Agents Of Transformation Research Articles

Teacher Agency in Creating a Translingual Space in Nepal’s Multilingual English-Medium Schools

This paper focuses on teacher agency in creating a ‘translanguaging space’ in Nepal’s multilingual public schools. Drawing on the ethnographic data from two public schools, we discuss how teachers can resist a monolingual ideology of an English as a medium of instruction policy to ensure students’ participation in classroom activities. The findings of the study reveal that teachers create a translanguaging space to counter the official English-only monolingual ideology and draw on students’ home languages to address their learning needs and their own pedagogic challenges. By using students’ home languages in teaching both the content and English language subjects, the teachers in this study demonstrate a transformative agency to create a multilingual classroom space where students feel safe to use their existing language abilities and epistemologies in learning process. The findings of the study imply that policymakers need to build on teachers’ multilingual agency and their critical ideological awareness to develop pedagogical approaches that recognize students’ diverse linguistic identities and learning needs.

Teachers' collaborative reflective discussions on technology-mediated teaching: Envisioned and enacted transformative agency

This study explores teachers' reflections on the competences that come into play in technology-mediated teaching activities. Underpinned by educational design research, the collaboration between researchers and teachers followed a methodological design involving three iterative phases: (1) workshops in which teachers and researchers collaborated to develop instructional scenarios involving digital technologies, (2) lessons enacting instructional scenarios, and (3) reflective discussions based on video sequences from the instructional scenarios. The researchers selected video clips of instructional sequences involving so-called critical incidents where the teachers encountered some kind of challenge in the technology-mediated teaching activities. The unit of analysis comprised transitional episodes identified in the reflective discussions, where temporal shifts took place as the teachers elaborated on challenges and oriented towards future actions. Theoretically, the study is based on sociocultural perspectives, acknowledging social interaction as collective thinking. To analytically scrutinise temporal shifts in the interaction, interaction analysis was employed. The findings show that while the elicited video clips supported retrospective reflections, the collaborative context with colleagues and researchers interacting supported prospective reflections. These findings are discussed in terms of how the temporal shifts in the reflections can analytically be understood as teachers' envisioned or enacted transformative agency.

Transformation toward sustainability in Finnish teacher education policy: Promises and shortcomings

While the state of the world is becoming ever more unsustainable, transformation and transformative learning have become increasingly relevant and raised attention in various sustainability education discourses. This is obvious in both policy and research. As teacher educators, we have studied how this sustainability and transformative education trend is visible in education policy. We have first read international policy and research on sustainability education and transformation. In a more thorough study, our focus has been on two recent and fundamental policy documents outlining the Finnish teacher education. Our results show that even if several UNESCO policies documents for years have called for a transformation toward sustainability through education, the Finnish teacher education policy has not yet fully acknowledged sustainability issues and teachers’ transformative agency in addressing them, but emphasize other aims. Therefore, it is mainly up to the individual teacher educators and the leaders of their faculties to decide on how to prepare student teachers not only to deal with changes in general, but to particularly bring about changes towards sustainability.

People for Peace and Republic: A Fantasy Theme Reading of the Representation of ‘Nepalis’ in Movement-Time Editorials

Newspapers’ editorializing exigencies as a mere publication of spot news would not be enough. Editorials clarify, explain, interpret, or integrate the news based on events, incidents, situations, or trends. Events of and during political movements are the main subjects of newspaper editorials. Editorial coverage of everyday exigencies builds up and helps represent narratives of various actors directly or indirectly involved in the events. In the public texts in Nepal, including newspapers, ‘Nepali people’ feature as principal actors and participants in socio-political transformations. Through Fantasy Theme Analysis of editorials on political subjects, this article explores how The Kathmandu Post and The Himalayan Times covered ‘Nepali people’ as the participants, actors, and agents of political transformation during the people’s movement in 2005-2006. The article inductively concludes that with a principal rhetorical vision for establishing peace and republic, ‘Nepali people’ performed the agency of transformation in the country.

