Expansive Learning and School System Development : An Activity-Theoretical Intervention Study

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This intervention study is based on a partnership between a university and local elementary schools that also involves other social actors and institutions. These parties are involved in designing and implementing such hybrid and symbiotic forms of activity as children's project-based learning and networks of learning to bridge the gap between school activities and the productive practices of everyday life outside the school. The idea of this intervention is that expanding school activity is carried out not from the inside alone but by creating hybrid and symbiotic activities in the real life-world.The study illuminates and analyzes the emerging new forms of school learning in these hybrid and symbiotic activities for school innovation. Drawing on the framework of activity theory, the study conceptualizes multiple different activity systems that mutually interact for school change. Based on the notion of expansive learning, the intervention evokes and generates the involved participant … More s' critical and creative agency for school reform as collaborative self-organization from below, creating networks of learning transcending the institutional boundaries of the school. This approach is based on bottom-up, reflective communication initiated among people involved in schooling.The intervention in the expansive development must consider the complex learning trajectories of an individual, collective, or whole organization as new emerging objects of education. Such multiple learning trajectories are produced in collaboration among schools, various providers (e.g., universities, experts, workplaces, community organizations), and the learners themselves. The study concludes that a joint engagement and contribution was truly needed for the school, the university, and even the children themselves to collectively generate powerful learning trajectories to connect and reciprocate all the potential resources of learning. The involved partners should be seen as a collective of expansive learners who are willing to make school innovations together to become collaborative change agents. Less