Affordances and bricolage
المؤلف:
Catherine Layton
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P343-C29
2025-08-02
487
Affordances and bricolage
Stepping back from the immediacy of students' accounts, one way of describing these qualitative differences is to see the work placements as offering different 'affordances' (Burkitt, 1999) - opportunities for action. The affordances of the workplace are in interplay with the affordances of the student's own background and capacities. The task for the student, upon entering a work placement, is to work out, sometimes explicitly but more often implicitly, what actions will take them towards their goal. Thus they, more or less effectively, cobble together responses in familiar and unfamiliar situations that they believe will lead them forwards. Each intervention and response has effects on people and the environment.
This observation allows for the foregrounding of bricolage as the mechanism through which people learn in placement contexts. The term bricolage is used to incorporate both spontaneous improvisations in response to immediate demands, and the conscious problem-solving (which still has an improvisational quality, in that it draws, for the most part, on what is to hand) that occurs when people are working towards the achievement of a project (Giddens, 1976; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Goffman, 1972; Goffman, 1976). The process of bricolage in addressing problems has the effect of (and maybe even the implicit aim of) refining the focus of activity, and, paradoxically, of both increasing and reducing the number of alternative courses of action to those that are likely to have the desired results. Recognition of the role that bricolage plays in negotiating a path through a placement is central to enhancing assessment strategies and processes, most particularly in the first day or two, when the affordances of the environment can be identified (and, if necessary, enlarged), and patterns of interaction are set in place.
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