International Journal of Educational Research 50 (2011) 21–25

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International Journal of Educational Research

Learning at boundaries
S.F. Akkerman *
Department of Education, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: In the literature on boundaries, it is sometimes falsely assumed that learning naturally
Received 15 October 2010 evolves from a co-location of diverse practices and perspectives. Empirical studies indicate
Received in revised form 31 March 2011 that this is not self-evident. The aim of this article is to understand the challenge of
Accepted 1 April 2011 learning at the boundary. In the light of this aim, the article interprets empirical findings
Available online 18 May 2011 from two previous longitudinal studies of academic projects, in which educational
scholars, with diverse cultural backgrounds and different academic perspectives,
collaboratively conduct research and encounter boundaries during interaction. The case
studies show that (1) boundaries that people encounter can easily stay implicit during
ongoing negotiations, and (2) when people do identify boundaries and explicate them
during collaborative processes, dialogical engagement is triggered. On the basis of the
findings, I argue that explicitly identifying boundaries enables learning since it creates a
collective need to take more into account some unfamiliar perspective or practice.
ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The contemporary literature on boundaries and boundary crossing in educational sciences seems to be a direct response
to the increasing diversity that we witness in most of our societies. Many learning and collaboration processes do not take
place within a single and singular domain or practice, but often reflect horizontal processes across and between distinct
practices (Engeström, Engeström, & Kärkkäinen, 1995). This suggests that much of that which we study in school, at work or
in between school and work, reflects processes of boundary crossing.
As reviewed by Akkerman and Bakker (2011) many educational scholars have stressed the learning potential of boundary
crossing. In his situated learning theory about communities of practice, Wenger (1998) emphasizes how boundary crossing
is important for staying sufficiently open to ideas from the outside. In the third generation of cultural historical activity
theory about horizontal learning between different activity systems, Engeström (2001) also identifies the value of boundary
crossing as a way to enter unfamiliar domains, introduce new elements into established practices, and potentially even to
expand and transform these practices. In line with the ideas of these scholars, many researchers have started to emphasize
how boundary crossing is carrying learning potential, for example stating that it allows the renegotiation of relationships
and the connection of new perspectives (Broberg & Hermund, 2007), that it can lead to collective third spaces and hybrid
practices (Gutiérrez, 2008), and that boundaries are sites for expanding mutual understanding of shared tasks and problems,
and the development of expertise (Edwards & Fowler, 2007).
In contrast with these claims, most empirical studies on boundary crossing situations report no or only limited processes
of learning. Frequently, negotiations of perspectives occur without leading to reflections or to new and hybridized ideas. If
such reflections and ideas do emerge, they often do not impact practice in such a way that actions are undertaken in line with

* Tel.: +31 030 2534414; fax: +31 030 2534262.

0883-0355/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2011.04.005
22 S. Akkerman / International Journal of Educational Research 50 (2011) 21–25

these ideas. As Kerosuo and Engeström (2003) point out in the context of a practice between medical specialists from
different health care systems, new ideas (in their case about how multiple health care providers can treat patients in a more
reliable way) do not necessarily and immediately lead to actual changes in practice. As they argue, the latter requires an
expansive integration process during which the entire patterns of work are reinvented.
In this article I aim to understand more what it takes to learn at the boundary. In light of this aim, I will discuss empirical
findings from two previous longitudinal studies of academic projects, in which educational scholars from different
institutional and cultural backgrounds, and with different academic perspectives, collaboratively conduct research. The first
study concerns an international research project with five academic partners from different European countries (Akkerman,
Admiraal, Simons, & Niessen, 2006). The second study concerns a national research project covering three PhD projects and a
postdoctoral project, involving researchers from five different universities (Akkerman, Admiraal, & Simons). The two cases
are similar in that they are formalized and funded projects that were initiated based on mutual intentions to collaborate, but
at the same time show a continuous struggle to achieve collaborative results. Whereas the strong ambition to learn from and
with each other was not achieved in the first case, the second case seems to be more successful. Comparing the underlying
mechanisms in both cases allows me to point out one essential issue for learning at the boundary. Before moving into the
separate case studies, I discuss in the next section how I conceptualize the notion of boundary.

