Transforming Teaching Research Activities through a Change Laboratory Intervention in China

• In Event: Formative Interventions from the Global South: Expansive Learning as Justice-Oriented Educational Praxis

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the transformation of school-based Teaching Research Activities (TRAs) in China—a nationally institutionalized mechanism for teacher professional development—through a formative intervention, Change Laboratory (CL) approach. While TRAs are intended to promote collective inquiry and pedagogical improvement, they have often become ritualized and disconnected from teachers’ actual learning needs (Bu & Han, 2019; Ho et al., 2021). This study engaged early-career teachers in critically analyzing and redesigning their local TRA system. The objective is not only to enhance a situated practice but also to explore how CL can serve as a context-sensitive method for re-mediating teacher professional learning in highly structured educational systems.

Theoretical framework
This study is grounded in CHAT and draws on expansive learning theory to inform both its analysis and design (Engeström, 2015, 2016). TRAs are conceptualized as historically sedimented activity systems, structured by enduring contradictions between state-imposed mandates and teachers’ lived pedagogical concerns. The CL functions as a formative intervention that surfaces these contradictions and supports their resolution through collective analysis, modeling, and future-oriented experimentation (Sannino et al., 2016; Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). The study extends CHAT by situating expansive learning within China’s top-down yet collectivist education culture, highlighting how teacher agency can emerge under constraint.

Methods
We conducted a CL intervention in a suburban primary school in Wuhan, China. The CL consisted of eight sessions over six months, involving ten early-career teachers and a team of researchers. The intervention was designed to support participants in transforming their local teaching research practices by surfacing and analyzing systemic contradictions, co-modeling new approaches, and testing them through iterative cycles of reflection and action.

Data sources
Data sources include transcripts of CL sessions, video documentation, memos, teacher-designed artifacts (e.g., teaching analysis), and interviews. The focal object of analysis was the co-creation of the Micro-Lesson Case Study (MLCS). This new mediating artifact enables teachers to collaboratively examine brief segments of recorded lessons using structured rubrics. Through this tool, the object of TRAs shifted from inspection-oriented performance to inquiry-driven professional reflection.

Results
The intervention generated a full cycle of expansive learning, through which contradictions in the TRA system—especially between policy-driven compliance and classroom realities—were surfaced, re-examined, and re-mediated. Teachers co-constructed the MLCS as a context-sensitive tool for professional development. This model did not emerge as a fixed solution but as an evolving, situated practice embedded in teacher agency. Our findings contribute to CHAT by showing how expansive learning can reconfigure institutional activity systems from within, enabling practice-centered innovation under structural constraints.

Significance
This paper presents the first CL intervention within China’s institutionalized TRA system, offering insight into how expansive learning unfolds in hierarchical, collectivist educational contexts. It contributes to CHAT by showing that expansive learning can take root in tightly regulated environments when systemic contradictions are surfaced and re-mediated. The study deepens our understanding of teacher-led innovation: while researchers initially suggested MLCS, it was transformed and sustained through teachers’ dialogic engagement. In line with AERA’s call to reimagine research as a practice of repair and justice, this work demonstrates how educators can reclaim agency and redesign their professional culture from within.

Authors

• Chunting Diao, Hubei University of Chinese Medicine

• Wei Yue, Central China Normal University