International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2004 Conference Homepage

Embracing Diversity in the Learning Sciences

As a field, the learning sciences have drawn from a diverse set of disciplines to study learning in an increasingly diverse array of settings. Psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, and artificial intelligence have all contributed to the development of methodologies to study learning in schools, museums, and organizations. As the field grows, however, it increasingly recognizes the challenges to studying and changing learning environments across levels in complex social systems. This demands attention to new kinds of diversity in who, what, and how we study and to the issues such diversity raises to developing coherent accounts of how learning occurs and can be supported in a multitude of social contexts, ranging from schools to families, and across levels of formal schooling from pre-school through higher education.

ICLS 2004 seeks proposals that address and promote conversation about a variety of diversities that confront the learning sciences, and to expand the fields of inquiry that can contribute to understanding learning. We construe diversity broadly, and seek contributions that can address one or more of the following meanings of diversity:

Diverse settings of learning and teaching - including K-12 classrooms, higher education, museums, after school clubs, families, and other informal settings.
Diverse populations of learners - spanning the range of ethnic and socioeconomic communities; urban, suburban, and rural settings; and across the life span.
Diverse levels of analysis - connecting accounts of learning across individuals, groups, institutions, and systems. It is not simply that there are multiple levels of analysis, but that each level is complex and subject to different forces than the others, and each operates across different scales of time.
Diverse characteristics of learners and social contexts - expanding our attention beyond cognitive factors of learning to include affective and conative factors of individuals, interactions between actors in a social setting, and the ways in which institutional and social factors impinge on these interactions.
Diverse methodologies and theoretical perspectives - in contrast to recent efforts to narrow definitions of what counts as research in education, we seek multiple ways of describing and explaining learning in complex settings, and attention to the ways in which particular methodologies warrant claims.