Studies in Expansive Learning
Learning What Is Not Yet There

A conceptual and practical toolkit for creating learning processes with the help of interventions in workplaces, schools and communities.

Yrjö Engeström (Author)

9781107512443, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 June 2019

287 pages, 42 b/w illus. 14 tables
23 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.5 kg

'In this volume, we see the fertility of Engeström and his colleagues in the Change Laboratory. These chapters extend expansive learning to address a variety of settings from schools to hi-tech corporations. The approach's genius is in developing mediating artifacts (semiotic representations inserted into the activity system) that allow participants to see their work and relations in new ways, expanding their view, to come to fresh solutions to the problems that trouble their work.' Charles Bazeman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Yrjö Engeström's exciting approach sees expansive learning as the central mechanism of transformation in societal practices and institutions. For researchers and practitioners in education, this book provides a conceptual and practical toolkit for creating and analyzing expansive learning processes with the help of interventions in workplaces, schools and communities. Chapters 1-3 situate the theory of expansive learning in the field of learning science. Chapters 4-8 contain empirical studies of expansive learning in various organizational settings (such as banks, schools and hospitals). In Chapters 9-10, the author looks at new challenges and possibilities arising from rapidly spreading 'wildfire' activities (disaster relief, for example) and from the methodology of formative interventions aimed at triggering and supporting expansive learning. This book provides an integrative account of recent empirical studies and conceptual developments in the theory of expansive learning, and serves as a companion volume to Learning by Expanding.

1. Introduction - learning sciences at the threshold of expansion
2. Whatever happened to process theories of learning?
3. Studies of expansive learning - foundations, findings and future challenges
4. Enriching the theory of expansive learning - lessons from journeys toward co-configuration
5. From learning environments and implementation to activity systems and expansive learning
6. Process enhancement versus community building - transcending the dichotomy through expansive learning
7. Expansive learning in a library - actions, cycles and deviations from instructional intentions
8. Beyond discontinuity - expansive organizational learning remembered
9. Wildfire activities - new patterns of mobility and learning
10. From design experiments to formative interventions
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Organization & management of education [JNK], Educational psychology [JNC], Learning [JMRL], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH]