Training design fostering the emergence of new meanings toward unprecedented and critical events

TL;DR

This paper explores how training situations can be designed to help adults understand and adapt to unprecedented and critical events by fostering new meanings through activity-sign analysis.

Contribution

It introduces cross-cutting design principles for training programs that facilitate meaning transformation in adult education, based on activity-sign hypothesis and event-driven analysis.

Findings

Training situations can perturb participant dynamics to foster new meanings.

Design principles enable adaptation to unprecedented critical events.

Analysis of training effects supports activity-sign hypothesis.

Abstract

Our research is part of a technological research program in adult education conducted in reference to the "course of action" program. Using the activity-sign hypothesis of this programme, training situations are thought as opportunities to perturb/relaunch the participants'dynamics of meaning. Our contribution aims to (i) improve the conceptualization of training situations that are thought as aids to the understanding and transformation of the participants situations, and (ii) derive cross-cutting design principles that allow the enactment of these training situations in different contexts. We rely on the analysis of training programs aiming either at the management or at the overcoming of events experienced as unprecedented and critical by the individuals concerned. Depending on the case, these training programs have a "restorative" aim (resolving of impasse situations), or have a "preparatory" aim (prefiguration of crisis situations). The design principles of these training programs and their effects are analysed with the conceptual tools developed within the course-of-action, integrating two additional dimensions: fictional and event-driven. The conditions for the emergence of new meanings are described in terms of abduction, either for reparative purposes (resolution of deadlock situations) or for preparatory purposes (prefiguration of crisis situations). The contribution to course-of-action program and to research on adult education is discussed through the prism of the hypothesis of activity-sign.