Studio etnografico di una comunità professionale blended: il ruolo delle tecnologie formative nella prospettiva della Activity Theory
Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Several educational models characterizing communities as environments that foster learning processes, have been formulated in recent years. In the literature we can find different constructs: the community of learning, the community of practice and the professional community. Most studies based on these constructs focus on the process of peer-education, on ways to participate, on the reification, and on the discursive processes allowing the participants to negotiate meanings or actions within the community. However, a better understanding of a community's salient features can be achieved by investigating it with a systemic approach. For this reason, we have adopted the Activity Theory perspective of Engeström, expanding the scope of the analysis from the community itself to a broader "activity system". From this perspective, communication technologies play an important role; their evolution allows to move some or all activities of these communities into online spaces. In such learning environments, members can share documents or descriptions of professional practices, discuss real-world issues related to their activities, seek various forms of consensus and alignment; and debate to better assess and determine how to act on the field. Therefore, we have conducted an ethnographic study of a blended professional community, which employs face-to-face and virtual tools and environments, in addition to communication technologies currently well established but completely new to the subjects under examination. The main goal of this investigation is to elucidate the role of educational technologies with the eventual goal of understanding the community’s professional and organizational culture. The project, viewed as an opportunity to provide change for participants (Engeström, 2008), strove also to gain insight concerning their activity system, the effects that learning in real work contexts can have, and into interactions among members. Consequently, the main goal of this investigation is to understand the community’s professional and organizational culture, in order to analyze the role of educational technologies towards the development of the community itself as well as in their real work context. The community was established and developed from a blended learning project involving 74 professionals working on animal health and food safety in the Veneto regional health system. Members includes physicians, veterinarians, safety technicians, biologists, chemists and nutritionists. Their educational objective is to improve the regional public health system ability to manage emergencies related to food risks. At the same time, the intervention was aimed to foster closer cooperation among practitioners and services involved in animal health and food hygiene, to ensure a better protection of public health. The project, viewed as an opportunity to provide change for participants (Engeström, 2008), strove also to gain insight concerning their activity system. To summarize, the aim of this investigation is to investigate the community from two point of views. Firstly, from inside, to reconstruct the community features. Secondly, from outside, through the extended perspective given by a complex network of actors and the system contradictions emerged in the description of the individuals' activity system. In addition to community analysis, we have elucidated how educational technologies can modify professionals's established practices and allow them to design new communicational structures to solve the major contradictions of the system. Finally, we proposed an innovative model of educational intervention historically and culturally based on the results of ethnographic study
Author: Cinzia Ferranti
Language: Italian
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W60557691