Abstract:

The current study has been formulated in cooperation between researchers and school officers from a rural Swedish municipality, based on their concern that there is a large and growing gender gap in the results, and on a notion held by some principals and teachers that the motivation for school is low for many students, especially the low-achieving boys. The school officers as well as the teachers suggested that the problems are the result of an interplay between norms and conditions in the local society which foster negative attitudes to education generally, and unfavorable but amendable premises for learning that prevail in many schools and classrooms. To generate knowledge of have to change the situation researcher, principals, teachers and other professionals’ such as school nurse and union representatives have worked together in finding tools to deal with the gender gap in grades. In this paper we present the result from the first, in a series of five (CL:1-CL:5), activity based formative interventions. The participants’ in CL:1 have been school professionals’ who works with students in 7-9 grade. The theoretical and methodological framework is Change Laboratory (CL), which is a specific form of activity based formative intervention where actionable knowledge is understood as a collaborative and generative possibility knowledge intertwined with transformative action (Sannino & Engeström 2017). Focus is on the participants expanding learning and the aim to generate and implement new models and instruments for activity. The core ideas of the CL is about professional empowerment and empowering in ways not experienced before and insert hope that change is possible also at the systematic level when working together. Based on the result from CL:1, the aim of this paper is to highlight challenges and opportunities connected to the use of Change Laboratory as a method for work integrated learning.

Keywords:

Activity theory, expansive learning, Change Laboratory, school professionals’, work integrated learning.