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

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20 A. Edwards
Professional learning and distributed expertise
In two recent studies 1 with colleagues, I have been examining how professionals
learn to do the kind of responsive preventative work stimulated by these policies.
As these studies have been located in the early days of policy- led changes in practices,
much of the learning we have found has been on or beyond the boundaries
of established organizational structures. They work outside their ‘institutional
shelters’ (Sennett, 1999) in new forms of responsive collaborative practice while
they focus on the transformation of children’s trajectories. These trajectories are
intrinsically mobile and unstable objects of activity: what Engeström calls ‘runaway
objects’ (Engeström, 2005), which change as they are worked on and constantly
move ahead of those who are working on them. Following the runaway objects
that are children’s trajectories, in order to move them towards social inclusion, is
relatively new and quite risky work.
The learning involved is therefore not a matter of becoming an increasingly
adroit participant in established professional practices; they often don’t exist and if
they do they may not offer the flexibility required for this new kind of responsive
work (Edwards, Barnes, Plewis, Morris et al., 2006; Edwards, Daniels, Gallagher,
Leadbetter and Warmington, 2009). This form of expansive practice requires
the creation of new tools or new use of old tools and new competencies. Tools
used by practitioners may be material and quite mundane, for example, a mobile
phone solely for use at work seems to support flexible responses to children’s
trajectories. However, these tools may find themselves appropriated to sustain
less expansive forms of practice unless attention is paid to how and why they are
used on runaway objects.
The how and the why are necessarily intertwined with the use of material tools.
New competencies need to accommodate an ongoing process of reinterpretation in
response to the remaking of a child’s trajectory as well as responsive negotiations
of responses to those interpretations. Competencies need to be forward- looking:
rather like Cole’s 1996 development of Wartofsky’s (1973) ‘tertiary artifacts’
i.e. tools for going beyond representations of what exists to enable imagined
futures. Cole suggests that these function both internally by shaping our thinking;
and externally by mediating our engagement with the world. By allowing us
to look beyond the ‘given’ to what ‘might be’, tertiary artifacts resonate strongly
with Engeström’s notion of ‘where to’ tools. Giving the example of a care plan,
Engeström suggests that they contain the ‘core idea’, and are used to sustain a
long- term orientation on a complex object (Engeström, Pasanen, Toiviainen &
Haavisto, 2005). The term ‘tool’ is more helpful than ‘artifact’; as Cole suggests,
tertiary artifacts can be seen as ways of thinking which can provide ‘a tool for
changing current praxis’ (1996, p. 121).
Currently the core idea for policies aimed at the prevention of social exclusion
is early intervention with a coordinated response which crosses occupational
and organizational boundaries. Coordinating tools, such as Common Assessment
Frameworks are being developed, but early comments from practitioners suggest