables us to prioritise links over nodes—a formulation that is as helpful as it is problematic, In addition,
such a formulation carries with it political implications as political theorists have suggested that the network, as a “banal
picture [of] nodes and lines [with] no beginning or end . . . . implies a very specific way of ordering and making society”
(Papadopoulos, Stephenson, & Tsianos, 2008, p. 21). Rather than conceiving of social order in terms of a hierarchical grid, it is
now argued that the undetermined and indeterminable network stands as a metaphor for the distributed nature of power in
our society.

3. Narrating learning—where is the journey?

The role of text in the forms of mapping described so far is not accidental because on the whole our understanding of
learning is constructed by narrative. Whilst I have suggested that the semiotics of maps and charts may contain its own mode

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of comparison and analysis thus offering a different kind of understanding of relationships than text, all the examples I have
described so far actually draw on interview data behind the people, events and relationships. In other words, a significant
amount of any interpretation of learning over time and across contexts depends considerably on forms of understanding
generated by the way that subjects “narrativise” or story experience and thus construct any kind of journey, pathway or
trajectory (Goodson et al., 2010). Indeed, Brigid Barron acknowledged the origin of her study in a collection of narratives
entitled “Technobiographies” (Miller, Henwood, & Kennedy, 2001).
In Learning Identities, Education and Community: young live in the cosmopolitan city (Erstad et al., 2016), we paid particular
attention to how participants in Oslo constructed narratives about themselves (see Chapter 6) to suggest an almost
existential meaning for the choices they made about education such as which school to attend, what courses to follow. How
individuals “storied” themselves, what forms of narrative justification they used (especially family history), what kinds of
categories about the value of learning they employed all played a part in what effectively became forms of narrative maps or
at least stories of the paths taken during a journey. These narratives are text-based and of course deployed versions of
sequence, history and what we termed “futuremaking” (to describe both what decisions get made and on what basis) but
they are maps in the sense that they laid out pathways of travel, and constructed educational history as a journey to the
particular point they were now at; see also (Bathmaker & Harnett, 2010; Goodson & Sikes, 2001). The narrative worked to
justify notions of direction, travel and of course other metaphorical map-like features such as obstacles, freeways and on
ramps. In many ways deploying these kinds of narrative to account for the role and nature of education in their lives met the
criteria described by Bradley Levinson and his colleagues of what it means to be an educated person (in the sense of being
able to relate the appropriate cultural narrative) in Norway today (Levinson, Foley, & Holland, 1996).
Similarly, in The Class (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016) we explored the discourse used by 14-year-olds to reflect back
on their younger selves in order to distinguish how young people learn to create reflexive identities (see Chapter 10). In this
example the capacity to draw on a range of heuristic resources to interpret the younger selves played a key role in imagining
the future at that point. We were particularly interested in how choices made within the school system translated into a set
of discourses about deciding what kind of person you are, what subjects you enjoy, the meaning of that pleasure in expertise,
and what you want to become. How each young person understood these discourses in the context of how they had learnt to
tell the story about themselves was central to the decision-making process about their academic futures. In both of these
