Learning Through Project Work
-About relational being and interdisciplinarity in project teams
By Katrine Falck
Cand. Mag. Learning and Innovative Change
Abstract
This master thesis found that it is possible to compare a project team to an interdisciplinary community of practice. However, the project team has to negotiate this reality by itself in order for it to come true. It will however, only do so if it makes sense to the project team. There is a possibility that the culture in which the project team is imbedded can influence whether it will make sense to the project team to see itself as an interdisciplinary community of practice. Furthermore, the master thesis shows that interdisciplinarity can have meaning for the ability to learn in the community of practice. Firstly, interdisciplinarity can create and limit what is possible to learn in a community of practice. Secondly, it has been shown that the project team most likely defines what it needs to learn. However, there is the possibility that this will be influenced by the conditions of the organisation in which the project team operates.
The master thesis searched to answer the research question “How can one understand the interdisciplinary processes in relation to the learning process in a project team?”
In exploring the research question, it has been divided into two sub-questions, and following this, the analysis also has been divided into two parts:
• How are the learning processes in a project team?
• How can one understand the interdisciplinary processes?
The first part of the analysis, Etienne Wengers theory about communities of practice, puts learning in a project team into a socio-cultural context. This means that all learning is social. The project team is in this terminology the same as a community of practice, and is being analysed as such. By doing so, it has been possible to analyse how a project team learns in community, and how that learning influences the project team.
The second part of the analysis uses Kenneth Gergens theory about relational being. This means that the interdisciplinary processes are analysed in the perspective of social construction. By using this theory, it has the impact that the interdisciplinary processes are constructed through the social relations in the project team and that they cannot be analysed apart from the social relations.
By combining these two perspectives in the conclusion, it has been found possible to answer the research question of the master thesis. This conclusion was shortly summarised in the beginning of the abstract.