Making and Reading World Literature in a Pandemic

Abstract This essay intervenes in a debate about world literature that pits commodity circulation against normativity and literature’s causal force. By taking into account the history of book production and circulation as intimately linked with the history of global capitalism, this essay reads Severance (2018) by Ling Ma as a critique of the logic of global logistics and its labor relations. Reading the novel during a pandemic ironically draws attention to the reader’s own position in this global labor hierarchy, highlighting that the novel itself necessarily participates in the material injustices of global print capitalism. The essay argues that paying attention to book production and circulation – in the form of global supply chains, the world market’s global reach, and particularly the human relations this produces – is in fact not antithetical to, but instead a highly leveraged way of understanding literature’s potential for transformative agency.

Transformative Agency in Workers’ Account: Tensions in Professional Development

The concept of agency expresses one’s will in actions that alter reality. In the work market's current social and cultural conditions, individuals are pushed to continuous change to transform their professional and personal lives. The interests and socio-material constraints help understand the personal and professional path shape. In this paper, we will focus on how a group of workers expressed transformative agency in their narrative accounts, how it evolves and the influence of the interests and socio-material constraints on the expression of agency. To pursue this objective, we interviewed twelve workers that moved from Italy to France. From the transcription and the analysis, we have identified four dimensions in their account to make sense of their career path: conflicts of motives to act; wandering actions in global cultural (dis)fluency; activation of resources toward an (in)definite interest; sensorial and material mobility.

Teacher educator in a digital age: A study of transformative agency

Teacher educator in a digital age: A study of transformative agency

Agency in cultural-historical activity theory: strengthening commitment to social transformation

ABSTRACT Theorizing agency is crucial to intervening in social, economic, political, and environmental crises. This paper examines three approaches to agency within cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT): transformative activist stance (Stetsenko), transformative agency by double stimulation (Sannino), and relational agency (Edwards). All three uphold CHAT’s rebellious gist, where our actions are shaped by circumstances but where the possibility of transcending those circumstances always remains. However, the paper finds important differences despite common foundations and apparent similarities in relation to dialectics, mediation, motives, and practice. Bringing these distinctions into relief highlights what each framework offers and nuances that hold them helpfully apart.

Forward anchoring in transformative agency: How parents of children with complex feeding difficulties transcend the status quo

To understand how people change the course of their own lives and the lives of those around them, we need to understand the dynamics of agency. Sannino (2015a, 2015b) model of transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS), centres on how people use auxiliary tools to break away from conflicts of motives. Focusing on the serious but overlooked problem of feeding-tube dependency in childhood, the paper asks: How do parents enable their child to feed orally when the ‘given’ future remains dependent on a feeding tube? Analysis of two successful but different processes deploys Sannino's metaphor of forward-anchoring – pulling on stable anchors to move towards unknown solutions. As primary caregivers, two mothers broke away from conflicts of motives by searching, regaining control and then pulling forward on through diverse arrays of actions. The paper contributes new insights in an area where agency is vital yet hardly studied. It reveals how what is often regarded as a biomedical or clinical problem can be understood in radically different, future-oriented terms that recognise parents' agentic contributions, and the everyday means that can be crucial in breaking away from underlying conflicts of motives.

Visual forms of mediating artefacts: A research-intervention in engineering education

This paper describes a research-intervention to change technology-enhanced learning (TEL), in a setting of engineering education. It examines how participants used visual forms of mediating artefacts, that is, the means by which the group came together, examined and changed their own TEL activity. Engineering education, an arena that is highly dependent on visualisation and the promotion of visual literacy, largely constrains visual representations to instrumentalist and work-related applications, for the mental rehearsal of engineering solutions. This paper instead describes an activity theoretical perspective, where visual representations of social activity became mediating artefacts, sitting between a collective subject (of learners, lecturers and managers in engineering education) and the object of their activity (to change their TEL activity). In the study described, participants identified, curated and engaged with visual forms of mediating artefacts: stimulating their need and potential for change; assisting their questioning of social conditions and knowledge; and mitigating the reversal and regression of their endeavours. The research-intervention used the Change Laboratory methodology, engaging them in collaborative and agentic double-stimulation tasks through a process of expansive learning. The core claim is that visual forms of mediating artefacts played a crucial role in the group’s qualitatively meaningful change to TEL, and in engendering their transformative agency.Keywords: Visualisation; TEL; engineering; Change Laboratory; transformative agency; expansive learningPart of the Special Issue Visual literacies and visual technologies for teaching, learning and inclusion <https://doi.org/10.21428/8c225f6e.bf2afe2e>

