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

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

Inexpressible memories and learning for reconstruction: Between the major earthquake disasters in postwar in Japan

Learning for disaster reconstruction carried out by teachers and children in schools faces the fundamental contradiction of how tragic memories leaving deep scars can be told and shared, and the attempts to deal with this problem. In this paper, in order to approach the issue of whether an educational practice which overcomes this contradiction is possible, I carried out case study analysis of learning and education from earthquake experiences, based on the framework of activity theory. As the result of the analysis, it became clear that through learning for disaster reconstruction in school, children encountered various "providers of learning" outside school, and according to the connections they made, came to possess the possibility of creating new mutually supportive cultures and lives

Education as a Collaborative Intervention : Engaging Learners and Building a Community of Agency in Disaster Prevention Learning

The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (also known as the Kobe Earthquake), with a magnitude of 7.3, struck on January 17, 1995, killing 6,434 people. This article aims to analyze and characterize an intervention in a hybrid earthquake-related disaster prevention education program in Kobe City, Japan, within the framework of cultural-historical activity theory and its methodology for formative interventions. From the viewpoint of the methodology for formative interventions to foster participants\u27 expansive learning and agency, educational activities should be reconceptualized as dialogically negotiated activities in which various agents could produce new collaborative interventions, while transforming their activity systems. Furthermore, the article illuminates this kind of reconceptualization for education as a series of collaborative interventions. To do so, it takes up an activity-theoretical formative intervention pertaining to the implementation of earthquake-related disaster prevention learning and considers it as a new hybrid learning activity. This activity is carried out by a nonprofit organization in collaboration with the youth, residents, and various other agents in the local community. The analysis of such hybrid disaster prevention learning focuses on a collaborative self-intervention in which the participants were able to form a new type of agency to shed the passive role of the victim and thus create a dialogically negotiated site where they can discuss future town planning to prevent or reduce disaster damage