Marianne Teräs

Learning in “Paperland”: Cultural Tools and Learning Practices in Finland

The article explores intercultural encounters in a vocational school and how cultural tools and practices are identified and made “visible”; without this process, the practices of the dominant groups are taken for granted and perhaps assumed to be beyond critical scrutiny. The study examines a cultural artifact and learning practices that immigrant students identified: different forms and uses of paper in Finland. The study introduces a new formative intervention method called the Culture Laboratory. The analyses showed that paper-dominant learning practices were varied but rigid. This means that critical reflection on cultural tools and practices is needed when people from different cultural backgrounds encounter each other, as well as spaces and methodologies for dialog and participation.

Inter-Professional Working and Learning: Instructional Actions and Boundary Crossing or Boundary Making in Oral Healthcare.

Inter-professional teams are typical in health care, and inter-professional education has thus become more common. This empirical study explores the instruction-related challenges when students of dentistry and oral hygiene collaborate during their internship in caring for the oral health of patients. The conceptual framework of the study stems from cultural-historical activity theory, the aim being to explore the instructional actions and boundary crossing of clinical instructors while they were supervising the students. The main data comprise 17 videotaped treatment sessions, which were organised three-dimensionally in sequences, themes and topics, and analysed in terms of the instructional and boundary-crossing actions. The results reveal chains of subtle and rich instructional actions classified as instructive, evaluative and collaborative. Instructional boundary crossing occurred rarely and was also boundary-making: positioning, moving and communicating. It should be taken into account in the field of inter-professional working and learning that instructional boundaries seem easier to maintain than to cross, and professional teachers at educational institutions and instructors in workplaces need to be aware of this.

Intercultural Space as Transitional Space: Movements, Transformations and Dialectical Relations:

This article reports on research into an intervention called a ‘Culture Laboratory’, based on a generic ‘Change Laboratory’ method within developmental work research and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Within the Culture Laboratory, transitions can be viewed as movements, transformations and reciprocal relations, undertaken as participants attempt to improve their training in a process of observing, comparing and creating. The 17 participants in this study were students from eight different countries of origin, their teachers, other school staff and researchers. Experiences from this study would suggest that transitions are not outright movements that follow a certain path, but are rather complicated back-and-forth movements and tension-rich in-between spaces, which can enrich development and learning through creative actions.