2. What are boundaries?

When reviewing the dispersed but huge body of literature on boundary crossing, Akkerman and Bakker (2011) found
that the boundary and by whom it is conceived as such in the context of study are often unclear. Considering the
methodologies and empirical descriptions, it seems that it is often the researcher who analytically lays out the boundary
by distinguishing different practices, for example distinguishing school from work, or one institute from another.
Boundary crossing therefore, is a term frequently used to denote that there is a movement across or a co-location of these
practices. For example, students that are in apprenticeships are said to cross the boundary between school and work, or
an inter-organizational team is seen as crossing the boundaries of various institutes. Problematic in this
conceptualization is that both the boundaries and the process of crossing remain completely dependent on the sort
of distinction that the researcher is making.
Whereas the boundary is often roughly laid out by researchers at a system level, the actual concern of most of the scholars
seems to be more subtle. From an educational or organizational perspective, the issue at stake is often the way in which a co-
location or movement across sites leads people to ‘‘enter unfamiliar domains’’ (Engeström et al., 1995). It is this unfamiliarity
that, it is argued, imposes the boundary, in that it may hamper understanding and ongoing action. At the same time, this
unfamiliarity is seen as permitting the learning of something new, significantly different from that which is known and
common. This learning even seems to offer the potential for practices and perspectives to be expanded and hybridized.
Taking seriously the notion of unfamiliarity, I contend that one cannot point out boundaries from the outset solely by
distinguishing a diverse set of practices and perspectives. Pointing out boundaries first of all requires the determination of
unfamiliar experiences by those involved. What is conceived by people as being different from the practice in which he or she
is participating? In a very subjective sense therefore, I take boundaries as a dialogical resource between the familiar and
unfamiliar. This perception is similar to that which in personal relationships has been theorized as the dialogicality between
the ego and the alter ego (Akkerman and Niessen, 2011; Marková, 2003).
Such a conceptualization implies that a boundary is not a static and predefined distinction. ‘‘Me’’ or ‘‘mine’’ are not fixed
categories but constructions that shift along with relations. In relation to a foreigner I can present myself as typically Dutch,
call Utrecht my city, and the Netherlands my country. In relation to my neighbour, these characterizations may not make
sense at all and his or her house can still be unfamiliar terrain for me. What follows from this is that boundaries are dynamic
constructions in distinguishing something from something else, and that being a matter of concern in a specific relational
situation. It is this conceptual openness that turns the notion of boundary into an active concept that allows investigation
when encountered in horizontal situations and hence, when there is a potential for learning.

3. Boundaries in a European research project

The first case, studied and reported on by Akkerman et al. (2006), concerned an academic European project within
educational sciences. The project group consisted of 14 participants from five different institutes in Italy, the Netherlands,
Denmark, Scotland and Spain. The five partners collaborated for two years with the aim of formulating advice for educational
policy regarding educational innovation in e-learning. A shared motive of the project was to address pioneer teachers as
agents of innovation and to create facilitative tools for these pioneer teachers. The project was initiated and designed by the
Italian partner, who also acted as project leader. The activities that were planned involved both the organization of national
actions (e.g., organizing a symposium, conducting research, finding teachers to collaborate) as well as international actions
(e.g., the development of a conceptual model describing the competences of pioneer teachers, cross country analysis of
empirical data). The project participants communicated and collaborated by means of an electronic work environment and
seven three-day meetings.
We followed the project group for two years by collecting all email communication, project plans and working documents
and by observing and video-taping the project meetings. In addition, interviews were conducted with the participants, both
 S. Akkerman / International Journal of Educational Research 50 (2011) 21–25 23

