3.1 Theories of Learning and Famous Learning Theorists
3.1.4 Activity Theories (1987)
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During internships, the supervisor becomes a promoter of learning, trusting that collecting knowledge and skill that results from direct participation in actions within an environment affect the learner. In reality, the collective and reciprocal action happens between the intern and his or her environment. Therefore, knowledge and skills have a base of active experience. The supervisor’s role calls for forming the learners’ real training from the environment. Research has shown that the environment promotes skills that lead to developing the learner (Billet, 2011) and that through an internship, controlled learning allows and encourages social constructivist learning. Since then, in this education, students manage their learning. The constant support of other people in the workplace makes the interns more confident. They are more liable to feel at ease questioning and reflecting on procedures for learning. Vygotsky (1978) and Dewey (1916), in their research, explain the collective social action, development procedures, and reflective learning. The theory shows the existence of an interplay between active learning and the learner’s interaction while gaining experience. Learners can, by induction, show and translate information into construction or non-structure which they want to know, that is cognitive constructivism. In this model, learning is a growth process that calls for change and building on earlier learning experiences, for instance, how interns move from one experience to the next higher one.
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Figure 3.3. A collective activity system (Engströem, 1987)
The activity theory disapproves of detached individuals as lacking the first entity that is being analysed in a study (Bertelsen & Bodker, 2003). I consider this approach to be a descriptive instrument for a system of rules all on “who is doing what, why, and how.” However, an action is seldom that simple. The approach supplies a tool with which researchers evoke and understand human activity. In research methods, the approach is a practical lens using the qualitative method. Last, the theory provides a way of seeing and studying a remarkable development, finding out rules, and causing inferences across reciprocal action.
Activity theory reports actions in the interrelated of social and technical aspects of an organisation through six related elements. Engstrom (1987) redefines the activity method as a conceptual system expanded by more nuanced arguments, including:
(1) object-orienters—the activity system’s aim;
(2) Subject or internalisation—workers used in the activities; community or externalisation all workers needed in the activity system (Figure 3.4); in the social context;
(3) Tools or tool mediation—the ideas used by workers in the system. Tools shape worker- structure
(4) Mutual action; they alter with increasing experience. The knowledge also varies;
(5) division of labour—social-economic classes, the structure of data having various degrees staged in a tree-shaped structure of activity, dividing operations among employees in the system, and
(6) rules—norms, and principles governing events in the system.
Activity theory helps in explaining how human artefacts and social organisation intercept social policy. This starts with the belief in an activity considered as an organisation of human “doing”
through which a person improves an object to gain the needed result (Bryant, Forte & Bruckman, 1981). The person uses a tool which may be external (an electrician’s tool kit, a computer, or a
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machine) or sometimes internal (a plan). For example, during internships, the whole idea of students learning skills is that they learn the skills of someone who is more experienced than them, the supervisor/mentor who supports them. In particular, the supervisor introduces a topic or skill, guiding them through it so they can learn, and then the supervisor allows them to practise on their own. Activity theory encourages the supervisor to consider the composite relation between people, institutional arrangements, and norms placed across the partnership (Roth &
Tobin, 2002). In internships, the academic and the workplace are different systems. Research has shown that both educational and the workshop have various “tools” and needed outputs.
These differences affect the abilities of students to transfer learning from the classroom to the workplace environment (Le Maistre & Pare´, 2004).
The socio-cultural form of activity theory allows for a set of human actions and connects the person to the social level (Engstrom, 1999). The unit of analysis is the natural process of admitting the individual or many entities considered as a building block working towards an object, therefore, adopting the specific rules and the active relationships that arise inside the activity system of rules (Engstrom, 1999; Barab, Evans & Baek, 2003). In the workplace, the graduates work in a team with supervisors and other employees of the organisation. They all work towards a goal within a community of practice, irrespective of their ages, belonging to a social class or academic level. I recognized one of the powerful points of activity theory as that it associates the specific subject with the social genuineness—its researchers both through the facilitating activity. Roth and Lee (2004) consider Science Education as involvement in the community with associations to the cultural and historical evolution of this society. Subjects (people or groups) get used in science activities, and they use tools to address a scientific idea.
Besides, they act with one another, with devices and means of entering the community of learners. They work by building knowledge, gaining the results that are precise (Engstrom, 2005).
I noticed that activity theory was a governing instrument for equating the university and the workplace. The theory also clarifies the many problematic transitions between classroom and work environment. I viewed the comparison as most pertinent and informative when comparing activity in university and similar activity in their similar workplace environments. In my study, I have preferred to scrutinise the professional academics in the finance, ICT, and accommodations (hotels) sectors. These academics prepare graduates under controlled conditions in universities, assuming that students will transfer knowledge into the workplace
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which was gained in the classroom. Classrooms and workplaces are unique activity systems (Le Maistre & Pare, 2004).
I used activity theory as a lens in my qualitative research method because it provided a method of understanding and analysing the phenomenon of internship and employability. Activity theory helped me in finding patterns and making inferences across interactions. I described the phenomena and presented them by using language to persuade.