1st Edition
Human Activity, Social Practices and Lifelong Education Francophone Perspectives
This volume presents a scientific and practical trend in lifelong education, which focuses on "human activity". This trend is particularly apparent in French speaking countries where a seminal tradition of ergonomics, born in the middle of the 20th century, produced studies about work and workers’ activity in various contexts. Results demonstrate that working activity, firstly, is always complex, creative and enigmatic despite the efforts done by the designers to create prescribing working environments and by managers to control production procedures, and secondly, cannot be understood without specific field studies about real work. This approach influenced adult educational researchers and trainers to develop programs in order to help trainers to better know human activity and its transformations in various social practices (and not only in working context). It also helps them to design learning environments accompanying human activity transformations at various time scales.
The chapters in this volume present a range of original studies on human activity in various social practices, such as tourism, theatre prop-makers in opera, manual job environments, management in a small company, high level athletes illegal practices, school teaching and finally during teachers retirement ceremonies. These studies of the relationships between social practices and human activity and its transformations, give empirical and conceptual bases for designing programs aimed at emphasizing and accompanying specific individual and collective learning, and human development in a lifelong perspective.
This book was published as a special issue of International Journal of Lifelong Education.
1. Introduction: Human activity, social practices and lifelong education: an introduction Marc Durand 2. How unethical actions can be learned: the analysis of the sporting life courses of doping athletes Denis Hauw 3. Gift and transmission in teachers’ lifelong learning: what remains of those who leave Pierre Imbert 4. Construction of dispositions and development of human activity: a theoretical framework illustrated by the case of a novice manager Marc Durand 5. Activity development and invention in the making and use of technical objects in the workplace Annie Goudeaux 6. When design of everyday things meets lifelong learning…Germain Poizat, Yvon Haradji and David Adé 7. Stability and transformation in configurations of activity: the case of school teaching in France and Mexico Philippe Veyrunes and Frédéric Yvon 8. Learning the practice, learning from the practice: tourist practices and lifelong education Gilles Brougére 9. Affording learning environments in workplace contexts: an interactional and multimodal perspective Laurent Filliettaz
Biography
Marc Durand is professor of adult education at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His research topics are on work analysis and vocational education in various professional contexts (health, education, leisure and sport, industry, craftsmanship, art…). He develops a perspective of cognitive anthropology of human activity. Prof Marc Durand is a member of the International Journal of Lifelong Education editorial board.
