Critical Learning Transforming Pedagogic Practice : An Activity-theoretical Study of School System Development

特集:教育実践の活動理論へ本論文は、2004年度科学研究費補助金基盤研究(C) 「プロジェクト・アプローチによる総合的学習とカリキュラムの総合化に関する開発研究」（研究代表者 : 山住勝広、課題番号 : 15530606) の研究成果の一部である

A University School Collaborating with Society : An Activity-theoretical Research of New School Project

特集2 2003年度文学部共同研究 生涯学習社会における知識創造型学校・大学・図書館の活動形態に関する研

Should You Stay or Should You Go? On Development between the Worlds of Children and Adults

We premise two worlds whose notions of time differ: of children and of adults. For the former, time is cyclical, and for the latter it is linear. Another time, spiral time, is located between them. When a child in a development process performs a learning activity, her development will pursue the passage of spiral time

Not from the Inside Alone but by Hybrid Forms of Activity: Toward an Expansion of School Learning

This article illuminates and analyzes a hybrid educational project as intervention research in Osaka. The intervention research aims to develop a hybrid activity system in schools, based on a partnership between a university and local elementary schools but also involving other social actors and institutions. These parties are involved in designing and implementing such 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. Based on the framework of activity theory and the expansive learning approach to school innovation, 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 which various involved partners inside and outside the school collaborate and reciprocate with one another; participating organizations and actors potentially share expanded new objects of educational work. In these symbiotic forms of activity, various providers of learning outside schools offer different learning trajectories to teachers and children, and the rules and patterns of instruction/learning are different from those in classroom-based teaching. The notion of ‘negotiated knotworking’ is useful in analyzing this emergence of joint engagement. Knotworking refers to a way of organizing and conducting productive activities in hybrid and distributed fields where different partners operate. The involved partners should be seen as a collective of expansive learners who are willingly generating expansive and powerful learning trajectories that are potentially changing the school

Human Agency and Educational Research: A New Problem in Activity Theory

In this paper, I address the reconceptualization of human agency that can shift to an analysis of both distributed and multiple agency in networked learning activities. As human activity becomes increasingly dialogical, boundary-crossing, networked, hybrid, and weekly bounded forms of work and organizations, the new generation of activity theory invites us to focus educational research efforts on the evocative and supportive new forms of agency to design and implement new patterns and forms of collaborative relationships of multiple activity systems. After a conceptual overview, this paper will analyze findings from a case study on an inter-institutional, collaborative after-school learning activity for children called New School promoted by the Center for Human Activity Theory at Kansai University in Osaka. In conclusion, this paper will propose that evoking and supporting new distributed and multiple forms of critical design agency for networked educational work and organizations among different actors involved in and affected by educational practices must offer a lifeline to educational research as an intervention to break away from something old (e.g., institutional boundaries of traditional school learning isolated from society) and move toward something else (e.g., advanced networks of learning across boundaries). Such agency might include the will and courage to create school innovations so that schools can become collaborative change agents

Selective Proliferation of Lactic Acid Bacteria and Accumulation of Lactic Acid during Open Fermentation of Kitchen Refuse with Intermittent pH Adjustment

When minced and autoclaved model kitchen refuse was inoculated with a small amount of non-autoclaved model kitchen refuse as seed culture, incubated at 37°C for 3-5 days and intermittently pH neutralized, 27-45 g/l of lactic acid was accumulated with a small amount of acetic acid and ethanol. The highest accumulation and highest productivity levels of lactic acid were observed at an initial and adjusted pH of 7.0 and a 6 h interval of pH adjustment. After several hours of lag, the lactic acid bacteria became the dominant cell type during the incubation, while the number of coliform bacteria and clostridia decreased. Such selective and stable accumulation of lactic acid was achieved in dozens of different experiments with various refuse preparations. In contrast, with continuous pH adjustment, Iactic acid once accumulated was labile and a small amount of butyric acid was produced, increasing the number of clostridia. The dominant bacteria isolated from the fermentation with intermittent pH adjustment were identified as Lactobacillus plantarnm and L. brevis