examples, narrative allowed us to better explore agents, their identities and choices than simply logging decisions—which it
transpired tended to emerge rather than stand as pivots in a moment of time.
The interpretative mechanisms used in both of these cases depended on the authors drawing on linguistic (narrative)
analysis of codes and conventions in order to extrapolate larger patterns. Both examples were keen to make the case that it
was the young subjects of both studies who were in effect, the mapmakers, that it was the young people who had learnt to
construct narratives utilizing the tropes of pathways and journeys. This leaves us with the question that the emic approach of
making sense of how narratives of learning are constructed as journeys and so forth may be no more than the way that our
culture deems appropriate and relevant: it is how people have learnt to tell stories about what learning means to them.
However, this may not necessarily prove any more than that narratives, like maps, impose order and meaning.
From this perspective studies in the learning sciences tradition of exploring “cultural learning pathways” (Bell, Leah,
Reeve, & Tzou, 2012; Bell, Tzou, Bricker, & Baines, 2013), “social practice theories of learning and becoming” (Penuel, Van
Horne, DiGiacomo, & Kirshner, [120_TD$IF]under review) or “person-centred ethnographies” (Reed, Kevin, Lari, Andrew, & Daniel, 2008)
all of which are persuasive, ambitious and provocative attempts to study learning across contexts and over-time may be as
much transfixed by this epistemological quandary as they are generative in opening up narrow definitions of learning
science or engineering. A key paradox in these studies as well as the ones discussed so far, is that by using tropes of travel and
journey (in narrative form) as a way of focusing on individuals in particular social contexts (learners), almost leads to a mode
of deconstructing any notion of learning as the object of enquiry.
For example, Bell et al. adopt a process of what they call “developmental reconstruction” (Bell et al., 2013, p. 273). This
involves the authors constructing “retrospective learning biographies” in order to identify “learning pathways”. Rooted in
extensive ethnographic study the theory posits “extended pathways of deepening participation” (Bell et al., 2013, p. 273). In
practice this means critiquing narrow and restricted understandings of a more cognitive understanding of learning as formal
educational routes (what the authors term “learning goals”) “through a series of connected moments of participation in sets
of social practices” (p. 277). Case studies of a series of individuals explore diverse ways that the actual pathways people
follow frequently involve forms of negotiating and interpreting expectations and frameworks that are provided so that we
are required to shift our gaze from inherited definitions of learning to actual experiences which are inevitably not just more
muddled but often resisted or rejected. Similarly, the study by Penuel et al. ([12_TD$IF]under review) uses the materialist social practice
theory of Dreier (2007) to show how an overly simplistic attention to conventional understandings of STEM as purely
disembodied cognitive displays of skill and knowledge actually stand in the way of understanding wider forms of scientific
understanding and their possible use in building a purposeful life (for other examples see Azevedo, 2011, 2013).
But are these findings really that surprising? Whilst the language of cultural learning pathways may confound
determinist and positivistic hopes for education showing the inevitable messy complexity of everyday life in practice, does
the language of routes and pathways – even when described in terms of complex experience – not just inversely mimic the
idea that learning in our society offers a rational explanation for the lives that people lead?
Here we need to note how the language of cultural learning pathways deliberately blurs structure and agency. For
example, in the idea of a “learning biography” are we talking about a biography of learning? And is that to say a way of

