Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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106 S. Ludvigsen et al.
• How is time and temporality accounted for in different theoretical
traditions
• How is time used by participants in social practices of learning to constitute
common objects
These questions form the basis for discussing how the creation and use of common
objects bring together learners’ diverse trajectories of participation.
Approaches to trajectories of participation
The turn towards social practice as a key concept represents the broader reframing
in the social sciences (Schatzki et al., 2001). Our engagement with social practice
as a core concept in order to understand learning follows this turn, which for us
entails taking interdependencies as a starting point. These interdependencies are
subject to continuing debate and discussion in the social science (for example, see:
Middleton and Brown, 2005; Perret- Clermont, 2005). We position the discussion
of trajectories of participation in terms of the interdependency between the
historical and the specific situation. We set out to develop an account that brings
in the temporal aspects of learning, and in so doing developed a more advanced
understanding of how the interdependency is constituted.
We start by taking a step back and trace some of the most significant contributions
to the concept of trajectory. One of the first scholars to introduce trajectory
as a concept was Anselm Strauss. In studies from hospitals in the 1960s Strauss
and his colleagues developed the concept to understand and analyse how the ill
person and their family at home manage to live as normal a life possible in the
face of the present disease (Strauss, 1975). The trajectory can be seen as a process
of connected phases where there are individual differences, but common features
of what to expect. According to them, trajectory is gradual and non- linear, with
phases, clusters and sequences of tasks that constitute their specific details. There
is dynamism within and between the phases, reflected in complexity and diversity,
uncertainty and unpredictability (Strauss, 1975; Strauss et al., 1985).
Strauss and his colleagues gave an account of trajectories as differences in how
participants work with diseases, as sequences of tasks and calculations of risk
(intervention–non- intervention) given available resources. The temporal aspects
in Strauss’s account were connected to how time unfolds.
From a critical psychology perspective Dreier developed a systematic approach
to the concept of trajectory (Dreier, 1997 and 1999). Dreier focuses attention
on how people’s participation across multiple contexts is at the core of individual
development. An important premise in Dreier’s work is that social practices are
diverse, which means that social structures do not work in an undirectional way,
but as open- situated practices, where the local interaction is what connects the
multiple trajectories of the participants.
Dreier’s framework distinguishes between personal locations, positions and
stances. Personal location concerns where a person takes part in some activity, a