Changing educational traditions with the change laboratory

Abstract

This paper outlines the use of a form of research intervention known as the Change laboratory to illustrate how the processes of organisational change initiated at a secondary school can be applied to develop tools and practices to analyse and potentially re-make educational traditions in a bottom-up manner. In this regard it is shown how a culturalhistorical activity theory (CHAT) perspective can be combined with a relational approach to generate the theoretical and practical tools for managing change at a school. referring to an ongoing research project at a school, the paper describes how teachers and management there, with the aid of the researcher, attempt to re-configure their educational praxis by drawing on past, present and future scenarios from their schooling activity. These are correlated with similarly historically evolving theoretical models and recorded empirical data using the Vygotskyian method of double stimulation employed by the Change laboratory. A relational conceptualisation of the school's epistemological, pedagogical and organisational traditions is used to map out the connections between various actors, resources, roles and divisions of labour at the school. In this way the research intervention proposes a model of educational change that graphically represents it as a network of mediated relationships so that its artefacts, practices and traditions can be clearly understood and effectively manipulated according to the shared objectives of the teachers and school management. Such a relationally-oriented activity theory approach has significant implications in terms of challenging conventional processes of educational transformation as well as hegemonic knowledge-making traditions themselves.

Using a Change Laboratory to voice students’ lived experience of moving from face-to-face to online instruction

“…Grounded in CHAT, the Change Laboratory (CL) is a formative, interventionist, research methodology that allows participants to work jointly with a researcher-interventionist to shape an Activity System (Botha, 2017;Engeström & Sannino, 2010). Participants move from an individual position to develop collective transformative agency (Virkkunen, 2006), ultimately shaping their own activity system without the researcher-interventionist(s) (Morselli, et al, 2014).…”

Expansive learning in a change laboratory intervention for teachers

“…As the results are promising, there is a need for more studies to be able to compare and draw general conclusions. While there are many studies using activity theory and expansive learning in the study of educational change (Botha 2017;Sannino 2008;Teräs and Lasonen 2013;Engeström et al 2002;Yamazumi 2008), few of these have been conducted on small-scale interventions, exploring the longitudinal development of expansive learning by analysing participants' discourse in the series of intervention sessions. This is needed and important to demonstrate evidence of expansive learning and the usability of CL interventions for educational change.…”

Exploring initial collaboration in an intervention: Creating a meeting place between educational research and educational practice

“…22-26) and its development (Postholm & Moen, 2011). This meeting place can support teacher education and practice, and it is suggested that Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2015(Engeström, , 2016Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013) offers conceptual tools that combine the necessary sources of expertise (Botha, 2017;Zeichner et al, 2014).…”

“…Various developmental studies using CHAT have addressed the importance of collaborative activity in such a meeting place (Botha, 2017;Engeström & Toiviainen, 2011;Postholm, 2008;Thorgeirsdottir, 2018). However, a search in Oria, with access to many databases with peer-reviewed journals, shows that few studies have focused on how such a meeting place could be developed at the beginning of a collaboration.…”