LEARNING AND SENSE: BAKING ACTIVITY OF SETTLED WOMEN

ABSTRACT Purpose: This article is the result of an ethnographic study carried out in a settlement in the interior of Paraná, Brazil, which, from the perspective of the Social Learning Theory, aimed to understand how the learning of the productive baking activity of settled women occurs, serving as a path to a diversity of studies that seek to understand why certain practices emerge, institutionalize or are altered over time through an approach that sees them as a collective endeavor. Originality/value: In revealing the sense of the activity and participation of these women in the baking activity and their relation with learning in the enterprise, this study was justified for its contribution to the understanding of this learning, answering questions that can serve as reference to understand the reality of productive groups of this new economy. Design/methodology/approach: The proposals of Engeström (2009) and Nicolini (2009) formed a methodological package whose results showed the sense of activity as the search for an identity, the will to belong, factors generators of internal and external contradictions that extend the horizon of possibilities of the enterprise, leading to an expansionary cycle that causes the development of learning. Findings: The results revealed that in the system of activity, learning and participation are intrinsically related, associating the development of the group with participatory learning and the negotiation of meanings in the community in which it is inserted, linking past and future, individual and collective, new and existing knowledge, in a transformative movement of identities of the subjects and generator of a socially constructed knowledge.