Linking Transformative Learning and Collective Agency: A Participatory Research on Internship in Education

The paper explores the undergraduate internship in Education as an activity system that involves undergraduate students in Education (engaged in training as early childhood and community educators), institutional actors at the University (undergraduate course board, faculties, tutors) and professional educators acting as supervisors in the internship within the educational services. The system and its evolution are analyzed with a focus on the material and symbolic positioning of students, to understand both the individual trajectories of learning and participation, and the institutional conditions that position them in the internship, defining a space for their voices and perspectives on the experience. What role do they act in the formative ecology of the internship? What contradictions can we detect if we analyze the positioning of students in the framework of the Activity System? Shardow and Doel suggest recognizing students as agents of self and context transformation, protagonists in the relationships and actions of inter-institutional formative partnerships that they simultaneously investigate and help to construct. What tools, spaces, norms and relationships can enable trainees to take on this mandate and form themselves within it?