In contrast to models that dichotomize home and school or youth culture and school, syncretic approaches to literacy acknowledge the importance of both vertical and horizontal forms of expertise to the development of expansive and rigorous forms of learning. Specifically, vertical expertise, particularly in school contexts, involves building increasing amounts of disciplinary knowledge and movement from novice to expert in a particular domain. Horizontal expertise develops as people move across everyday contexts, interactions, activities, and disciplines, and is rarely or poorly factored into school-based concepts of learning. As Engeström (1996) has theorized in his work, “instead of just vertical movement across levels, development should be viewed as horizontal movement across borders” (p. 4). From this perspective, syncretic approaches to literacy learning can be designed to open up opportunities for connecting learning across a range of ecologies, as they provide the supports for both vertical and/ or horizontal learning (Engeström, 2001; 2003; 2009).
Schools—and too many current early childhood practices meant to “accelerate” children—stress vertical learning at the expense of horizontal learning. Vertical learning involves moving ever up a skill tree from lower to higher skills. Vertical learning is, of course, important, but too often we move learners up the skill tree too fast. Good learning requires good horizontal learning as well.
Horizontal learning (Goto, 2003) involves engaging in activities and skills without worrying about ratcheting up a skill tree. Time pressure is lowered. In horizontal learning the learner explores the lay of the land and tries out various possibilities, takes risks, and “mucks around.” This process deepens the learner’s perspectives on skills and their contexts of application. It prepares them to ratchet up the skill tree when they are ready and well-prepared to do so, with a sense that they can do it and know what it all means.
Mucking around, at its best, is a form of play and serves much the same function. It allows children to take risks, try different things, and fail without a high cost. In school, we too often ignore the fact that some children have had a lot of horizontal learning at home and we move everyone in the class quickly up the skill tree, forgetting that some children may not have had enough horizontal learning yet. We are not willing to allow these children the time they need for “mucking around,” but that does not lessen its necessity or importance.
By the way, in the case of literacy learning, horizontal learning is often called emergent literacy (Rhyner, 2009). In emergent literacy, children muck around playfully with sounds and rhymes, with letters and words, with being read to and engaging in pretend readings of their own, and with all sorts of connections between books and the world forged via media and in talk and interaction with adults. The literacy research is clear: Good literacy learning requires hours of rich emergent literacy practices starting at home (Adams, 1990; Dickinson, 1994; Dickinson & Neuman, 2003, 2006). These hours cannot simply be skipped in the service of moving forward quickly to meet policymakers’ curriculum goals and guidelines.
Even scientists and other professionals muck around. When experts take on a new challenge, beyond skills that have become routine, they become novices again and must engage in horizontal learning in the new area. Unfortunately, too many supposed experts rest on their laurels and do not continually seek out new challenges that will allow them, after a course of new learning, to ratchet up their skills to even higher levels (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). The process requires being willing to play around and risk (even invite) failure again. Good learners in any area, no matter how expert they are, take time to play around with things to see if they can get new ideas and insights or break intellectual logjams.
Distributed Learning
In a distributed teaching and learning system there need not be, and rarely is, one mentor/teacher. Rather, for different activities and skills there are different people to serve as mentors/teachers; there are different places to go; and there are different sorts of tools, technologies, and media to act as surrogate mentors/teachers. The distributed system is a hive of connected activities. Learners at all different levels can traverse this hive and dive into the places that have mentors and tools that are right for their current ZPD for a given skill. A distributed teaching and learning system is a self-organizing one in which people can pair up with the right other people and the right tools at the right time for ZPD learning. This means being able to find the help you need so you can do together with a mentor what you will, with that help, soon be able to do alone. As you engage with different sorts of help across the system over time, you are internalizing the judgment system for the interest/passion that drives the distributed teaching and learning system. You may internalize it so far that you become a real X or just far enough to accomplish what you need to learn to do for the purposes you have.
Distributed teaching and learning systems are usually self-organizing systems in no need of formal institutions for their support.
Distributed teaching and learning systems are making teaching ubiquitous today. Teaching is no longer restricted to schools and classrooms. It is no longer incorporated into just single individuals. It is distributed across different people and smart tools and technologies. The learning that goes on in distributed teaching and learning systems is neither informal or formal, but something different. It is participatory and immersive, but it involves multiple forms of instruction, some quite didactic.
