Action Learning II

	Children, on-line learning and authentic teaching skills in primary education
	Action Learning II

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Making sense of project observations

In the course of reflecting on the wide range of observations made in the project through inschool observations, action learning projects, conferences. workshops and discussions some key themes have emerged around the early notions of action learning

One view of these themes is given in the following model:

This model attempts to capture the following propositions

practices involve activities
activities result in experiences, products and the acquisition of explicit knowledge (albeit that such explicit knowledge is of a low order)
experiences can be expressed as tacit knowledge
through insightful questioning explicit and tacit knowledge can be
- compared
- related
- reconciled
- enriched
- ...
- and thus given meaning (and possibly made useful)

Within the project we have adapted the work of Prof Reg Revans and others pursuing the field of action learning into a systems/process perspective notions (see the above model). This has helped us to make better sense of our observations.

Our observation that collaboration is vital in ensuring that ICT is used easily and well in teaching and learning, and that professional learning is also successful, has led us directly to an interest in the notions of communities of practice. In communities of practice groups of people collaborate to improve their knowledge (tacit and explicit), shared repertoire of actions... about the practices that they share. They do this through

participation as learners and 'teachers' in the community where
teaching and learning involve negotiation of meaning

The model also appears to be consistent with the work of Vygotsky and others, in that his concept of maturation of concept involves their appearance at both abstract (as explicit knowledge) and concrete (tacit knowledge) levels.

The implication from Vygotsky is that the 'insightful questioning' is undertaken as social construction of knowledge (learning) in which action, learning, knowledge and social engagement cannot be meaningfully separated. For Vygotsky the insightful questioning is undertaken through scaffolding activity and mediating experiences.