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

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Intersecting trajectories of participation 107
physical place. The idea of positions includes the dynamic aspect that people change
between different settings where they represent different roles (father, mother,
teacher, sports coach, etc.). Finally, the concept of stances highlights the importance
of a clear idea of how people think, reason and act in a particular situation,
because without these stances, we only get an abstract theory of mind and human
activity. Stances are, in Dreier’s words: ‘grounded in complex, heterogeneous, and
contradictory character of personal social practices’ (Dreier, 1999: p. 15).
In Strauss et al. (1985), as well Dreier’s accounts of trajectory, there is less attention
to the use of artifacts in interaction, or to the connection between historical
processes and the interactions here and now. By contrast, in cultural historical
activity theory (CHAT), the focus is artifacts, objects and tools when ‘long- term
cycles of activities’ are studied. In Engeström’s work from 1987, the notion of
learning by expanding was developed, to offer a theoretical basis for a new way
to understand learning. The question often used to illustrate what is commonly
referred to as the ‘learning paradox’, is how two simple cognitive structures can
become one more advanced structure (Bereiter, 1995). While Bereiter tries to solve
the learning paradox from within cognitive science, Engeström takes a very different
approach, and from a dialectical position he shows how the learning paradox
can be solved at a social level. To do so, the conceptual system that Engeström
develops has social diversity and multiplicity as a starting point. Through concepts
such as disturbances, tensions, breakdowns, contradictions, rules, community,
division of labour, we can analyse social practice as activity systems or interacting
activity systems. Historical contradiction creates radical social expansions, and
such expansions changes the activity system’s direction through the relation to
the object. Radical change is, in other words, emphasised and prioritised in the
analytic endeavour in CHAT.
Trajectories are, within the CHAT perspective, used to conceptualise how activity
systems changes their relationship towards the object, or what we will call emerging
objects to emphasise its dynamic and shifting character. In recent CHAT studies
the concept of trajectories are used both as a theoretical and methodological concept
(Saari, 2003; Toiviainen, 2003; Kerosuo, 2006). We could say that, within
CHAT, time is built into the analysis both as a chronological and as a historical
feature through the focus on artifacts, tools and objects. The interactional analytical
details serve the purpose of showing how structural conflicts at different
levels create contradictions, which could lead to radical expansions, and expansive
learning.
An interactional account of temporality has been developed in ethnomethodology
(Garfinkel, 1984; Heritage, 1984; Sacks, 1992; Psathas, 1995). Garfinkel’s
position has been criticised for not dealing with time. However, Rawls argues that
this is based on a misinterpretation. Although Garfinkel’s approach aims to study
situated practice, time is a constitutive feature in his analysis, or, as Rawls puts it:
‘interaction that inhabits small bits of present time and local space’ (2005: p. 164).
Time is not some ‘measure of a relationship to a completed act that occurred in
some other place or time’ (2005: p. 168). Rather, time in Garfinkel’s approach