Transformational Processes in the Activity System and in the Educator/Designer through Design Procedure under CHAT

This study analyses the role of design procedures under Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) in the system of the activity and in the educator/designer’s professional and personal skills. Our effort has come as metacognitive outcome of a research that took place at a Contemporary Art Museum and in a classroom for students (11 years old). The purpose of the initial research was to highlight how an educational program under CHAT in a Contemporary Art Museum with the Life Cycle of Materials, as its Object, could affect students’ sustainable literacy, motives and relationships. As a metacognitive process the educator/researcher, who was simultaneously the designer, also studied the transformational processes of all Subjects of the activity system as well as her professional and personal transformations as an internal study for self-literacy. This paper describes trajectories of strategies, interactions, and expansions to the activity system, and puts forward for discussion the use of theoretical tools and epistemological principles of expansive learning for metacognitive analysis. Practical engagements with the theoretical framework of CHAT, came out as an important factor in the development of transformative agency and self-literacy at a professional level.

Scientific mobilization of keystone actors for biosphere stewardship

The biosphere crisis requires changes to existing business practices. We ask how corporations can become sustainability leaders, when constrained by multiple barriers to collaboration for biosphere stewardship. We describe how scientists motivated, inspired and engaged with ten of the world’s largest seafood companies, in a collaborative process aimed to enable science-based and systemic transformations (2015–2021). CEOs faced multiple industry crises in 2015 that incentivized novel approaches. New scientific insights, an invitation to collaborate, and a bold vision of transformative change towards ocean stewardship, created new opportunities and direction. Co-creation of solutions resulted in new knowledge and trust, a joint agenda for action, new capacities, international recognition, formalization of an organization, increased policy influence, time-bound goals, and convergence of corporate change. Independently funded scientists helped remove barriers to cooperation, provided means for reflection, and guided corporate strategies and actions toward ocean stewardship. By 2021, multiple individuals exercised leadership and the initiative had transitioned from preliminary and uncomfortable conversations, to a dynamic, operational organization, with capacity to perform global leadership in the seafood industry. Mobilizing transformational agency through learning, collaboration, and innovation represents a cultural evolution with potential to redirect and accelerate corporate action, to the benefit of business, people and the planet.

A critical realist theory of ideology: Promoting planning as a vanguard of societal transformation

This article explores the potential values of a critical realist theory of ideology on the analysis of planning issues. In particular, it argues its usefulness in promoting planning as a vanguard of societal transformation. The critical realist theory of ideology revitalizes the epistemological inquiry of beliefs, which enables an evaluation of the social, economic and environmental impacts of the ideas and beliefs embedded in planning. Furthermore, the essence of critical realist theory of ideology is to explain the (re)production of the ideology, which paves the way for transformative planning, as transformation cannot be realized without eliminating constraining social conditions. Finally, critical realism situates its critique of ideology within the wider transformation process by rendering visible the dimensions that can contribute to eradicating the ideology in question, and shaping better planning ideas, including ethical reasoning, utopia thinking and transformative agency. A meta-theoretical framework based on critical realism is proposed to guide a critique of ideology in planning. By using an example of planning for sustainable urban development in Copenhagen and Oslo, the paper demonstrates the ways in which the meta-theoretical framework can be applied to planning in a quest for societal transformation.

Racial Equity by Design: Forming Transformative Agency to Address the Racialization of School Discipline

Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an enduring systemic problem whose patterns change from one context to another. In order to develop systemic solutions that are responsive to local contexts, school stakeholders’ collective, agentic actions toward systemic changes are essential. Utilizing a participatory systemic design process led by an urban high school community, this case study examines how Learning Lab, an inclusive problem-solving process, fostered urban school stakeholders’ transformative agency. Through structured decision-making and collaborative design activity, Learning Lab participants analyzed systemic contradictions in the school discipline system and developed a culturally responsive behavioral support system to address racial disproportionality in discipline outcomes.