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narrating and telling a story about learning experiences or a way of learning to create a biography—of learning how to tell a
story about the self? Similarly, what does it mean to talk about learning pathways? Does the pathway pre-exist the learning
or is it shaped through and by the learning? In conventional expectations about schooling and transitions-to-work it may
well be that pathways are assumed to exist but that being able to follow them is the problem. But is it a pathway made by the
learning or for the learning and in what sense could it exist outside the learner? The ambition here is to look at how
individuals exert agency within the social conditions they inhabit, but by definition people will grow and change and trying
to seek an explanations for the choice of route they have taken draws attention to complex social processes that mock the
simplicity of only focusing on any single simple idea of learning in the first place.
Paradoxically then using a language of routes and pathways explicitly in this tradition of narrative analysis seems to
recuperate what I have called a “vector-based paradigm” from the notion of planned developmental stages and life
transitions towards our vision of learning being something people do in order to make sense of the conditions in which they
live. In other words, the idea of a map in these narratives exists importantly as an abstract ideal for both participants and
critics alike but that interpretations vary on how fixed the pathway is and, perhaps just as importantly who defines it as a
route?

 e and habitus
3.1. From the texture of everyday life to mise en scen

It is no accident that all the studies described in the previous section are all in some ways ethnographic. Furthermore,
many of the scholars involved in this work rely on video data as a key part of their fieldwork. While this in and of itself, is not
new, I want to suggest that there is an important logic connecting these highly detailed ways of collecting data about learning
and the theoretical frame of the map (with its associated ideas of journey and travel).
In the first part of this article I speculated that there might be a relationship between the growth of big data and the idea of
a map. Certainly, it is difficult to understand social network analysis without access to big data—and, as I argued at the end of
the second section, this also ties in to current political theory about the relationship between power and the State. Whilst big
data contains within it an always impossible-to-comprehend level of detail so that extrapolating patterns is the only way to
give meaning and shape, there is a parallel with the current interest in ethnography and video data. Video data is also big data
inasmuch as it is incredibly challenging to note each and every semiotic signifier that make up film’s total meaning
(Goldman, Pea, Barron, & Derry, 2007; Goldman-Segall, 1997). It too can capture learning across time (and contexts) but
without an overarching narrative, it too lacks meaning and coherence (Bordwell, 1987). Indeed, there has been a
considerable amount of recent scholarly interest in developing protocols to draw on the apparent simplicity of using video in
learning research (Derry et al., 2010) precisely to investigate how technological innovation may (or may not) transform a
world (increasingly) captured by video into meaningful analysis.
Video (or film) is particularly rich in capturing the semiotic multi dimensionality of the present especially in the way that
objects, things (cf. Latour, 2007), the physical interpersonal relations between people, the accreted history of artefacts (e.g.
Pahl & Khan, 2014) all combine to create layers of meaning. The studies discussed in the previous section all draw on this
capacity to “see” contexts in these varied, deep and significant ways. I like to think that our capabilities to interpret contexts
in this way derives from our immersion in film and documentary so that we have become trained readers of these cues about
the meaning of context, as for example, suggested in the extraordinary sociological interest in the recent television series The
Wire, (Penfold-Mounce, Beer, & Burrows, 2011). Analyses in film/media studies tradition show our comfortable ability to read
and interpret narrative and mise en scène (the arrangement of elements in a frame to create meaning) in order to make
contexts meaningful (see Beller, 2002). Video data thus draws on this cultural orientation to reveal aspects of context that
can be profoundly meaningful for scholars of learning.
Of course this capacity to interpret the meaning of contexts through attention to all kinds of possible signification is not
exclusively part of an ethnographic tradition, which customarily uses context to cue emic explanations even if it profoundly
expands our capability to examine the context specific nature of learning experiences as in, for example, the piece by Bell
et al. discussed above. However, the ability to frame and share representations of social worlds does draw attention to the
theoretical concept of habitus, in that notions of values, dispositions, taste – terms frequently used to explain the ways that
individuals come to embody social structure (Wacquant, 2011) – seem to be well captured by media. Habitus is not the same
thing as context – it is of course more of an analytic category (although see Schegloff, 1997) – but it does draw attention to
levels of detail and levels of meaning all of which are learnt and determine learning. The study by Mariette de Haan et al.
already discussed (de Haan et al., 2014) uses the concept of “relational habitus” to theorise the texture of everyday life –
especially social interactions on and off-line – as a way of describing the structural patterns common to groups of young
people's learning. Similarly, the ethnographic studies of The Class and Learning Identities, Education and Community: young
live in the cosmopolitan city argue that young people's bedrooms, their uses of technology, their behaviour with peers and the
consumption of media both in and across contexts exemplify a broader learning of identity which is best explained by the
structural yet personally embodied concept of habitus (Stone, Underwood, & Hotchkiss, 2012; Underwood, Parker, & Stone,
2013) as revealed in the mise en scène.
The idea of habitus as an elaborated understanding of context is relevant to the overall argument of this article for two key
reasons. First, habitus is in itself a way of articulating structural and historical patterns in the interpersonal and the everyday.
It is a form of mapping wider meanings around moments in the present. Secondly I have suggested that an interest in
ethnography (and especially in video) as a way of recording and capturing the everyday is salient because it can identify

