76
The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, coordination and
alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the develop-
ment of a practice ... it also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions
between them and to cause learning by introducing into a practice, elements of another.
(p 109)
The broker needs to be skilled at building productive relationships and needs to
possess deft political skills as well as have the conceptual depth to do the necessary
knowledge translation work from one group to the other (Kimble et al., 2010 ).
Boundary objects are critical elements in the communication between activity
systems. The term has an interesting history, and it originally came from Star and
Griesemer’s ( 1989 ) study of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology where they
describe a boundary object as ‘an object that lives in multiple social worlds and
which has different identities in each’ (p 409). The term ‘object’ can be misleading
as they can be both virtual and physical entities. Boundary objects can be referred
to as ‘technologies, although they can be drawings, sets of rules, research projects
or documents’ (Kimble et al., 2010 , p. 441) or they can be ‘an analytical concept of
those objects’ (Wong & Edwards, 2009 , p. 133). Carlile ( 2002 ) further argues that
familiar and routine situations only require a simple boundary object, such as a
single word, to coordinate activities. During the professional experience where the
learning context is complex, participant stakeholders including preservice teachers,
supervising teachers and university mentors need to create a common ground that is
shared among themselves. This requires the boundary object to be flexible and fea-
sible in order to accommodate different needs from people from different communi-
ties of practice. However this does not always reap fruitful outcomes as it encounters
the tensions and contradictions as the result of the political nature of these processes
(Carlile, 2002 ).
Fig. 5.3 Third-generation activity theory: Professional experience (After Engeström, 2001 , in
Bloomfield & Nguyen, 2015 )
T. Loughland and H.T.M. Nguyen