Understanding Complex Performance through Learning Trajectories and Mediating Artefacts 

Professor Michael Eraut, University of Sussex 

This paper seeks to address the challenging problem of how an individual’s understandings and capabilities may be represented and communicated in a social context by treating representations as mediating artefacts, whose meanings are clarified and to some extent reconstructed through the conversations they elicit. The significance for higher education experiences that are supporting students in their development of knowledge, capabilities, qualities and dispositions that are relevant to being an effective professional is that mediating artefacts play an important role in the representation of what has been learned, understood and applied in work place contexts. Important mediating artefacts that are used in the work place need to be considered, in accounts of work place learning and achievement and embedded in mediating artefacts like reflective diaries and reflective reports, that higher education uses to enable students to represent the development students have gained through work placement.

Chapter A7 pdf