Students' multimodal knowledge practices in a makerspace learning environment

In this study, we aim to widen the understanding of how students' collaborative knowledge practices are mediated multimodally in a school's makerspace learning environment. Taking a sociocultural stance, we analyzed students' knowledge practices while carrying out STEAM learning challenges in small groups in the FUSE Studio, an elementary school's makerspace. Our findings show how discourse, digital and other "hands on" materials, embodied actions, such as gestures and postures, and the physical space with its arrangements mediated the students' knowledge practices. Our analysis of these mediational means led us to identifying four types of multimodal knowledge practice, namely orienting, interpreting, concretizing, and expanding knowledge, which guided and facilitated the students' creation of shared epistemic objects, artifacts, and their collective learning. However, due to the multimodal nature of knowledge practices, carrying out learning challenges in a makerspace can be challenging for students. To enhance the educational potential of makerspaces in supporting students' knowledge creation and learning, further attention needs to be directed to the development of new pedagogical solutions, to better facilitate multimodal knowledge practices and their collective management.Peer reviewe

Researching the materiality of communication in an educational makerspace : The meaning of social objects

This chapter aims to contribute to theorising and empirical research on the materiality of communication in a novel technology-rich educational setting called a ‘makerspace’. It argues that the knowledge is pivotal for understanding and supporting communication and learning in a makerspace environment where the students independently navigate and integrate knowledge from different resources and domains using a range of material artefacts during their design and making activities. Material objects and materiality in general in educational processes are closely intertwined with power, politics and ideology and hence urge more research attention at least from the perspectives of educational equity and educational change. The chapter investigates how the materialities of an educational makerspace mediate the communication processes among students and their teachers during their design and making activities. In explicit mediation, intention is overt, and the materiality as a stimulus means is ‘obvious and non-transitory’.Peer reviewe

The sociomaterial ecology of emotions in a school's makerspace

In this chapter, we investigate the sociomaterial ecology of emotions in students’ engagement within a school’s makerspace. The notion of sociomaterial ecology accentuates the holistic view of emotions that emerges in the multifaceted relations among people, technologies and the sociocultural environment. The empirical data of our study consist of video recordings of 9–12-year-old students’ interactions in a makerspace called the FUSE Studio in a Finnish primary school. The video data were subjected to a multimodal analysis to investigate the multiple modes and embodiments through which students’ emotions were expressed, shared and negotiated in situ. Our study shows how the students’ engagement in maker activities involved multiple and – at times – tension-laden emotions ranging from excitement, joy, happiness, pride and humour to irritation, frustration and disappointment. We also show how these emotions were entangled with fellow students, teachers, the makerspace, its material artefacts and requirements, as well as the rules and practices of the school. Overall, the display of emotions was found to be strong in situations in which the students experienced challenges. However, the ways in which the students responded to and negotiated these challenges, such as ownership of emotions, gave rise to different opportunities for their engagement and learning. In all, the chapter demonstrates the integral role of emotions in students’ maker activities, pointing out the value of researching and understanding emotions from the perspective of sociomaterial ecology.Peer reviewe

Students’ Funds of Knowledge and Knowledge Creation During STEM Learning in a Computer-supported Makerspace

Despite increased research attention to novel design and making environments, often referred to as “makerspaces”, students’ funds of knowledge and knowledge creation are still a fairly unexplored issue in these contexts. To address this gap, we draw from sociocultural theorizing, with a specific interest in the notions of funds of knowledge and knowledge creation. We ask: how do the students’ funds of knowledge mediate their knowledge creation during STEM learning in a novel computer-supported makerspace? Our findings indicate three forms of knowledge creation during STEM learning: “horizontal knowledge creation”, “vertical knowledge creation”, and “extended knowledge creation”. Our work joins with the line of research focused on complex intersection between students’ funds of knowledge and schooled knowledge in a third space. It makes visible how a novel computer-supported makerspace makes available a repertoire of digital, material and social resources that can advance the emergence of creative third spaces.Peer reviewe

Young People, Digital Mediation, and Transformative Agency, Special Issue (part 2)

Non peer reviewe

The Transformative Potential of School-based Makerspacesce : Novel Designs in Educational Practice