at the beginning and end of the project. Using Bakhtin’s theory and notion of ‘‘multivoicedness’’ (Bakhtin, 1981), we analysed
all discourse with a specific focus on the negotiation of meaning and the way in which different socially and culturally
informed voices were expressed by the participants within this negotiation process.
What is of interest in terms of boundaries is that there is a paradoxical situation in how they are encountered and
constructed. On the one hand, there is a strong sense amongst the partners of how they differ in academic perspectives and
concerns. On the other, we observed that the participants did not acknowledge each others’ perspectives during ongoing
collaborative work. I want to highlight one example of this paradox.
In the interviews, we found that the Danish participants are described by all the others as being more practical, whereas
the other partners see themselves as more theoretically informed and driven. The Danish participants describe their stance
in similar ways as different from the others who have a lot of theoretical input. They point out that they want to address
practitioners in the educational field by making very concrete products. One participant described how their concern was
informed by the Danish partners’ departmental and national context:
We have this board of interested parties, perhaps unions, teachers’ organizations, the Ministry of Education. All the
Danish bodies involved in the educational area. . .It is their philosophy that we are expressing. So it is very non-
academic and very much addressing the practitioner level.
The Spanish participants describe themselves as postmodern thinkers. Other partners describe the Spanish participants
in similar ways. Most partners aligned their own view with the Spanish ideas about learning and education. However, they
preferred using terms like constructivism and socio-constructivism to label their views.
Despite the mutual characterizations, recurrent discussions testify how the partners often do not address each others’
concerns. One discussion, as reported in more detail by Akkerman et al. (2006), concerned the way in which pedagogy had to
be described in a document. During the process of writing, both the Spanish and Dutch participants emphasized several
times the need to elaborate more on the pedagogy of technology. One instance that seemed to raise concerns by the Spanish
partner was when the Danish partner did not accept some specific textual proposals of the Spanish partner to elaborate on
the learning models and theories. The Spanish participants were offended. The action of the Danish partner was not
acknowledged by the Spanish partner as reflecting a concern regarding the making of concrete products. Nor were the
textual proposals of the Spanish partner acknowledged by the other partners as reflecting the Spanish concern of expressing
a critical, postmodern view on learning and pedagogy.
Several issues made these recurrent discussions problematic. Firstly, people interpreted the actions of others in the light
of their own concerns. The Danish project members considered the textual changes in the light of being practically
meaningful and valuable for teachers. The Spanish project members considered the deletion of text as a sign of others
disagreeing on the relevance of postmodern thoughts. In their interpretations they may not be aware of the others’
perspectives or what this other perspective entails in concrete actions. Of course, they might also deliberately neglect the
concerns of others in order to make their case. It is at this point that issues of power and competing discourses, as discussed
more extensively by Daniels (this issue), relate to boundaries. Regardless of the underlying reason, we can see how, for each
of them, different boundaries are at stake during the discussions.
Secondly, we did not find immediate explications of these boundaries and how they were at stake. Rather, boundaries
were only explicated on a more general level during meetings, separate from the specific interactions in which they were
encountered. For example, a Spanish participant mentioned her ongoing concern in a meeting as follows:
Yes, often but many times when people present educational innovation, and when you scratch a little bit, it is not
educational innovation. Then for me it is not interesting in this way. And I am sure this project is not like that. But I
want to make sure that it is not.
The common reaction of other partners to the Spanish worries when they mentioned these in meetings was that they
completely agreed with them. Despite this, the discussion was reinvigorated time and again, and the reservations of the
Spanish partner about their philosophy being acknowledged remained until the end.
To conclude, we found a multiplicity of boundaries at stake in discussions and a lack of explication of these boundaries
by those concerned. This creates a situation in which participants do not increase their exploration of one another’s
perspectives and learn about them. Although the project members are well able to sketch the academic diversity in the
group, they do not pick up this diversity during situated arguments. Though there are many plausible arguments for this
(e.g., efficiency, task objectives, pushing one’s own concerns in negotiation, etcetera), it is a way of working that goes
against the intentions of the project group to collaborate intensively and learn from and with each other. Hoping to learn
from the expertise of the Danish partners, as one Italian project member said, entails taking seriously their situated
arguments and elaborating more on how and why they do what they do, even in the writing of texts. Similarly, it is the
discussion raised by the Spanish project members, about pedagogy and postmodern thoughts, which allows the
commencement of more reflection on educational philosophy, that underlies the project. As we concluded in our earlier
study of this project (Akkerman et al., 2006), it is the particularities of the diverse partners that are not taken up for
exploration. Rather, the particularity in the comments of project members is subordinated to their own concerns. To a
certain extent, it is the unfamiliarity of the practices of others, the institutional cultures and the academic expertise of the
various partners, that is eliminated by familiar terms and categorizations. Consequently, the learning potential that the
project group began with is not realized.
24 S. Akkerman / International Journal of Educational Research 50 (2011) 21–25

