Conference learning’08

Conference learning’08

The international conference, which was kindly sponsored by Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg (FNR), took place at the University of Luxembourg, campus Walferdange December 10th -12th 2008 and was organized in cooperation with “Schreiw Dech Frai” asbl.
Since the 1990s, a growing amount of research has adopted socio-cultural and/or interactional approaches to describe and analyze learning and development. These approaches contrast previous research, which has been primarily (i) conducted from a psychological/psycholinguistic approach, and (ii) focused on learning and development as exclusively a matter for the individual(‘s mind). As opposed to this view, more socially based studies argue that learning is intrinsically (i) social in nature, (ii) situated in a particular local context, and (iii) does not only occur in formal settings.
The conference focused on formal as well as informal learning. Of particular relevance was the inclusion of visual, or “multimodal”, aspects of language, and as such the conference discussed benefits and challenges of including multimodal and activity-bound aspects for the analysis of learning and development.