The last three features of sense-making 2 tend to represent a sociocultural perspective of sense-making. The sociocultural perspective focuses on engaging in a communicative process with others to arrive at a shared understanding and is premised on the understanding of learning as a social process, taking place and mediated by specific contexts. The sociocultural perspective of sense-making recognises learning as a social and communicative process. This perspective captures the participatory nature of learning not only in the verbal processing and exchange of cognitive information, but also through the communication and understanding of one another’s cultural backgrounds and practices (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005), as well as interactions with artefacts (Fenwick, 2008a ; Nicolini, 2012). With such interactions, higher forms of thinking come into existence. The process through which higher forms of thinking come to be is called internalisation. In this collective process, each member plays a role in contributing to the knowing of others, as people attempt to collaborate with one another, negotiate and clarify the meaning of their experiences with other people so as to build knowledge and understanding, that will enable collective action (van Aalst, 2009; Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005; Wells, 2002). Sense-making through interactions also enables the development of new knowledge and generation of ideas among communities, not just adding to and complementing one another’s knowledge (van Aalst, 2009; Engestrom, 2001; as cited in Chun, 1998; Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005). In addition, sense-making does not just occur with social interactions, but with material interactions as well (Mau & Ambrosio, 2003; Naykki & Jarvela, 2008; Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005; So, Seow & Looi, 2009). After all, humans live in an environment surrounded by objects, tools and technology; our learning activities are therefore entwined with the use of such resources (Fenwick, Jensen & Nerland, 2012). The sociocultural perspective includes others as well as the tools, cultures and other features of the environment in the learning, exchanging and construction of knowledge, and acknowledges that people learn not only by knowing but also by doing. The discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of the current understanding of sensemaking points out that sense-making includes both cognitive and sociocultural perspectives of human development. Drawing on the mix of these theoretical perspectives, Section 2.2 below will review some empirical studies on learners’ sense-making experiences, which are mediated by different factors.
2.2 Factors mediating sense-making In this section, different factors that have been identified as promoting or inhibiting the effective sense-making process of learners are related to the use of pedagogical strategies to convey concepts and capability development, the design of the BL curriculum, as well as the guidance and support from workplaces. The following subsections will elaborate on how these different factors affect learners’ sense-making in BL environments. However, the BL in most of the studies we found in our review of the literature comprised mainly classroom and tech-
2
5. is social and systemic; 6. is about organising through communication; 7. is about what actions to take.
15