4. Boundaries in a national research project

A second collaborative project, reported on by Akkerman et al. (2012), concerns a four-year educational research project
aimed at collaboratively building a conceptual model of how teachers learn at work. The project group was composed of 16
academics representing four universities. The project was organized based on intentions to collaborate intensively and to
integrate three theoretical perspectives commonly associated with three different research groups. The research project
included three PhD projects and one postdoctoral project.
Anticipating the risk of working in isolated part-projects, the project group deliberately created interdependency
amongst the project members. They did so not only by assigning representatives of two or three theoretical perspectives in
each part-project, but also by agreeing to use similar instruments for data collection and analysis. The postdoctoral project
was set up to integrate theoretical and empirical findings. Frequent meetings were organized for the whole project group, the
part-project groups, and for the group of primary researchers. This project and the various meetings were followed, during a
two-year period, with a similar trajectory of intensive data gathering and discourse analysis as in the previous case study.
As in the first case study, we found that people face boundaries in a much localised manner during the collaborative
process. However, in addition, we found that project participants managed to turn individually and locally encountered
conflicts in actions into collectively acknowledged boundaries. They did so through three sorts of explication mechanisms.
One method of explication involved making general statements about the diversity in the project and the problem in
accounting for this, for example stating ‘‘The most important value of this project is that we try to integrate three different
theoretical perspectives, and we should make sure that all three are accounted for’’. A second way of explication involved
voicing the position of another person, for example saying ‘‘I doubt whether Stephan would agree with this’’. A third stronger
way of explication involved project members making each other accountable for something initially sensed to be a personal
issue. A typical example of this was as follows: ‘‘I find this a big problem in the project and we really have to deal with this
because this is what we aimed for’’.
Due to these explication mechanisms, the project group seemed well aware of the sorts of boundaries at stake in the
project, not only in a general sense, but also when they were encountered during the ongoing collaboration process as a
concern of one or more project participants. As such, the identification of boundaries not encountered in the first case study
was a typical process observed in this study. Moreover, we could see in this second case how this identification process
created collective recognition and responsibility for a particular boundary.
It seemed that project members explicated boundaries purposefully to trigger reflection in the group. Two different
purposes could be discerned in the interactions. Depending on the goal of the person, boundaries were constructed either to
be maintained (to give something meaning) or to be overcome (to include or account for something). I want to present an
example of each of these purposes and illustrate the effects.
Explicating a boundary with the purpose of maintaining it was always associated with the intention of giving something
meaning and pointing out that which is unique. An example of this can be found when one of the PhD students, Brenda,
presents to the rest of the research group the state of the art of ‘‘her’’ PhD project. During her presentation she shows, in
diagrammatical form on the whiteboard, how the whole project in general aims to study different clusters of learning
activities. Using that frame, she indicates her specific focus as follows:
And it is exactly this first cluster [pointing to one of the circles on the whiteboard] I try to grasp a bit more in project 3.
Actually this is why this project is unique as in the other two projects it [the first cluster] is more difficult to investigate
and they [the other PhD students] may not come to that.
In this instance, she explicates a boundary between the focus of her project and that which is covered by the other two
research projects. At the same time, she indicates that her focus is contributing to the overall picture of learning activities
that the whole project aims to achieve. Throughout the presentation of her project, Brenda uses similar statements in which
she tries to define her project as unique and of added value. In response to these instances, the other researchers start
discussing this unique contribution, starting to reflect on the way she will theorize and analyse the data.
We found that explications of boundaries can also have the purpose of generating a reflection on how to overcome the
boundaries. In these cases, people emphasize not how something is unique, but how something is excluded or not fully taken
into account. An example of such an instance is the following remark of Karel:
Well, it goes, it goes a bit beyond that. . .If one, look, if one wants to include the organization, let’s say the context, as a
set of more or less isolated context factors that do have a bit of influence on individual learning and leave it at that, if
one wants to do that, then you better not say you want to account for the current discussions about workplace
learning, because then in those discussions you go twenty years back in time. So if you want to take some account of
the current discussions about workplace learning, then you also have to learn from its insights. And then one does see
that you have to go to a slightly different approach with respect to that relation between context and individual
learning. So it’s one or the other.
Like Brenda, Karel is pointing to a boundary, in this case between that which is accounted for in the project (aligning with
the workplace learning literature of 20 years ago) and that which is not (aligning with ideas in contemporary literature). In
contrast with the utterance of Brenda, however, this boundary is not presented as a desirable but as a problematic situation.
The construction is meant to challenge the project group to seriously consider whether and how this boundary can be
 S. Akkerman / International Journal of Educational Research 50 (2011) 21–25 25

