Fostering School-Wide Change: Transformative Agency in Change Laboratories

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 10:50 am
  In Roundtable Session: Transformative Agency: Successes and Failures (Table 11)

Abstract

Agency is key to enabling workplaces to adapt to changing cultural and consumer expectations. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) regards agency as amenable to pedagogic facilitation. Change laboratories are an established methodology for promoting expansive learning and change in workplaces. This study involved four change laboratories lasting two years with teachers and leaders in a secondary school, focusing on Grade 9, co-curricular participation, and student approaches to learning and wellbeing in parallel courses in the final two years of schooling. With reference transformative agency by double stimulation, the study found unique germ cells to be the basis for the emergence of agency in each change laboratory, tracing kedge anchors used to break away from the status quo.

Author

• Nick Hopwood, University of Technology Sydney