Mind Culture and Activity

Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a workplace characterized by technologically dense practices as a setting in which human actors and technological objects work "together." The case of remote cardiological consultation is paradigmatic of how information and communication technologies (ICT) enter workplaces and reshape them as "systems of fragmented knowledge:" that is, learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies work jointly to construct and reconstruct understanding of social and organizational action. Working at a distance, therefore, requires the acquisition of skills relative to the mobilization of fragmented knowledge, and the latter's alignment into a fully-fledged work practice. Knowing-in-practice is accomplished by discursive practices: "Framing and postscripting", as practices that generate a "space" of signification for the subsequent action; "footing", as the dialectic that enables people to align themselves within a predetermined frame and disrupt its coordinates; and "delegation to the nonhuman", as the ability of humans to delegate the performance of clinical practice to nonhuman systems, which come to be regarded as active subjects within the remote consultation.

This article outlines the implications of a theory of ‘sensory emplaced learning’ for understanding the interrelationships between the embodied and environmental in learning processes. Understanding learning as multisensory and contingent within everyday place-events, this framework analytically describes how people establish themselves as ‘situated learners’. This is demonstrated through three examples of how culturally constructed sensory categories offer routes to knowing about the multisensoriality of learning experiences. This approach, we suggest offers new routes within practice-oriented educational theories for understanding how human bodies become situated and embedded in cultural, social and material practices within constantly shifting place-events.