Abstract

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 view- point of the methodology for formative interventions to foster participants’ expansive learning and agency, educational activities should be reconceptualized as dialogically negotiated activities in which various agents could produce new collaborative interven- tions, 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.

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