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Purpose: This response paper aims to comment on specific aspects of the position paper. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the author presents a response to Fischer et al.'s contribution on "The Challenge for the Digital Age: Making Learning a Part of Life." While imperatives and narratives of learning in the future have been well articulated in the literature, their paper provides insights into lifelong learning in the digital age. Findings: The author raises comments on the comprehensiveness of the lifelong learning perspectives and the calls to action. Over the years, with multiyear efforts on the research-based evolution of the design, implementation and adoption of technology-supported learning environments in some parts of the world, the author believes well-researched innovative pedagogy and design principles have already to some extent impacted transformation of learning and teaching in normal schools. By referring to the work in the running of a model school in Taiwan, the author demonstrate some of the pathways that can guide innovation and work towards operationalizing a futuristic vision that is resonant with the one painted in the paper. The paper will end with some comments on how narratives on the future of learning will evolve. Originality/value: In trying to understand the lens that the vision would bring to learning on the digital edge, the author has provided commentaries to probe into the comprehensiveness of their vision of future learning. From an Asian perspective, the author describes one effort that can help make progress in moving towards this vision. It involves realizing the vision by grounding our designs in real experiments or instantiations, such as the interest-driven creator (IDC) experimental school in Taiwan, and highlight past research efforts which have been successful in transformation of classrooms and schools such as developing seamless learning for connecting learning in different spaces afforded by mobile digital devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to critically explore the opportunities, complexities, and tensions of invoking students' everyday experiences as resources in educational activities. We analyze data from teacher interviews, instructional work in classrooms, and parent–teacher conferences taking place at a lower secondary school. The analysis shows how teachers reflect upon the relationship between students' lives outside and inside school, some of the complexities and tensions that emerges when students' everyday knowledge is invoked in instructional work in classrooms, and how students' everyday lives are activated as resources in parent–teacher conferences by the participants for building meaning together. We discuss issues teachers may reflect upon when planning and conducting educational activities that are sensitive to students' learning lives and everyday experiences. • Teachers define students' everyday experiences as important resources for engaging students as learners in school. • Some aspects of students' activities from outside school are defined as more relevant for classroom learning than others. • Invoking everyday experiences in whole-class conversations requires teachers to maneuver among the different learning lives of students. • Students need guidance in making connections between everyday experiences and academic practices in schools. • Parent–teacher conferences can be used to identify students' interests that can be used in instructional work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social class is a major determining factor of people's life chances. Much sociology-based research shows that socio-economic position is still one of the best predictors of who will achieve success, prosperity and social status and, in particular, who will enjoy the highest levels of educational outcomes. Survey data and qualitative studies alike confirm that many people continue to see class as a feature of everyday life, in ways that are connected with their understanding of learning and its possibilities. However, despite its continued significance in people's lives, class has virtually disappeared from modern adult learning research. This paper concludes that in an era when governments across Europe are setting about the dismantling of social support and collective protection produced by social democracy and trade unionism, class analysis presents an important means of understanding change and changing understanding. The existence of persistent social class inequalities in access is a repeated theme of research into higher education (HE) participation. Moreover, socioeconomic inequalities persist in spite of the considerable enlargement of higher education systems that has taken place in many countries since the 1950s (Field, 2003; Alon, 2009; Boliver, 2011; Reay 2012). Moreover, survey data and qualitative accounts confirm that many people continue to see class as an everyday aspect of their lives, in ways that are connected with their understanding of learning and its possibilities. This paper looks at the ways in which experiences and constraints of social class were experienced and 'storied' by a group of non-traditional students in higher education. It starts out with reflections on the current status -- or rather absence -- of class as a key category of critical analysis in adult learning. We then examine briefly the question of class in the context of mass higher education. While much has changed in the social composition of the undergraduate population as a consequence of expansion, taken as a whole there seems to have been relatively little change in undergraduates' socio-economic status. While the overall number of students from broadly working class backgrounds has grown, their relative share of the undergraduate population has not greatly altered (Boliver, 2011). In England, it seems that the proportion of students from poorer families declined during the expansion period of the mid- to late-1990s and recovered to its original position during the early years of the current century (Chowdry et al., 2013). In Scotland, Ianelli concludes that similar fluctuations mean that 'overall the relation between social class of origin and educational attainment has not significantly changed over time' (Ianelli, 2011: 257). What does this mean for the experiences of students from working class backgrounds? We explore this question through a discussion of RANLHE interviews in Scottish higher education. We interviewed a sample of 83 students from three HEIs -- one a highly selective institution, one a former central institution (roughly akin to a polytechnic) and one with a mixed mission emphasising both teaching and research. We recruited students through direct email contacts (both targeted and general), appeals in newsletters, intermediaries such as course leaders, and -- once we had started -- by snowballing; some also approached us, having heard about the project by word of mouth. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, with hesitations and repetitions included. We read and re-read the transcripts, which included responses to a standard question on class. Posed late on in the first or early in the second interview, the interviewer asked 'How you would describe your background in terms of class?' and the student's reply was then followed up. The interviewer did not provide a definition of class, though the follow-up discussion could explore definitional issues if the interviewee raised them (hardly anyone did, at least not explicitly). Responses during this initial discussion of class gave us a baseline for a preliminary thematic analysis which, in turn, provided a springboard for undertaking an iterative thematic and contextual examination of the ways in which different people spoke about class or -- in some cases -- deflected a discussion of class. We distinguished between how people spoke about membership of a particular class and how they talked about class as a phenomenon. The students in our sample spoke about class in relation to their own educational disadvantage and/or experiences/perceptions of HE. Often they discussed class obliquely, or in ways that can be understood through socio-cultural perspectives. One arts student, for example, talked of relating the circumstances of Tracey Emin's childhood (material disadvantage, abuse) to the context in which she grew up and being completely alienated during a class discussion by what she perceived as classist and misogynistic contempt shown towards Emin by fellow students. In addition, class affected student experiences in more material ways, both for mature students who had worked themselves and for young students who came from working-class families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people who disengage or disconnect from school are often demonised within the media and the wider public imagination, from a largely individualized and pathological positioning. Policy explanations and responses are often unhelpful in their focus on a range of ‘deficit’ attributes – poverty, poor parenting, dysfunctional families, low familial achievement, aspiration and motivation, and other ‘at risk’ categories. This paper offers a different explanatory framework that foregrounds the experiences of some young people who had disengaged from school and resumed learning under a very different set of conditions to the ones that had exiled them from schools in the first place. Using a socio-spatial framework, the paper explores the notion of ‘relational space’ as it was appropriated and reclaimed by these young people, in explaining how they saw themselves as constructing viable and sustainable learning identities for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes the learning experiences of a six-year-old girl, Lutfa, over the course of a school year. It addresses Lutfa's struggles with mastery of the processes of reading and writing. Observational material is presented from the author's own literacy support work with Lutfa, together with classroom observations. The article argues that children's literacy learning can be illuminated by considering its social and emotional context. It conceptualises a child's learning identity as simultaneously constructed within intra-personal, interpersonal and socio-historical domains. It describes an unconscious dimension to these domains and further suggests that through the process of transference, the object-world of the classroom is given a specific emotional colouring and resonance for the individual. The article develops the idea of an unconscious ‘matrix for learning’, through which a task such as literacy learning is experienced. It then explores this matrix as experienced by one child. The article concludes by reviewing the complex and subtle interplay that occurred between the intra-personal, interpersonal and socio-historical contexts of literacy learning in Lutfa's case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]