“Competence” and “competencies” might well be some of the most contested words in teaching-learning discourse over the last 20 years. With the implementation of the Bologna-process, the latest, written-down competence-based learning outcomes have acquired the status of policies, which guide curricular planning, teaching, learning and assessment, alike. Of course there is also value to a competence-oriented approach to teaching and learning in terms of clarity, transparency, and expectation management (e.g., Biggs, 1996). However, competence-orientation has been critiqued as instrumental and normative in its entanglement with questions about the nature and purpose of higher education and how higher education should cater the affordances of the labor market through employability discourses (Kalfa & Taksa, 2015).

Students themselves are walking at tight rope when it comes to their own competence trajectories: At the one hand, the academic experience is set up as a transformative socialization practice towards academic communities; at the other hand they are expected to come out of these experiences with transferable and communicable skills that make them valuable assets at the labor market (Kalfa & Taksa, 2017). As previous research has shown, this duality can easily create dysfunctional effects, when students become highly instrumental in their study strategies (Norton, 2004) and performative communication of what they have learned (de la Croix & Veen, 2018). Moreover, competences are in themselves becoming a measurable artefact that is then treated more as an input than as an outcome variable.

Problem-based educations have long striven to provide students with non-trivial and non-instrumental learning experiences. By engaging students in the exploration of real-world problems, curricula such as the Aalborg PBL model have provided templates on to make learning both of high autonomy, high competence and social belonging (Kolmos et al., 2019). However, also in these curricula students struggle (maybe more so than in ‘traditional’ higher education), to find their own voice when it comes to communicate their competences. This is even more relevant since these curricula put an emphasis on student project work with authentic problems, which in itself has already shown to provide increased opportunities for competence development, as opposed to traditional curricula (Johnson & Ulseth, 2016; Scholkmann & Küng, 2016).

The present study has been set up to bridge contradictory positions: an accommodation to the expectations of students having to communicate their competences to the labor market (Grotkowska et al., 2015), but also understanding these competences as something deeply personal that is tacitly ingrained into the individual learning trajectory and can only become explicit in specific socio-material configurations and in the interplay between human and non-human actors (Gourlay & Oliver, 2016). To shed light on these processes, we engaged a group of eleven students over the course of three semesters in a set of reflective activities around their learning trajectories and resulting understandings of what they have become competent of. These reflective activities were designed as to provide multiple instances of interactions with themselves, with a set of digital and analogous tools, with different stimulating inputs and with the presence of members of our research team as helpful partners (Scholkmann & Lolle, 2021).

We understand students’ competence development at entangled with their own awareness and understanding of themselves in relation to the world, and the world of employability and work, therein (Fladkjær & Otrel-Cass, 2017). Our intention was to understand how they come to this understanding, and how these processes can be fostered. Therefore, the theoretical underpinning of this study can be found in Yrjö Engeström’s transformative learning, and more concretely in his activity theory (also called cultural historical activity theory, CHAT; Engeström, 2015).

Our methodological approach can best be described as a set of iterative action research circles, in which, in encounters between the research team and the eleven participants, reflective activities were triggered and documented. All activities comprised a combination of a challenge or activity (such as a question or an assignment), a set of mediating artefacts (digital or analogous) as well as the presence of members of the research team as facilitators and sparring partners (Scholkmann & Lolle, 2021). Data was stored in different modalities, such as videos and transcripts, artefacts produced by the students as well as in field-notes and personal reflections of the research team. The present analysis based on CHAT draws on three distinct data points in the process, which through communicative validation in the research team were identified as significant in the richness of their data. These data points were: a) an initial workshop in which the students were asked to visualize their competences in a mind map; b) the preparatory phase of a workshop in which the students were to present themselves to external stakeholders (as potential future employers); and c) the interactions with the research team and externa stakeholders during this workshop. The data material consists of both videos/transcripts of the interactions and artefacts such as students’ mind maps and the portfolios they created to present themselves to the stakeholders. Three students with the pseudonyms ‘Malene’, Mikkel’ and ‘Kapser’ were identified as being representative for specific attributes within the sample and analyzed in-depth by creating CHATs for each data point. These CHATS then were juxtaposed across time, and in relation to what we called “referential CHATs”, that is, CHATS representing the research team and the external stakeholders (for the final workshop). CHATs were created on basis of the second generation of activity theory, where the core activity system, consisting of the acting ‘subject (S)’, the ‘object (Ob)’ and intended ‘outcomen (Oc)’ of an action and the applied ‘tools (T)’, is supplemented by the aspects of ‘rules (R)’, ‘community (C)’ and ‘division of labor (D)’. The intra-subject juxtapositioning of activity systems over time resonates with the first generation of activity theory, whereas the juxtaposing with referential CHATS stretches our analysis towards the third generation of activity theory (Engeström & Sannino, 2010).

Throughout the analysis (which is still on-going at this point), we are focusing on both changes in our three focus-students CHATs over time. We interpret those as non-linear “developments” in their competence trajectories, which are taking place in entanglement of the tools and artefacts under use, the rules applied, the community present, the intended outcome etc. We also focus on points of conflict, both withing each CHAT and between them. These can tell us both about students’ challenges when unravelling their own competence developments and with communicating them to external stakeholders. In a more classical application of the theory, we also look at potential conflict between objects, specifically in relation to the referential CHATs, which holds the potential to understand dynamics of competence constitutions and awareness as a result of negotiation between different groups. A first glance at the findings shows diverging dynamics and trajectories for each of the three students, for example regarding their understanding of what a competence is, how they come to perceive of themselves as competent and how interactions with the referential CHAT contributes to their own reflective processes. Moreover, through the lens of CHAT it becomes obvious that competence development is in fact a deeply entangled socio-material practice, in which what the students experience and what the research team (pro)poses as intervention co-constitutes both understanding and progress. With that, our findings also bear the potential to serve as pedagogical underpinning for new approaches how to integrate competences into higher education at the curricular level – that is, not as prescriptive learning goals but as practices in which students can develop their own voice and understanding.

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