Identities in motion – Boundary-crossing learning from an intrapersonal perspective

Abstract

This paper investigates how learning unfolds in poly-contextual settings. In work-related learning, boundaries between contexts have been viewed as learning resources. From the multilevel approach suggested by Akkerman and Bruining (2016), we focus on the intrapersonal level, on individuals as units of analysis. We propose an intrapersonal methodology and demonstrate it with an empirical study based on individual interviews. We combine cultural-historical activity theory understanding of an individual with Mariann Märtsin's ideas of identity construction and identity as subjective sense through multivoiced negotiations of meaning at the boundaries within the self. Our analysis demonstrates how the interviewees offered examples of identity construction that show how they rendered their being meaningful in the world in all its diversity without losing the unity of the self. Situationally dominant senses opened fields of meaning potentials with mediating semiotic devices at the boundary between the personal and the professional. The analysis points to some generalizability of sensemaking as a generic process that always operates in unique forms. Our findings suggest that exploring subjectivity from the perspective of sensemaking may contribute to research on work-related learning by addressing an object of sense making which is dialogically comprised with hybridity, multiplicity, and complexity.