Abstract

This article illuminates and analyzes a hybrid educational project as intervention research in Osaka. The intervention research aims to develop a hybrid activity systemin schools, based on a partnership between a university and local elementary schools butalso 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.

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