Proposal view
Proposal Type: Individual Paper 
Domain: Teaching and Instructional Design 
SIG: Teaching and Teacher Education 
Type Submitted Paper 
Equipment PC and projector
Paper Details
Title New forms of agency in school: Toward improving student learning and achievement
Abstract This paper addresses new forms of agency in school to improve student learning and achievement from the framework of cultural-historical activity theory and the notion of expansive learning as a new form of pedagogy. In the paper, a students’ after-school activity project in elementary and junior high schools in Osaka, Japan is illustrated and analyzed. It is an inter-organizational, multi-activity collaboration in which elementary and junior high schools, families and communities outside the school, and a university cooperate to improve student learning and achievement. The aims of this paper are to consider how such multiple different actors as school teachers, parents, experts and community members outside the school, and university students for internships and researchers/staff involved in the students’ after-school activity project are engaged in shaping and sustaining expansive learning to redesign and implement new forms of learning activity to improve students’ learning and achievement in schools. By crossing the boundaries of each activity system involved in the project, such expansive learning leads a collaborative self-organization in which participants learn school innovation together and become collaborative change agents of their own lives and futures in the school. The research project is conducting a series of laboratory sessions as empirical intervention research based on activity theory to facilitate participant expansive learning for designing and implementing new activities. The analysis of this empirical intervention research suggests that the process and cycle of participants’ expansive learning in the after-school activity involved the creation of new tools, concepts, and rules for the emerging forms and patterns of multiagency and cross-school working to improve student learning and achievement. The findings of this paper argue that such multiple learning challenges through collaboration can create knots to act together crossing boundaries and shape multiple distributed agency.
Summary Aims
This paper addresses new forms of agency in school to improve student learning and achievement from the framework of cultural-historical activity theory (Cole, 1996, Daniels, 2001, Engestrom, 1987, 2005, Engestrom, Lompscher & Ruckriem, 2005, Yamazumi, 2006a, Yamazumi, Engestrom & Daniels, 2005) and the notion of expansive learning (Engestrom, 1987, 2005) as a new form of pedagogy. Activity theory offers a theoretical framework to analyze and redesign human collaborative activity from the viewpoint of a model of a collective activity system as the unit of analysis of human practice and development and an intervention methodology to facilitate and support practitioner’s processes of innovative learning to improve their own practice. Expansive learning involves the creation of new concepts and new practices for emerging forms and patterns of activity systems.

In the paper, a students’ after-school activity project in elementary and junior high schools in Osaka, Japan is illustrated and analyzed. It is an inter-organizational, multi-activity collaboration in which elementary and junior high schools, families and communities outside the school, and a university cooperate to improve student learning and achievement.

This research project aims to create collaborative cross-school working (Daniels, Leadbetter, Soares & MacNab, 2006) to promote new forms of learning in and for multiagency working in schools. Daniels and his colleagues (2006, p.45) focus on three sets of boundaries which teachers should be challenged and move across in cross-school working: 1) school boundaries with other schools, 2) teacher professional boundaries with other professionals, 3) boundaries in a relatively unfamiliar and in an under explored pedagogic context.

From the perspective of activity theory, agency is seen as the subject potentialities and positions of the externalized creation of new tools and forms of activity with which humans transform both their outer and inner worlds and thus master their own lives and future (Engestrom, 1991, 2006). With human activity quickly changing to networking and partnering among diverse cultural organizations, this focus on agency is shifting to an analysis of multiagency in complex, distributed, and networked collective activities, which are gradually undergoing transformation.

The aims of this paper are to consider how such multiple different actors as school teachers, parents, experts and community members outside the school, and university students for internships and researchers/staff involved in the students’ after-school activity project are engaged in shaping and sustaining expansive learning to redesign and implement new forms of learning activity to improve students’ learning and achievement in schools. By crossing the boundaries of each activity system involved in the project, such expansive learning leads a collaborative self-organization in which participants learn school innovation together and become collaborative change agents of their own lives and futures in the school.

Methodology and research design
The research project is conducting a series of laboratory sessions as empirical intervention research based on activity theory to facilitate participant expansive learning for designing and implementing new forms of multiagency and cross-school working to improve student learning and achievement. We are conducting Change Laboratory (Engestrom, Virkkunen, Helle, Pihlaja & Poikela, 1996) sessions to facilitate participants’ processes of expansive learning for designing and implementing new activities. In the sessions that introduce the triangular representation of a model activity system as a conceptual scheme, the researchers-interventionists presented several video clips to the participants to represent and examine work situations as the ‘mirror’ surface. Simultaneously we attempted to invest the model activity system with the participants’ personal sense to fill it with their assessments of the situation, that is, their making sense and telling stories about joint experiences. The individuals and the group should be confronted with the so-called ‘double bind’ (Bateson, 1972, Engestrom, 1987) inconsistencies in relation to the current state of this practice. However, these problems themselves involve the analysis of contradictions and collaborative discussion. Also, the act of learning to overcome such contradictions, specifically, novel innovative solutions for designing and implementing new activities, is brought about a collective project.

Findings
The analysis of this empirical intervention research suggests that the process and cycle of participants’ expansive learning in the after-school activity involved the creation of new tools, concepts, and rules for the emerging forms and patterns of multiagency and cross-school working to improve student learning and achievement. The findings of this paper argue that such multiple learning challenges through collaboration can create knots to act together crossing boundaries and shape multiple distributed agency.

Theoretical and educational significance
The paper contributes to empirical intervention research to create emerging multiple and distributed learning among diverse participants including teachers as key agents and even children and their parents for school change. To exploit intervention as a collective endeavor is to shape creative and critical design agency among all the parties involved for school change. This paper also offers activity-theoretical concepts particularly promising as tools for analyzing new practices of collaboration between schools and the outside community. With the help of these concepts, it will be possible to reconceptualize the more familiar but theoretically and relatively weak notions of community and partnership.
Keywords Activity theory
Collaborative learning
Teacher education/development
Appendices
Authors
Name Surname Institution Country e-mail EARLI Number Presenting
Katsuhiro Yamazumi Kansai University Japan kyamazumi@chat.kansai-u.ac.jp   *  
Michiko Shimada Kansai University Japan michiko@chat.kansai-u.ac.jp    
Daisuke Itoh Kansai University Japan itoh@chat.kansai-u.ac.jp    
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