Enactivist workplace learning

By Anonymous – Camille Flammarion, L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888), pp. 163, Public Domain.

I’ve just read Lundgren et al (2018) Conceptualizing reflection in experience-based workplace learning . The authors refer to an enactivist perspective on workplace learning whereby learning is generated in “mutual interaction of the learner and environment or context with each changing, possibly in divergent ways, through their interconnections” (p.314). So learning is an effect of interactions in a complex system. While enactivism remains human-centred in its understanding of learning and agency, the authors later discuss sociomaterialism to note that “it makes very little sense to posit a human-centred effect, like reflection, as a prime motivator of complex action in complex ecologies” (p.321) . What seems to be important in these perspective is the role of distributed actors be they people, texts, technology, furniture, tools, paper, pens, whiteboards, carpets, windows etc.. in opening-up and or closing down possibilities of new practices – that is, of learning. So a person’s competence is not necessarily always transferable, or immutable, but may well be performed only through particular interactive gatherings distributed beyond any particular individual.

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