An Integrative Literature Review of Contemporary Connected Learning Research

• In Event: 66.070 - Connected Learning in Teacher Education

Abstract

This integrative literature review pulls together existing research to describe how connected learning is taken up and studied in contemporary scholarship (see Authors, 2018). As described above, connected learning has been influential across fields in the design of teaching and learning with wide variance it its uptake. No review or other synthetic analysis that we are aware of makes an effort to thematically describe the “field” of connected learning research and practice, and its boundaries as learning theory, design concept, and/or practice have not been mapped. This poster reports on just such an effort--to review and describe the state of connected learning.

Rather than championing connected learning and finding examples of successes--an approach understandably undertaken in much of the early scholarship about connected learning in action, this poster reports findings from a critical, systematic review that identifies ways educators, researchers, and designers have utilized connected learning. We consider, for example, how connected learning has lived up to (or not) the equity ideals of its formulators, how it has surprisingly spread across fields, which parts of the connected learning design framework have been implemented and which have been ignored, and how researchers have developed new methodological approaches to studying connected learning. In doing so, we hope to both share the landscape of connected learning as it has actually been taken up and, simultaneously, to influence how the model might be understood and implemented differently going forward.

To identify articles for inclusion in this systematic review, we conducted a search in May 2018, using Google Scholar to identify articles that referenced the Ito et al. (2013) connected learning report. This resulted in over 500 initial sources, including journal articles, books and book chapters, conference papers, and dissertations. We excluded all sources not written in English and non-peer reviewed sources (e.g., dissertations and conference papers), and scholarship that did not engage connected learning in central ways (e.g., mentioning connected learning briefly in the literature review). This resulted in more than 150 sources. Our analysis of these sources has resulted in the identification of three primary findings that will be explored in this poster:
Two consistent themes across connected learning research are a focus on boundary crossing (e.g., across informal/formal, physical/digital, in-school/out-of-school contexts) and interest-driven learning (for both youth and adults).
An equity agenda is not as central in contemporary research and practice as educators might expect based on Ito et al.’s (2015) argument that “connected learning centers on an equity agenda” (p. 8). Despite their insistence that connected learning is centered on equity, less than 3% of the initial 500+ sources mention the term “equity” in the title or abstract.
Connected learning is being used in educational research in various ways (e.g., as theory, as a design framework, as rationale for cross-contextual methods).
Theoretically, connected learning is often used alongside various complementary frames (e.g., CHAT, transliteracies, digital literacies, collaborative design).
Methodologically, connected learning is using and spurring innovative methods.

Authors

• Nathan C. Phillips, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Becca Woodard, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University

• Sarah C. Lohnes Watulak, Middlebury College

• Lindy L. Johnson, The College of William & Mary

• Katalin Wargo, William and Mary