The Youth Justice Portal and Transformative Digital Education in Criminology

Abstract

The ideas in this paper explore how learning design intentions developed by academics, practitioners and learning designers, intersect with students’ development of pre-professional identities (PPI) in the field of youth justice. We propose a theoretical framework built on Activity Theory that situates the learning environment as a set of two activity systems – teachers and students – that come together through a boundary object called the ‘Youth Justice Portal’. The portal is the main avenue through which teaching, and learning takes place, and we examine how the technical and theoretical framework that we have adopted can be applied in open-ended domains that require the development of students’ PPI. The practical implications related to the adoption of the model in disciplines which require placement-based learning opportunities are discussed.