Founder John Seely Brown Parent organization Xerox | Founded 1986 | |
The Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in Palo Alto, California was co-founded by John Seely Brown, then chief research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, and James G. Greeno, Professor of Education at Stanford University, with the support of David Kearns, CEO of Xerox Corporation in 1986 through a grant from the Xerox Foundation. It operated from 1986 to 2000 as an independent cross-disciplinary think tank with a mission to study learning in all its forms and sites.
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George Pake, who founded Xerox Palo Alto Research Corporation in 1970 became IRL's first director and moved with the institute to its different locations, first on Hanover Street, Palo Alto and then to Willow Place, Menlo Park. Greeno was Associate Director of IRL 1987-1991 and Acting Director for a few months during 1991. From 1992 to 1999 the leadership team consisted of Executive Director Peter Henschel, Associate Director Susan Stucky, Chief Financial Officer Ian Thomson and HR Lorraine Watanabe. Following Ian Thomson and Lorraine Watanabe's tenure, Tessy Albin and Nancy Cryer served, respectively, as CFO and as HR/Operations Director 1999-2000.
IRL was a nonprofit research organization that looked at learning in a wide variety of settings, including schools, workplaces, and informal settings, using collaborative, multidisciplinary teams. Research questions were based in real-world problems and settings defined in partnership with people in schools and workplaces who championed these activities. IRL had a significant impact on education and knowledge management (among many other fields) not only in the US but globally through the development of the concept of a community of practice.
Social Approach to Learning
The first group of researchers was recruited from Stanford and Berkeley universities and from Xerox PARC, in disciplines including anthropology, computer science, education, psychology, and linguistics.
The institute developed its unique social approach to learning, expressed in the Seven Principles of Learning and in the conception of communities-of-practice. Its innovative view of learning, the use of qualitative methods and the coupling of research with design were path breaking in its time, inspired an enthusiastic following and have enriched organizational and educational discourses to this day.
IRL's Seven Principles of Learning
- Learning is fundamentally social.
- Knowledge is integrated in the life of communities.
- Learning is an act of membership.
- Knowing depends on engagement in practice.
- Engagement is inseparable from empowerment.
- “Failure to Learn” is the normal result of exclusion from participation.
- We already have a society of lifelong learners.
IRL’s Core Capabilities
IRL defined its core capabilities as:
IRL’s projects were grouped into research settings:
1. Research of Learning in the Classroom
2. Research on Learning in the Workplace
3. Research Initiative on Learning, Identity and Diversity.
History and Philosophy of IRL
The chief scientist at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), John Seely Brown, psychologist by training, saw the computer revolution open up the possibility of dramatic changes in learning. He gained the support of David Kearns, CEO of Xerox Corporation, who encouraged the Xerox Foundation to grant a substantial amount of money to the creation of an institution to study learning and innovation in the context of the use of computers.
The institute was to operate as an independent entity, even though it was incubated with the knowledge and the assistance of key people from Xerox PARC. It gradually weaned itself from dependence on the grant and earned its keep by the fruits of its research.
The institute was named Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) and founded in 1988. Its first director was George Pake, a physicist from PARC. Its staff was composed of an inter-disciplinary group of researchers: recruited in part from PARC and from Stanford and Berkeley Universities. Researchers came from the disciplines of education, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and psychology. Of particular note, James G. Greeno, a senior educational psychologist, worked to define themes and guide research projects throughout IRL's history. This first generation of researchers developed the vision and methodology for the institute. They were inspired by anthropology’s conception of learning as a social and cultural phenomenon and inspired by books like “Situated Learning” (Co-authors Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger were members of the institute).
The institute adopted ethnography as its main research method, a factor that distinguished it in major ways from other thinktanks. Under this influence the initial image of learning as an individual’s interaction with knowledge mediated possibly by computational tools made way for a vision of learning as apprenticeship. In apprenticeship the knowledge content could not be isolated from the learner’s social status in a socio-cultural field: apprentices had to be received into a community – a guild, profession or team – and migrated within this group from the periphery towards greater and greater participation in the social and professional activities.
The learning process was seen to be substantially one of interaction with the members of one’s own community or group first and with related social groups and networks secondarily. From gaining access to a practice to learning how it is carried out by this group, to collaborating with peers on a shared task or agenda, and finally socializing others as an established member – all these were aspects of learning but also evidence of transformations of identity. They establish both the position of the learner and the content of what is to be learned as part of a social practice shaped by and shaping a material and institutional environment.
IRL’s social perspective opened up areas of learning where none had been suspected before. Learning was found to be present not just in schools and training camps, but also in clubs, prisons, neighborhoods, in highly formalized as well as highly informal settings.
In traditional schools and workplaces, social interaction was often frowned upon as an interruption of work proper. It was the institute’s conviction and commitment to convince the public otherwise. The school part of the institute took on the key gatekeeper in Middle School, mathematics, and created social and practical learning substitutes for the individualized learning tasks in the school curriculum. For instance, instead of teaching fractions in the traditional manner through a series of manipulations of numbers, they developed collaborative design exercises that involved fractions in a practical context – designing a room layout and furniture – that taught students the relevance of fractions in maintaining proportions and gave them a grounded understanding as well as a practical use.
The analogous research on the industry side consisted in ethnographic projects in organizations to uncover social forms of learning inside the workplace and to enhance what benefits they could bring to the corporation. These enhancements could relate to the spatial and institutional aspects of work: Several large projects were dedicated to designing work processes, strategies and workplaces in support of the social aspects of work. They could focus on furniture and technology, on organizational processes or on team building, orientation and training. What all had in common was the theoretical position of the institute – to treat a corporation as a social entity composed of individuals and communities formed around key practices or competencies. Communities-of-Practice were seen as building blocks for learning and identity formation and as holders of organizational know-how.
During its twelve years of pioneering research, IRL had developed and disseminated many radical advances in social and cognitive science: the use of systematic ethnographic methods to study organizations, the social approach to learning, research projects with corporate clients, emphasis on communities and social networks as instrumental for innovation and organizational knowledge, and the awareness of the informal aspects of an organization.
Throughout those twelve years the institute managed to keep itself afloat through national and other grants and specialized corporate projects. It hired researchers, developed a network of affiliates and corporate sponsors, conducted industry retreats, delivered reports and presentations, and contributed to journals and conferences. In 2000, as the dotcom bubble was bursting, funding for learning research projects became hard to come by. After the institute lost a major project at the end of its fiscal year, the decision was made to cease operations. A number of key educational projects and research staff were transferred into WestEd, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research, development, and service agency which also worked with education and other communities throughout the United States and abroad.
After the institute closed, staff members and researchers dispersed, some back to universities, some to other research institutions such as WestEd noted above and to NASA Ames. Others returned to the corporate sector or made their way newly into the corporate world to work in the emerging field of business anthropology or Ethnographic practice in corporations.