Learning Teams: Case Studies from Kenya and Nepal

• In Event: Learning Teams for Foundational Learning: A Collaborative Approach to Ensure Every Child Can Thrive in an Increasingly Complex World

Proposal

Working in partnership with colleagues from a Kenyan NGO and Kathmandu University, Nepal, we have generated in-depth case studies of different types of learning teams situated in the following four recent or ongoing initiatives:
• A LOT Change: Professional mentors, counsellors, community leaders and parents in a learning team to empower adolescent learners in Korogocho and Viwandan informal settlements, Nairobi, Kenya.

• Tayari project: An early childhood initiative involving collaborations between teachers, community health workers and parents in Laikipia, Siaya, Nairobi and Uasin Gishu, Kenya.

• Textbook free Friday: An initiative of the Mayor in Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) Nepal to improve learners’ practical skills and enhance community bonds. Organic learning teams involve schools, parents, the local community, skill training provider organisations, a university and KMC.

• Innovations in teaching and learning: A participatory action research project at Shree Dapcha Secondary school and its three, associated primary schools, Nepal to catalyse innovative equitable pedagogical approaches. Dynamic networks involved parents, the wider community, students, teachers, university and school managers and government policy stakeholders.

The research is underpinned by a Cultural Historical Activity Theory perspective (CHAT) selected for its focus on collective social practice within complex real-life situations. CHAT, through the concept of expansive learning (Engstrom 1987), enables us to explore ways people work together to envision and develop new forms of practice to transform the world. We see this as helping us to generate insights relevant to the challenges of supporting children’s holistic development in a rapidly changing digital world where teachers and other actors will need to enact new roles, implement innovative pedagogies and address different forms of disadvantage and exclusion. An important outcome for expansive learning is agency, participants’ ability and will to shape their activity systems. 

Each case study was informed by the following research questions:

• How can the expertise of diverse actors be harnessed within learning teams to address complex and persistent challenges in children’s learning?
• What contradictions, which arise from professional and personal differences, cultivate or inhibit innovative practices within learning teams, in service of children’s learning?
• How do wider systems respond to the innovative practices of the learning teams

While the detail of the research was adapted to be appropriate to each specific case, all case studies involved scrutiny of different voices and activities of the learning team(s) through interviews, focus groups, observations and document analysis.
In this presentation we reflect on our data through the lens of the need to be agile in a rapidly changing digital world: we explore what motivates the actors in these learning teams to shift their practices, the ways in which new patterns of activity emerge, and the nature of these new activity patterns and how they co-exist with previous activities, and how initiation and evolution of learning teams is supported by digital tools We conclude by offering suggestions for how these findings might support others to envision new collaborations which improve agility and resilience within education systems

Authors

• Alison Sarah Buckler, The Open University

• Freda Wolfenden, The Open University, UK