Activity Theory and the Transformation of Pedagogic Practice

Abstract

Today, work and other societal practices are experiencing accelerating paradigm shifts from mass-production-based systems toward new systems based on networking between organizations, collaboration, and partnerships. This shift requires new paradigms in the fields of education, learning, and development. As human activity quickly changes to networking and partnering among diverse cultural organizations, we need to ask ourselves whether schools and other actors are equipped to prepare people for such practices. We also need to think about what kind of learning can generate critical and creative agency among learners. Such agency will help people shape their own lives and future. In this paper, I discuss the potential offered by cultural-historical activity theory for analyzing and redesigning new, expanded pedagogic practices in schools. Putting the third generation of activity theory to pedagogic practice, I propose that new forms of expansive learning that are transforming pedagogic activity structures in schools can occur in advanced networks of learning that transcend institutional boundaries of schools, turning them into societal agents of change. To concretize the notion of expansive learning as one new form of pedagogy in which boundary-crossing networks of learning and the changing agent role of schools emerge, I will illustrate and analyze a children's after-school activity project called New School: a multi-activity collaboration in which a university, an elementary school, families, and expert groups and community organizations outside the school cooperate to create advanced learning networks. Based on the New School project, a new landscape of expansive learning in the field of pedagogic practices that attempts to create a hybrid activity system will be discussed, along with its sustainability. I will argue that through such a collaborative endeavor, participants can be motivated to engage in shaping and sustaining collaborative learning and their own development.

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