A Knowledge Appropriation Model to Connect Scaffolded Learning and Knowledge Maturation in Workplace Learning Settings

Abstract

When organizations create new knowledge and work practices as a reaction to challenges they face, they often have difficulty to adopt these new practices "on the ground". One of the reasons is that in these cases, individual informal learning and collective knowledge creation are often insufficiently connected. In this paper, we investigate knowledge practices that explain how new knowledge generated in the process of creating and adapting new practices is applied in work situations. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews in five networks of organizations focusing on knowledge sharing in the German construction industry. Through a qualitative content analysis, we first identified five patterns of situations where individual and collective knowledge interact to implement new work practices. We detail these patterns with four knowledge maturation practices that explain how individuals contribute to collective knowledge development, and three scaffolding practices that explain how individual learning processes are facilitated through help seeking and guiding. Four practices of knowledge appropriation explain how knowledge is adapted and validated in concrete work situations. We combine scaffolding, maturation and appropriation practices into a model of knowledge appropriation that extends workplace learning research by offering a distinctive perspective on the practices that shape the interaction between knowledge creation and individual learning.

Conceptual Change in the Face of Digitalization: Challenges for Workplaces and Workplace Learning

“…Following Billett (2008), an interpretation could be that knowledge is something that dominantly exists on the social plane and is being negotiated between professional actors. Of course, there are sociocultural approaches of learning that also consider individual and cognitive issues of social learning (e.g., Marshall, 2008;Billett and Choy, 2013;Ley et al, 2019), but they all interpret knowledge structures as internalized cultural knowledge patterns. There is less focus put on individual mental efforts than in the discussion about conceptual change.…”

Social practices in teacher knowledge creation and innovation adoption: a large-scale study in an online instructional design community for inquiry learning

“…This mediation and re-mediation involved in the knowledge creation process in professional learning has been recently described in the Knowledge Appropriation Model (Ley et al 2020). This model identifies learning and knowledge creation practices (in organizations, communities, groups and individuals) that can be observed in the context of new innovative practices being created and adopted.…”

“…Previous research on professional learning (Ley et al 2020) has derived up to 12 learning and knowledge creation practices assumed responsible for the successful adoption of an innovation. These practices have also been validated in the context of teacher professional learning (Leoste et al 2019):…”

“…In the next section, we will advance our theoretical perspective on this issue, which has emerged from research on the Knowledge Appropriation Model (KAM; Ley et al 2020), a model to describe social practices of knowledge creation and learning to be expected in such professional settings. To study such KAM practices in online professional communities, we chose Go-Lab, a community with more than 35,000 teachers registered as of the end of 2019.…”

Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training in Technology-Enhanced Learning in Europe

“…), the knowledge maturation model was established in the Information Systems domain to describe goal directed collective learning processes and how knowledge materialized and matured in a systematic manner in organizational settings, e.g., how initial ideas are transformed into organizational improvements or new products (Maier and Schmidt, 2015). Extending the model from the perspective of the Learning Sciences, the knowledge appropriation model explained how healthcare professionals and construction workers were learning in such settings when they co-created new working practices (e.g., on treating diabetes or on applying sustainable construction techniques) by scaffolding and guiding learning at the workplace (Ley et al, 2019). Finally, the model found application in learning analytics, where it was used to analyze traces in an online collaborative learning design environment (Rodríguez-Triana et al, 2019).…”