Expanding the Chronotopes of Schooling for Promotion of Students’ Agency

Lasse Lipponen, Jaakko Hilppö, Antti Rajala and Kristiina Kumpulainen

Learning Bridges Research NetworkDepartment of Teacher EducationUniversity of Helsinki

ISCAR conference 2014 in Sydney. Symposium: Emergence of students' agency in educational interactions

2

“(In other courses) we sit and read, there are textbooks and note-taking, a fast pace in everything. There is one book

per course . . . Mostly you just sit in the classroom, write and listen.”

- Student interview, the Bicycles on the Move! project

Introduction

• Time and space are tightly controlled in traditional schooling (Brown and Renshaw, 2006; Vadeboncouer, 2005; Leander, 2002).

• In addition, student's informal funds of knowledge and experiences are not adequately acknowledged nor their agency fostered (Gonzalez et al., 2005; Engeström et al., 2002, Bloome et al., 2009).

• Although significant pedagogical innovations to address these issues have been made (Daniels, 2008) only few focus on the connection between agency and space-time configurations.

Engeström (1998); Jackson (1968)

Chronotopes (Bakhtin, 1981; 1986)

• Time and space are interconnected and socially constructed in discourse and everyday interactions (Bloome et. al 2009).

• “The typical patterns of organization of and across activities in space and time are described by chronotopes. Chronotopes are defining features of a culture or a subculture, and of communities of practice. Chronotopes inform our design choices in shaping social-institutional spaces for particular uses.” (Lemke, 2004)

• Within schools and classrooms there exist not only institutionally established chronotopes; conventional and novel chronotopes live side by side and may create conflicts and disturbances in the flow of activity (Leander, 2002).

Research questions

• We examine an innovative learning project in a Finnish upper secondary school, namely, Bicycles on the Move!

• We aim to understand transformation and refinement of the conventional time-space dimensions of schooling in the project. We ask:

• What kind of a chronotope does the Bicycles on the Move! project manifest?

• What implications does this chronotope have for providing opportunities to promote students’ agency?

Bicycles on the Move! project

• An optional course at an Upper Secondary School (Espoo, Finland) was first implemented during the 2009/2010 school year.

• The project aimed to increase students’ cooperation with different social actors to develop their sense of citizenship and agency.

• Students collaborated with authorities and influenced the decision-making of the City Council concerning cycling.

• The course was inspired and supported by two nationally operated projects funded by the Finnish National Board of Education

• The course was a huge success, arousing interest in the media even internationally

"That's the place where we document cycling issues. It provides a strong basis for doing this. From the map you can see that the problems aren't specific to a single area. They repeat all over."

Data and analysis

• The data were collected from the second implementation, during 2010/2011

• Including student and teacher interviews, newspaper articles and a tv program about the project, as well as observations and video recorded interaction from one lesson.

• On the basis of our ethnographic understanding of the project, we purposefully selected three interactional aspects for closer analysis

• student accountability

• meaning making and relationships

• developmental aspects

Teacher: The most urgent issue would be … right now they [the city

authorities] are really starting to ponder and think about … whether

Tapiolan Raitti is a functional main route for cyclists or whether it should

be arranged in some other way . . . It is likely that we’ll get an audience

with the big bosses in January, so before that we should have something

of an idea and we should have already checked every corner there and

we should have an idea. So would you possibly feel up to going through

those corners, especially from the Sokos Hotel heading East, and think

about it? What would be a functional route?

Expansion of student accountability

• Students were held accountable for contributing to public debates about cycling, in relation to the wide range of current and future audiences and stakeholders.

• In other words, the feasibility of the students’ contributions was connected to activity systems, and their chronotopes, outside of school.

• These aspects had impact on what was considered valid knowledge in the project.

Teacher 1: Have you had any insight into what you could do so far Have you even thought about this?

Student: I have thought about it, umm, about Ring Road I, it’s being built, there are big construction projects going on. Maybe something about that now.

Teacher 1: Do you mean there at Leppävaara?

Student: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. There is the motorway intersection and then, um, the tunnel. If that could be something?

Teacher 1: Yes, yes, what about cycling or whatever?

Student: Yes, exactly, public transportation or, I mean, pedestria and bicycle traffic solutions.

Teacher 1: Yeah, yeah, it would be a good idea to look at that and the plans around it.

Teacher 2: Really brilliant idea, I already looked into it last summer and I have already sent some emails about it but it doesn’t really mean that nothing should be done about it.

Expansion of meaning negotiations

• During meaning negotiations a rich variety of different sources were utilized and built on, such as student's own experiences and observations, and their funds of knowledge in relation to the environment.

• In addition, through the project the students established and maintained relations to expert communities, such as local decision makers, city officials, and cycling activists in different cities and abroad.

• In all, the meaning negotiations in the project forged connections to different communities, and across spaces and times.

A local newspaper headline stating: secondary school students found out that the cycle routes in the city of

Espoo are in miserable condition

Orienting to Transforming the Local Environment

• The students and the teachers were oriented to improve local cycling conditions, and hence towards transforming the surrounding environment.

• In the interviews, they talked about being changed themselves during the project: A bump or a crack in the road was no longer just a bump or a crack, but something that should and could be fixed by taking action.

• Thus, the students learned to see their surroundings not as being static and unchangeable but, instead, as being contingent and situated in historical time.

The forms of agency made possible through an expansive chronotope

• Relational agency (Edwards & D'Arcy, 2004)

• Students forged and built on social networks

• They learned to understand and act in relation to others’ potentially conflicting views, e.g., city planners.

• Conceptual Agency (Greeno, 2006) • The students used observations, experience, cultural

resources and expert voices as tools for joint thinking and problem solving.

• The classroom community constructed counter-arguments by juxtaposing expert voices.

• Transformative Agency (e.g. Engeström, 2008; Rainio, 2010)

• The classroom community broke away from traditional “taken-for-granted” practices and took initiatives to influence local cycling conditions and contribute to public political debate about cycling issues.

Discussion: Towards expansive pedagogy

• Transformative orientation requires teacher agency (Lipponen and Kumpulainen, 2011). It brings forth contradictions and stirs up negative emotions.

• Current and complex real life learning tasks (Engeström et al., 2002) expand students’ accountability by changing the requirements for contributions and bringing in new audiences with whom students share and discuss their observations, opinions and reflections.

• Connecting learning across settings, communities and time involves teachers and schools building partnerships and networks. New teacher competences are required, such as multi-professional collaboration (Kumpulainen et al., 2010).

Discussion

• The expansive chronotope created in Bicycles on the move! promoted students’ agency through overcoming limitations of conventional pedagogies – at least partially and momentarily.

• Yet, an expansive chronotope has a definite scope to be employed for the specific pedagogical purposes of promoting students’ transformative, relational, and conceptual agency.