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features of contexts in the mise en scène that previously might not have shown up in studies of learning. It is this second point
I take from studies by Philip Bell, Bill Penuel and their colleagues who use video and ethnography as a way of refocusing on
learning in terms of other timescales and other trajectories than the conventionally assumed purposes to the nature of
learning. However, as I have noted several times already, this escape into a vision of learning over time and across place itself
is trapped by the metaphor of a pathway or journey.
In general, however, collecting data and making meaning, although intimately related, is not the same thing. The
emerging theorists of big data suggest that the penetration of big data into so many aspects of personal, social, commercial
and political life confuses measurability with meaning-making. Jacob Silverman proposes that rather than imagining data as
the measure of experience we now conceptualise experience as the processing of data—he refers to the “data-ization” of
experience as if living enables us to be plotable on a “social graph” (Silverman, 2015, p. 10/41) Bruce Schneier suggests that
reflecting on experience means that we map relationships using forms of backwards surveillance to provide evidence
(Schneier, 2015, p. 35/7). He cites a risk engineer who describes this process of making meaning as a “narrative fallacy”
(p136). Both authors here point to the frame offered by the use of the big data in making meaning as over-determining how
we now approach day-to-day living: that the illusion of knowability has now become a prospective rather than a
retrospective search for understanding.
Previously discrete domains can now be brought under one gaze in order to offer up patterns and interpretation and I
would argue that the ambition to study learning across time and across contexts, although older than the birth of big data, is
part of the same epistemological perspective. Schneier’s “narrative fallacy” echoes my concern about teleology in the
introduction to this article in that the search for pathways imposes the logic of a journey – a vector – on the complicated
nature of everyday experience.

4. Conclusion: can we de-map learning?

The etymology of the word, education contains within it a concept of movement, given it means literally “to lead out”.
Traditionally philosophers of education have concentrated on what has been led out, where it comes from where it goes (and
which power or agent does the leading). My argument here is that we are on the brink of developing increasingly complex
forms of representation of learning that depend significantly on forms of narration, the filmic gaze and a visual frame (that
itself is emerging from the social uses of big data), all of which appear to make the concept of a “learning journey” more
visible and comprehensible. Yet the more we are capable of appearing to capture and represent complicated forms of
learning in non-“educational” contexts, the more the paradigm of studying such movement is thrown into question.
At the same time as I am inspired and intrigued by these new forms of representation (which seem an especially
persuasive way of capturing out-of-school learning and thus implicitly and explicitly challenging the claims made for formal
education especially in terms of understanding how social capital de-limits possible trajectories), I am concerned that the
assumption of a trajectory in and of itself biases our capacity to see what learning is in the first place. At the same time as,
what I have called, “learning lives” research has given us insight into experiences and ways of learning that have hitherto
existed more as assumptions or even prejudices, so I want to ask what if learning isn't a journey? Can we conceptualise a
notion of education that does not contain within it version of a trajectory, a direction or movement?
This is partly idle theoretical speculation in the sense that for all concepts to have validity we must be able to imagine
their opposites for them to have any meaning. It is partly a political question in that as a society we have moved from an
understanding of education as the development of wisdom or virtue to a set of values reliant on instrumentality, of how
education capitalizes individuals to enable them to become productive workers, and thus any sense that education might not
result in a forward movement, in some kind of mobility, is problematic. Thus those philosophies of learning, which stress
participation in social practices rather than the acquisition of disembodied cognitive skills that might be applied or utilised
in other contexts, challenge current values of what learning is.
For this reason, I am suggesting that we need to be cautious about the use of mapping as a way of describing and
interpreting any kind of learning. First, we always need to be sceptical of any concept of pathway or teleology as inevitably
such assumptions always bias interpretation. Secondly we need to be cautious about the ways that mapping is in itself
complicit in the desire to make any kind of learning purposeful—an inevitable consequence of the instrumentalist, human
capital version of what education is. Mapping forces us to see the route rather than the journeys not taken, the redundancies,
the repetitions and the activities whose ends we cannot know or even guess at. We will never escape the discourse of the
map – as I have already noted it is coeval with a certain kind of colonial and positivist imagination – but it is one we need to
use carefully and only where it takes us to where we are certain we want to go: a paradox if ever there was one.

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