This article investigates mobile learning from the standpoint of tourism. Regarding mobile learning research, as mobility turns have occurred, the perspective gradually transitioned from using mobile technology for education to learning as a human and non-human practice surrounding mobility. Tourism (i.e., mass tourism/leisure tourism) is a concrete activity that intertwines tourists, places, movements, spaces, and communities. Touristic learning can be correlated with mobile learning as a practice rooted in tourism that involves boundary-crossing from residences to tourist sites. However, few studies have concentrated on children’s learning through tourism, due to which this article aims to examine children’s touristic learning via family tourism based on interviews with twelve Japanese parents.
Mobile Society and Learning
The current mobile society epitomizes large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, including local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006). To date, social science has adopted a sedentarist approach taking fixity, closed spaces, and territorial models for granted, not addressing issues related to mobility sufficiently (Urry, 2000). In recent years, a mobility paradigm (mobility turn; Urry, 2007), focusing on movability in a mobile society, has emerged. The mobility paradigm criticizes humanism, which posits a human subject capable of thinking and acting independently of the material world (Latour, 2004), and attempts to capture varying mobilities of information and objects symmetrical with humans. Thus, the inspection of how humans and non-humans are constituted and connected in time and space from the perspective of mutual intersection is essential.
In a mobile society, education and learning are closely related to (im)mobility. These aspects are shaped by various mobilities, such as commuting to school (Fotel & Thomsen, 2003), blended learning (Gourlay, 2021), studying abroad (Beech, 2015), and academic mobility (Metcalfe, 2017). Nevertheless, immobility does lead to a loss of educational opportunities. Denial of mobility results in limited access to education, namely “residualized” schools and “immobile” communities (Gulson & Symes, 2017), prison education (Farley & Hopkins, 2017), and school closures and at-home learning during pandemics (Onyema et al., 2020). Notably, the development of educational opportunities, including mobility, applicable to both formal and informal learning is imperative. Accordingly, this paper considers learning in mobile lives and societies, as opposed to learning “moored” within a single classroom, workplace, home, and community.
Within the domain of mobile learning, representing learning on the move, mobility turns have occurred (Enriquez, 2011, 2013). That is, the research concerning mobile learning has shifted from the utilization of mobile technology for education to learning as a human and non-human practice surrounding mobility, such as bodies, materials, spaces, communities, contexts, and boundaries. Previous studies have inscribed mobility into the learning design from a technically deterministic viewpoint, using portable and handheld devices (e.g., Pinkwart, Hoppe, Milrad, & Perez, 2003). Conversely, Enriquez (2013) asserts the employment of the mobility paradigm and relationalism as a practical perspective on mobile learning. She discusses the mobility of learning through physical and material relationships reconfigured within technologies and media spaces, devoid of undue emphasis on learning as something that goes on in the mind. Similarly, Engeström (2009) proposes “wildfire activities” as a new relational pattern of mobility and learning. These activities are characterized by expansive swarming, sideways transitions, and boundary-crossing, formed everywhere simultaneously, multi-directionally, and reciprocally (e.g., birding, skateboarding, and disaster relief of Red Cross). Given that mobility turns and relationalism can enrich the concept of mobile learning, I propose expanding the study perspective from learning via mobile devices to learning via mobility.