crossed so as to be more inclusive in their theoretical approach. By creating an either/or situation (‘‘so it’s one or the other’’)
he emphasizes how crossing this boundary is a matter of choice, but one that has consequences. In response to Karel, the
group starts to conduct a collaborative exploration as to whether there is a way to align more with contemporary literature
on workplace learning than currently. Whereas one project member states that it cannot be included in this project because
other choices have already been made, most other project members try to come up with solutions. In the end, someone
suggested adjusting the data gathering and analysis so that the workplace of teachers can be considered more seriously. The
group started considering this suggestion in more detail, and indeed made a decision to extend data gathering and data
analysis. Following up this idea, a separate meeting was organized with a smaller group of researchers (including Karel) to
design the instruments.
We found, throughout the collaborative process, how explications of boundaries triggered dialogical engagement and
collective reflection in the initially intended direction (maintaining or overcoming the boundary).

5. Conclusion

In order to understand what makes boundary crossing so challenging, I have considered the way in which boundaries are
encountered by people during the interactions of two inter-organizational project groups. In both case studies we found that
boundaries are very personal and locally encountered. In the first case study we found that such boundaries can be very
implicit during ongoing negotiations. When people do not explicate the boundaries they encounter, their concerns are easily
neglected by others. This may happen due to a lack of recognition of the other’s perspective or, more deliberately, ignorance
of this perspective in favour of one’s own concerns. However, by not picking up and exploring situated actions of others, the
potential to learn about that which is unfamiliar is limited.
The second case added more insight into what happens when boundaries are explicitly identified during the collaboration
process, so that everyone is made aware of them and considered responsible. We found how boundaries are explicated for
two different purposes: the intention can be to maintain the boundary or to overcome the boundary. These two functions are
possible since boundaries simultaneously reflect a particular meaning referring to that which is constructed within the
boundary (e.g., unique or consistent with one theoretical perspective) and a particular difference between that which is
constructed as inside or outside the boundary (e.g., this theoretical perspective being different from other perspectives). This
also shows that whether boundaries are valuable or whether they are problematic, resides more in the function they have in
a specific situation.
The fact that project members in the second case not only encounter but also verbally construct boundaries, shows how
they can be the meditational means to trigger a certain dialogical engagement and invite others to explore a certain
perspective. This explicit identification thus creates a possibility to learn.

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