At the boundaries

I was reading a paper offering an Activity Theoretical perspective on writing genres. The author used "classroom" as an example of an activity system that is "at the boundary". The specific example was a higher ed classroom and the idea was that the classroom was at the boundary of the profession/discipline. Classrooms, especially higher ed, use written texts from the profession (think research articles, for example) and ask students to engage in activities present in the profession/discipline. Moving back and forth between professional activities and "school" activities requires higher ed students to go back and forth across these boundaries.

This idea can certainly apply to preservice teachers' portfolios, I think. Not only does the portfolio draw from the profession, but it documents the preservice teacher's excursions into the profession and back. The preservice teacher's portfolio sometimess serves a gatekeeping function into the profession as well. That's certainly a boundary activity! I'm not sure (yet) where to go with this idea, but it's a perspective I want to consider further.