From volitional action to transformative agency: double stimulation in services for families with young children

Abstract

This article examines how transformative agency arises in families where parents are struggling with aspects of caring for young children. The mechanisms of how volitional action develops into transformative agency in everyday settings are not well understood. A fine-grained analysis of change is presented in the case of a parent who resolved difficulties relating to her daughter's feeding. This case is situated within a broader dataset relating to diverse Australian parenting support services. Through double stimulation, parents used multiple auxiliary tools to construct new motives, enabling them to expand understandings and develop new possibilities for action. Evidence of transformative agency was apparent in longer trajectories in which the conditions of parenting were transformed. Relationships between expansive learning, double stimulation and transformative agency are conceptualised dialectically, offering fresh insights into the dynamics of transformative agency 'in the wild'.

Transformational Processes in the Activity System and in the Educator/Designer through Design Procedure under CHAT

“…All the above led to changes in diverse situations, such as new forms of collaboration in educational situations in non-typical environments, including changes in the educator's sense of self. Transformative agency can emerge when educators put auxiliary tools to use expansively to promote new understandings and new actions in several environments for learning, leading educational procedures to epistemic developments, as argued by Hopwood & Gottschalk (2020).…”

“…Engeström, 2015). Double stimulation, besides being a method, is a principle of volitional action which distinctively characterizes all higher mental functions (Sannino, 2015); involves complexes of decisions and actions that are repeated over time and "progressively cultivated" , and can be understood as the process whereby people use tools in a way that fundamentally changes the way they work on a problem or a situation (Hopwood & Gottschalk, 2020). Furthermore, "the method of double stimulation is a developmental quasi-natural experimental setting in which the subject who participates in research is provided with a richly structured environment, which can be re-organized in a goal-oriented way" (Valsiner, 2000).…”