Abstract
This chapter focuses on transitions across educational, workplace, physical and online settings, for those on professional undergraduate programmes where continual movements between work-based placements and university environments are commonplace. It introduces the idea of chronotopic movements, drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of a chronotope or space:time configuration. By analyzing how students in higher education work across different settings and time frames through this perspective of chronotopes, we show the influence of chronotopic movements on transition, their disruption of learning across boundaries and their mobilisation as resources to help solve boundary-related problems. Six medical students created video diaries to document their use of digital technologies whilst on clinical placements. Chronotopic movements were analysed in relation to access, management of resources, creating and repurposing artefacts and cultural transitions. Networked learning environments helped manage the changes in space and time and helped students adapt to, and make sense of, different spaces and create their own hybrid ‘places’. We conclude that the dynamics of fluid, shifting boundaries of space and time are amongst the key changes that networked learning environments have made possible for working and studying in higher education. Chronotopes can act as resources for mobilizing human agency and supporting students’ sense making when transitioning across boundaries. Yet they also present conflicts as multi spatio-temporal working places increase. Investigating chronotopic movements can reveal how spatiality and temporality frame our actions, including the hidden tensions and cultural challenges of boundary crossings, making this a rich seam for further research and investigation.
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Bakhtin usually referred to these as time:space in line with the Greek ordering in the word chronotope. For Bakhtin’s purposes in understanding the construction of the narrative within literary forms, this makes sense; within the context of networked learning and online and offline dynamics, we refer to them as space:time configurations to foreground the significance of space and for consistency. However, given that they are mutually constituting and defining, the order is not highly significant.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following doctors who were student co-researchers on the research project discussed above for their invaluable contribution to earlier work on this topic and their participation in the original study: Amy Hardeley, Joanne Lee, Charlotte Mann, Camilla Milner-Smith, Catherine Trappes-Lomax, Laura Tyler .
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Timmis, S., Williams, J. (2016). Transitioning Across Networked, Workplace and Educational Boundaries: Shifting Identities and Chronotopic Movements. In: Ryberg, T., Sinclair, C., Bayne, S., de Laat, M. (eds) Research, Boundaries, and Policy in Networked Learning. Research in Networked Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31130-2_7
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