Abstract
This is the first major chapter in the book in which we combine outcomes from our empirical research with further development of the main lines of the theoretical argument. In this chapter, we use some of the assessment tasks set for students who are going on work placement (internship or practicum). We argue that when students are tackling an assessment task, they are inevitably engaging in an artefact-oriented activity. We unpick the nature of this activity – distinguishing between object as motive and object as material entity. We make this distinction, in part, to then look at connections between motive and materiality in the overlapping worlds of the classroom and the workplace. We show that learning for knowledgeable action often takes the shape of an epistemic artefact-oriented activity. This activity connects, rather than separates, abstract knowledge and objects of professional practice with embodied skill through concrete, materially expressed, actions and things. We also distinguish between different kinds of artefacts – showing the ways in which they preserve, transfer and improve upon skills used in the professional workplace.
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Notes
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Wenger (1998) defines ‘reification’ as follows: ‘the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience. <…> [This creates] a point of focus around which the negotiation of meaning becomes organized. <…> [W]riting down a law, creating a procedure, or producing a tool is a similar process. A certain understanding is given form’ (p. 59).
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There is more to be experienced in the world than ‘objectified cultural artefact s’, of course.
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The closest Russian word for ‘thing’ would be ‘vesch’ (вещь).
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In a similar way, Vygotsky (1978) made a distinction between ‘action and meaning’ and ‘object and meaning’ (pp. 100–101).
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While Wartofsky (1979) closely integrated ahistorical and human perception , he still considered the development of those two kinds of perception as two distinct stages. Many ecological perspectives deny the possibility of such separation: ‘we have no grounds for distinguishing between those capacities for action due to “biology” and those due to “culture ”’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 387).
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From our perspective, as researchers interested in professional work and knowledge, Bereiter’s (2002) take on conceptual artefacts has a few limitations. We develop this argument more thoroughly below, but a key point to make just here is that much of the knowledge work that takes place in professional settings involves complex, dynamically changing mixtures of ‘knowledge in one’s mind’ and ‘knowledge in the world ’.
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Bereiter (2002) defined knowledge work as a rather specific and specialised kind of work ‘that creates or adds value to conceptual artefacts’ (p. 181). He conceived knowledge very specifically as ‘real stuff that is possible to work on’ (loc. cit.): a product to which one can attach the label of ‘intellectual property’. From our perspective (informed also by our empirical evidence), professional workers create a much broader range of intellectual products that have a broad range of uses, including for their own action , as with a lesson plan used by a teacher. Even such occupations as ‘brain surgery’, in Bereiter’s view, did not involve knowledge work – they are ‘knowledge-demanding manual occupations’ (loc. cit.), making knowledge work a completely disembodied, specialised part of knowledgeable work .
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Markauskaite, L., Goodyear, P. (2017). Objects, Things and Artefacts in Professional Learning and Doing. 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_8
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