Yrjö Engeström

Director of the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE) and Professor
Emeritus of Education at University of Helsinki, Finland, and Professor Emeritus of
Communication at University of California, San Diego, United States

Expansive learning in fourth generation activity theoretical studies: Potentials and challenges of heterogenous coalitions

Focused on supporting equitable and sustainable solutions to fateful societal challenges, fourth generation CHAT proposes coalescing expansive learning cycles as a tentative unit of analysis. In fourth generation CHAT studies, heterogenous coalitions are shaped between activity systems that represent different sectors and levels of governance.

A prime example of this type of research, carried out as part of the agenda of the RESET team at Tampere University, is work on the eradication of homelessness by means of the Finnish Housing First policy. The keynote will discuss this case of coalescing cycles of expansive learning. The analysis will examine actions and instruments of creating supportive interconnections between learning cycles across the levels of a local supported housing unit, a city, and the nation. Identifying these actions and instruments, as well as obstacles to such supportive interconnections, is a step toward building a methodological framework for 4th generation formative interventions for expansive learning.

Annalisa Sannino

Professor at Tampere University, Faculty of Education and Culture, Finland, and Professor of
Work-Integrated Learning at the Center for Activity Theory (CAT), University West, Sweden

The responsibility of optimism in Fourth-Generation
Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: An enacted utopia perspective

Fourth generation cultural historical activity theory engages with the construct of ‘enacted utopias,’ referring to sustained collective efforts that are already making a difference to overcome injustices. Building on the sociology of real utopia, the emphasis on enactment is a reminder of the vulnerability of equitable and sustainable ways of living,

producing and organizing. The solutions to planetary injustices are already there and many have been implementing these solutions for decades. This construct conveys the need to recognize that utopias are being enacted as we speak and that a central responsibility of educational and learning scholars and practictionners is precisely to accout for the colletive learning and agency that makes these utopias real. I refer to this as “the responsibility of optimism” that can be fulfilled by learning to recognize and support enacted utopias with viable pedagogical tools.

Ge Wei

Director of the Research Center for Children and Teacher Education and Associate Professor at
the College of Elementary Education, Capital Normal University, China

Redesigning teacher education
through a digitalized Change Laboratory in China

Preparing educators for the time of post-COVID and beyond requires to investing in high-quality teacher education, especially to transforming professional mentoring to match current needs. Informed by cultural-historical activity theory,

formative intervention methods such as the Change Laboratory supply an actionable framework for teachers’ participatory analyses and collective endeavor aiming to tangible transformation both at institutional and individual levels. Focusing on reforming the existing teacher education programme, this presentation gives an overview of the process of expansive learning and transformative agency that took place during a digitalized Change Laboratory (2021-2022), a thick description of the participants’ experiences, and the promising changes designed and currently undergoing implementation. By tracing the follow-up outcomes of the Change Laboratory (2023-now), its sustainability and generalization at municipal and regional level brews the potentials of the fourth generation of cultural-historical activity theory in China. The study also points at how to transcend East-West dichotomies of human learning building on the fourth generation of cultural-historical activity theory perspective on sustainable collective futures.

Katsuhiro Yamazumi

Professor of Education at Kansai University, Japan

Change Laboratories in schools oriented to
fourth-generation activity theory: Moving toward de-encapsulation
and creation of community-based coalitions for learning

Today, a key challenge in Change Laboratory research is to develop formative interventions focused on fourth-generation activity theory, which challenges the creation of alternatives to capitalism by transforming activity systems to confront global crises and threats to human survival. In Change Laboratory research on formal education, within the established public

education system, a new challenging initiative will be an overall transformation of the school as an activity system and a creation of innovative alternatives to marketization and privatization. Currently, education is under a neoliberal pressure to produce measurable learning outcomes such as academic test scores. The root of the intensifying contradictions in education can be traced back to the systemic tension and opposition between a dominant reduction in exchange value under the neoliberal pressure and the need to discover and strengthen new use values to create alternatives.

Based on a case study, this keynote speech explores the creation of a Change Laboratory based on fourth-generation activity theory that seeks to generate new educational practices that overcome the fundamental contradiction between exchange value and use value in contemporary neoliberal educational policy and reform. In this study, I discuss these two cases: The first is a Change Laboratory in which teachers and interventionist researchers collaborated at a private elementary school in Japan for the future-making of the school. The second is a Change Laboratory by high school students, their teachers, and interventionist researchers at a public high school in Japan, where students initiated collaboratively creating projects that explored a just and equitable world based on their own interests. The analysis of the two cases focuses on how the Change Laboratory interventions supported generating an expansive learning by participants who went beyond the given and broke through the contradictions that lie at the root of the current activity and created different ways to reorganize schools. The generation of expansive learning has gradually advanced an agentive and emancipatory school transformation in which participants have deviated from the logic of capitalism. Such Change Laboratories in schools oriented to fourth-generation activity theory encourage participants to move into a zone of proximal development, which is an alternative developmental orientation of learning and instruction in schools, namely, de-encapsulation and creation of community-based coalitions for learning.