I have considered how tools can function as boundary objects supporting boundary crossing such as that between schools and university (Lofthouse & Wright, 2012), and through which learning can occur as a result of reflection and transformation, which often involves aspects of confrontation (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011). I accept Dewey’s (1938) and Vygotsky’s (1978) concepts of tools forged through social and cultural influences, able to perform epistemic functions (Knorr-Cetina, 2001) and having catalytic qualities (Baumfield et al., 2009).
#Educational video toolkit professional#
One of the outcomes has been that I have refined my understanding of tools within contexts of professional and workplace learning and practices located in that workplace. This has been underpinned by processes of practitioner research, and represents an attempt to determine how professional learning with transformative purposes can be supported. Over the last decade I have (at first inadvertently and then more deliberately) built new practices and created new tools to support my own professional learning alongside that of my ITE and Masters students and others in the wider profession. I ask myself “how do we have a toolkit of power tools?” I am a fan of tools, but I think we may need to ask ourselves what we use them for, how we understand them and how we as practitioners contribute to their development and modification. We have an extended CPD toolkit to select from. I wonder whether the same could now be said of approaches for CPD and if so how helpful this is? Just think for a minute about the CPD ‘brands’ and models that are out there, the lexicon of ‘train the trainers’, the use of Twitter and blogs as a means to disseminate and pick up new ideas and the plethora of new digital platforms and kit that are on offer. While new ideas and strategies can no doubt be helpful to extending repertoires of practice, there remains an anxiety that the imports are adopted because they are ‘on trend’, fail to be fully integrated, and that any impact might have a short half-life. There is a popular approach of developing and delivering ‘teaching toolkits’ to enable teachers to change or tweak their classroom practice. A power tool in more than one sense it seems highly functional, well understood and even motivational – not a bad ambition for a learning tool. Talking about the job or even the tool itself was insufficient the item was removed from its box, the attachments scrutinised and the prospect of more DIY projects discussed with enthusiasm.
Recently I overheard an animated conversation about the functions of a power tool used for a DIY task.
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