Technology-rich creative learning environments, often referred to as makerspaces, are attracting increased attention in education as mediators of novel approaches to innovative design and learning. Despite their growing popularity, makerspaces present an understudied educational phenomenon. By drawing on a body of empirical research on makerspaces in a Finnish school, our chapter will offer significant insights into understanding the potential and tensions of school-based makerspaces for student-driven creative learning and educational change.Peer reviewe

Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning in a Teacher Training School’s Change Laboratory

Our chapter presents a case study of distributed creativity and expansive learning in the context of a teacher training school in Finland facing transformational needs due to a curriculum reform. We report on an analysis of a Change Laboratory (CL) process of six meetings involving a group of teachers, their headmaster, and researchers. Drawing from sociocultural theories on creativity and the theory of expansive learning, we set out to explore how creative acts emerged during the CL and how the interactive creative process contributed to expansive learning. Our findings illustrate that the creative learning process was socio-materially mediated through the participants’ discourse and tool use. The multiple consecutive creative acts, taken by the participants, generated “creative leaps,” which contributed to expansive learning actions and the materialization of the process into creative products. Consequently, the creative process resulted in a new tangible artifact: a shared pedagogical leadership model and a new collective conceptualization of the leadership activity for the school community. Our findings point to the need to analyze creativity not purely as independent actions but also as a collective activity. Our study offers a novel analytical method for analyzing and conceptualizing processes of distributed creativity as a learning activity in organizations. Our study also contributes to the understanding of creativity as a distributed process intertwined with expansive learning.Peer reviewe

An investigation into children's agency : children's initiatives and practitioners' responses in Finnish early childhood education

This paper investigates adult–child interaction in the early years of education. The intention is to understand how children's initiatives and practitioners’ responses support and/or hinder children's agency. Our ethnographic data include 150 h of video data supplemented by observational field notes from a Finnish Early Childhood Education (ECE) centre with eight five-year-old children and two ECE practitioners. The video data were analysed abductively by using an Interaction Analysis method. The children's initiatives were found to manifest in several modes, namely asking a question, suggesting, challenging, refusing and ideating. The responses to these initiatives by the ECE practitioners included accepting, accepting after a rejection, adapting, rejecting or ignoring. The analysis points to ways in which adult–child relationships are negotiated in everyday activities, showing the relational nature of agency and suggesting that the ways in which adult engages in the child's initiations are an intricate part of children's agency.Peer reviewe

Employees’ narratives about a development project as a resource for managing organizational change

Non peer reviewe

Muutoksen kehiä avaamassa : Toiminnanteoreettinen tutkimus terveydenhuollon muutospyrkimyksistä ja niiden seuraamuksista

