Analyzing learning at work: an interdisciplinary framework

Abstract

Experience in the workplace represents a significant domain for the analysis of learning. Based on many years of research on high-school and college interns, the article proposes a set of interdisciplinary ideas and strategies for conducting such an analysis. The core argument is that learning is the construction, enhancement or reorganization of knowledge and knowledge-use in an activity system, and that it happens through an interactional process involving participants, their joint actions and their material and informational resources. Understanding learning as a situated process requires an investigation of the way activities are established, accomplished, and processed, and of the social, cultural, political, and technological factors that shape them. The analyst must examine the ways knowledge is defined, distributed and used in the setting; learning, or the ways that knowledge-use changes over time; and pedagogy, or the social organization of the process by which learning is made possible.