Abstract
This chapter is the first of a pair of chapters concerned with the role of inscriptions and inscriptional practices in professional work and professional education. We use the term ‘inscription’ to cover a wide range of representations that are produced in media (external to the mind). Inscriptions play a vital role in knowledgeable work and innovation, so understanding the nature of professional inscriptions, and how students learn the capacities for inscribing, is critical. In this chapter, we analyse the activity of someone who is learning to be a school counsellor, tracing the inscriptional practices involved in completing one of their core tasks. We distinguish between three types of inscription: projective (inscriptions for practice), productive (inscriptions in practice) and illuminative (inscriptions of practice). Building on this ground, we introduce an enactive view of inscriptions and argue that students should be helped to see how – through inscriptional activity – they can both extend their own learning and knowing and improve the systems in which they are working.
These ideas are particularly useful to professional educators who are aiming for a better alignment between educational goals and inscriptional tasks that are set for students. Achieving a better alignment is greatly helped by understanding how inscriptions vary, how they function and what roles they play in knowledgeable action.
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- 1.
As Eraut (2009) says, ‘All vocational and professional practitioners are knowledge workers, who are expected to recognise or find out what knowledge is most relevant for their current learning goals, track down that relevant knowledge and make appropriate notes for speedy retrieval at a later date. Information from several sources may be required and, if concept maps of the topic and/or notes on its evidence base are constructed as these investigations proceed, they will greatly enhance the usefulness of their inquiry. Managing one’s knowledge adds value to the time spent acquiring and refining it, but this approach is rarely found in practice. Hence it is important to develop a repertoire of these approaches to knowledge representation ’ (p. 6).
- 2.
More specifically, by ‘inscriptions ’, we refer to a broad class of human memory representations that draw on human capacities to utilise symbolic technological devices in an external memory storage system . Inscriptions , therefore, are different from other human memory representations (such as mimesis and speech) which draw only upon human biological capacities to use the body and brain as (internal) memory storage systems. In this sense, the former representational system is technological, while the latter representational systems are biological (see Donald, 1991, 2001; and Chap. 5).
- 3.
Traditional cognitive (information processing) views of inscriptions primarily associate inscriptional capabilities with the ability to establish connections between individual mental processes and external symbolic expressions. The social view of inscriptions and inscriptional capabilities focusses on the capabilities needed to participate in socially shaped inscriptional practices (Roth & McGinn, 1998). The enactive material view moves away from the arbitrary meanings of inscriptions and looks for the source of meanings and, therefore, capabilities in a dense structural coupling between the human mind and its engagement with the physical world (Malafouris, 2013).
- 4.
- 5.
These two roles of inscriptions draw upon and mirror the two similar roles of signs and language that we discussed in Chap. 9.
- 6.
Of course, not all features of inscriptions and inscriptional practices identified by Latour (1990) hold for all research fields, but differences between research fields are not our main focus. Here, we want to emphasise the point that inscriptions and ways of inscribing in professional work are different from the ways in which inscriptional work has been characterised in the canon of science and technology studies of scientific research.
- 7.
By ‘inscriptional tools’ we refer to inscriptions that function as tools. A detailed discussion about tools is presented in Chap. 12.
- 8.
Overall, a report is a familiar generic inscriptional form that is used widely to present outcomes of completed work in many professions. However, each professional domain has its own kinds of ‘professional report’. Learning to read and create such reports, as well as other generic professional inscriptions customised within each profession, is often among the explicit objectives of professional courses.
- 9.
The main opinions from research on this matter are distributed along a continuum from the view that plans and other symbolic devices can represent human thought and action (Vera & Simon, 1993) to the view that human thought and action are fundamentally situated and meanings emerge directly in action (Suchman, 2007). We do not want to repeat this debate here (see, e.g. the special issue edited by Koschmann, 2003). We believe that, at this point in time, most of those who have been involved in this debate have more or less agreed that, irrespectively of how plans are weaved into the human cognitive ‘fabric’, they are always both contingent and important.
- 10.
Some of the most rationalistic accounts even locate it outside the minds and hands of those who carry on this practice. That is, inscriptional tools for practitioners, such as plans , are created by ‘experts’, and professional practices are audited by external accrediting bodies.
- 11.
Norman (1991) uses the term ‘cognitive artefacts ’ to mean things that have similar representational features and functions as inscriptions : ‘an artificial device designed to maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function’ (p. 17).
- 12.
It would be more precise to call this view ‘the actors’ view’ than ‘the personal view’ as similar inscriptions for work could be also used for collective work.
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Markauskaite, L., Goodyear, P. (2017). Inscribing Professional Knowledge and Knowing. In: Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4369-4_10
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