M.A. (Educ.) Anu Kajamaa from the University of Helsinki, Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE), examines change efforts and their consequences in health care in the public sector. The aim of her academic dissertation is, by providing a new conceptual framework, to widen our understanding of organizational change efforts and their consequences and managerial challenges. Despite the multiple change efforts, the results of health care development projects have not been very promising, and many developmental needs and managerial challenges exist. The study challenges the predominant, well-framed health care change paradigm and calls for an expanded view to explore the underlying issues and multiplicities of change efforts and their consequences. The study asks what kind of expanded conceptual framework is needed to better understand organizational change as transcending currently dominant oppositions in management thinking, specifically in the field of health care. The study includes five explorative case studies of health care change efforts and their consequences in Finland. Theory and practice are tightly interconnected in the study. The methodology of the study integrates the ethnography of organizational change, a narrative approach and cultural-historical activity theory. From the stance of activity theory, historicity, contradictions, locality and employee participation play significant roles in developing health care. The empirical data of the study has mainly been collected in two projects, funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund. The data was collected in public sector health care organizations during the years 2004-2010. By exploring the oppositions between distinct views on organizational change and the multi-site, multi-level and multi-logic of organizational change, the study develops an expanded, multidimensional activity-theoretical framework on organizational change and management thinking. The findings of the study contribute to activity theory and organization studies, and provide information for health care management and practitioners. The study illuminates that continuous development efforts bridged to one another and anchored to collectively created new activity models can lead to significant improvements and organizational learning in health care. The study presents such expansive learning processes. The ways of conducting change efforts in organizations play a critical role in the creation of collective new practices and tools and in establishing ownership over them. Some of the studied change efforts were discontinuous or encapsulated, not benefiting the larger whole. The study shows that the stagnation and unexpected consequences of change efforts relate to the unconnectedness of the different organizational sites, levels and logics. If not dealt with, the unintended consequences such as obstacles, breaks and conflicts may stem promising change and learning processes.Suomalaisen julkisen terveydenhuollon kehittämisessä sovelletaan enenevästi teollisuuden toimintaperiaatteita. Teollisuustyön periaatteet voivat auttaa etenkin keskijohtoa työn suunnittelussa ja johtamisessa, mutta ne voivat olla liian kapea-alaisia sovellettaviksi terveydenhuoltoon. Terveydenhuollon kehittämisen seurauksia on vaikea ylipäätään tunnistaa ja useat hankkeet onkin todettu hyödyttömiksi. KM Anu Kajamaa Helsingin yliopistosta, Toiminnan, kehityksen ja oppimisen tutkimusyksiköstä (CRADLE) haastaa väitöstutkimuksessaan terveydenhuollossa vallalla olevan suoraviivaisen johtamis- ja kehittämistavan. Terveydenhuollossa sovellettava kehittämisnäkemys on kaukana hoitotyön arjesta eikä Kajamaan mukaan yksin riitä terveydenhuollon ongelmien ratkaisemiseen ja muutoksen aikaansaamiseen. Hoitotyö on monimutkaista ja sisältää ennakoimattomia tilanteita. Asiakkaan ja työntekijöiden kannalta sujuvaa hoidon tuottamista vaikeuttaa se, että hoitoon osallistuvat tahot ovat fyysisesti eri paikoissa. Johtajat, kehittäjät ja työntekijät soveltavat keskenään erilaisia ajatusmalleja, mikä hankaloittaa kehittämistä. Terveydenhuollon kehittäminen vaatii uudenlaista, monimutkaisen kokonaisuuden huomioivaa otetta. Väitöstutkimus esittelee viisi esimerkkiä julkisen terveydenhuollon kehittämisestä ja kehittämisen seuraamuksista. Tutkimusaineisto on kerätty vuosina 2004-2010. Päätutkimuskohde on Oulun yliopistollisen sairaalan keskusleikkausosasto, jossa Kajamaa toteutti vuonna 2006 kollegoittensa kanssa Työsuojelurahaston rahoittaman kehittämishankkeen. Henkilökunta ideoi hankkeessa uuden toimintamallin, minkä seurauksena osasto selvisi kriisistä. Muutos oli työyhteisön ekspansiivinen oppimisprosessi. Työntekijöiden työn hallintakyky, vastuunotto ja osaaminen parantuivat uuden toimintamallin myötä. Vuonna 2008 keskusleikkausosaston kaikki salit olivat täydessä toiminnassa, kun vuosina 2005 2006 ylimääräisiä salisulkupäiviä oli vuosittain noin sata. Henkilökunnan sairauspoissaolot vähenivät noin 30 % ja vuonna 2008 tehdyssä leikkaustoiminnan valtakunnallisessa vertaisarvioinnissa leikkaussalien käyttöaste oli valtakunnan korkein. Tutkimus osoittaa, että eri ammattiryhmiä osallistavat tutkimusavusteiset kehittämishankkeet tuovat terveydenhuoltoon sen kaipaamaa muutosta. Yhteisesti ideoidut ja jalkautetut johtamis- ja toimintatavat ja välineet osoittautuivat organisaatioiden kannalta yksittäisten prosessien kehittämistä kestävämmiksi ja hyödyllisemmiksi ratkaisuiksi. Ongelmien analysointi yhdessä, organisaation oppiminen ja työnjaon uudistaminen edistivät muutosta ja toiminnan tehostumista. Kehittämisen seuraamukset ilmenivät usein vasta pitkällä aikavälillä. Pitkäjänteinen kehittäminen ja hankkeiden silloittaminen toisiinsa tuotti myönteisiä kehittämistuloksia ja toi kehittämiseen kaivattua jatkuvuutta