Abstract
This chapter extends and refines an alternative perspective on transfer of learning that takes a dialectic viewpoint of the social-historical-educational phenomenon based on the theory of expansive learning as a boundary-crossing process by the Finnish researcher Yrjö Engeström. The methodological approach is grounded in ethnography as a logic of inquiry in education. The data were collected through participant observations in classrooms of two seventh-grade classes and three teachers for a period of 6 months, as well as interviews with students and teachers. The unit of analysis is an activity system, called Water, that is composed of three other interconnected subsystems developed in different content areas (mathematics, Portuguese, and geography) and related to the same object, namely water and its shortage. With the tools of analysis used, we found that the students showed a broader and deeper understanding of the water issue by making reciprocal exchanges between the three activity subsystems, sharing a potentially expansive object (water and its shortage), and using common artifacts (i.e., boundary objects) in different ways. We argue that these successive boundary-crossing processes unleashed expansive transformations within the Water activity and new understandings about the water problem and its shortage. Furthermore, supported by Engeström’s theory of expansive learning and by our examples of boundary crossing, we present our perspective on transfer of learning as having a strict relationship with expansive learning, reflecting a perspective of learning that relies on the ideas of expansion and transformation and not on transporting knowledge forward from one activity to another.
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Notes
- 1.
Because, according to Engeström’s perspective, every activity is formed by at least two individuals, from now on, for the sake of clarity and brevity of the text, when we write activity we are always considering it as an activity system.
- 2.
Campanha da Fraternidade, or the Brotherhood Campaign, is an initiative of the Brazilian Catholic Church, which proposes an annual theme to be debated.
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Tomaz, V.S., David, M.M. (2021). Transfer of Learning as Boundary Crossing Between Cultural-Historical Activity Systems. In: Hohensee, C., Lobato, J. (eds) Transfer of Learning. Research in Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65632-4_10
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