‘They laughed at me, but I left that job’: occupational agency of Latvian migrant workers in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article focuses on migrants’ occupational agency in the UK labour market. In particular, the article explores the experience of Latvian migrant workers who together with other Baltic and Central European migrants have filled the low-skilled and low-paid employment sectors in the UK. The article follows a realist approach that provides different conceptual layers to better explain occupational agency. Drawing on survey data and semi-structured interviews, the article demonstrates how Latvians have exercised their occupational agency over the past decade, building relations with co-workers and UK employers. It is argued that Latvians’ position taking in the workplace and occupational mobility are directed by various forms of capital that are embedded in a transnational social field. The emergent structural properties of employment field guide migrants’ trajectories towards the accumulation of particular capital. Eventually, as this article also argues, such structural conditioning impinges on migrants’ personality traits and motivations that either foster or constrain transformative agency in the UK employment field.

Care-full academic activism for sustainable transformations in tourism

ABSTRACT The urgent need for radical changes towards sustainability provides an opportunity to reconsider the epistemology and methodology of tourism research. The present study discusses this opportunity by adopting the concept of deep leverage points for sustainable transformations and an ethic of care perspective. The discussion highlights the vital role that a deep form of reflexivity plays in care-based tourism research that aims at sustainable transformations. This reflexivity is identified as the core component of a conceptual model that is developed to illustrate the crucial aspects of a type of scholarly engagement that, in accord with feminist scholarship, is termed care-full academic activism. These aspects concern attentiveness and responsiveness, which relate to interconnectedness, and imagination and critical thinking, which relate to transformational agency. The present study emphasizes the communalities between the concept of sustainable transformation and the ethic of care. It provides a holistic and innovative view of care-based sustainability research and a practical guide for scholars.

The Development of Transformative Agency of Teachers in Teaching Research Activities in China.

Teaching research activities (TRA) in China are practical and reflective research of teachers on teaching. These required activities are meant to ensure quality education and facilitate the professional development of teachers. However, in TRA, teachers encounter many challenges such as low efficiency and weak team collaboration. These problems make it hard to achieve the expected outcomes. W Primary School reformed its activities using Change Laboratory, a formative intervention approach to workplace learning and development based on activity theory. The data collected included seven recorded meetings in the Change Laboratory. The conversations in the meetings were then transcribed into texts. A deductive method of content analysis was used to code the data, focusing on categorizing comments of teachers about the transformative agency. The findings showed the following: (1) There were five types of transformative agencies, namely, resisting, criticizing, explicating, envisioning, and committing to actions. Resisting and criticizing were represented less frequently, and taking action did not emerge as a type of transformative agency. (2) The comments about transformative agency about tools were more frequent than comments about other elements in the activity system. (3) There were some differences in the expression of transformative agency across participants. At the end of this study, the implications for the development of TRA are discussed.

Toward Nurses’ Transformative Agency in Transitional Care for Older Adults: A Change-Laboratory Intervention

Mobilization of nurses’ agency across healthcare sectors is needed to counter challenges associated with older adults’ transitions between hospital and primary care. Based on Cultural Historical Activity theory and the Change Laboratory method, we developed a learning intervention with 16 nurses. The aim was to foster the nurses’ transformative agency to improve care. Video-recording of nine learning sessions were transcribed and analyzed. Results demonstrated that shared transformative agency exhibited as an emergent phenomenon crossing sectoral boundaries as a prerequisite for change in transitional care. The nurses progressed from acting as individuals criticizing the current conditions to collectively forming a vision around a transitional care model. This was nurtured through the nurses’ negotiations which included a recognition of sharing similar challenges deriving from the healthcare organization and related financial restrictions, and conflicting healthcare and nursing ideals across healthcare sectors. The evolution of transformative agency was grounded in a professional nursing identity.

Education as a Source for Transformative Agency: Theoretical and Practical Issues

The issue of “transformative agency”, which proactively improves and transforms social structures, is relevant both for theoretical discussions and practical agenda. The field of education is of particular importance in terms of shaping the potential for agency. However, the dominant areas of research in education, including the sociology of education, focus, on the contrary, on the mechanisms and factors of reproduction of social structures and related activities. The authors propose to expand the research agenda by increasing attention to the conditions and mechanisms of the formation of “transformative agency” at different levels of education and in its various segments, with an account of the processes of de-structuration that weaken the forms of institutional coercion familiar to the 20th century. The article raises theoretical questions and suggests relevant empirical phenomena for further research.

Learning to become entrepreneurial through a change laboratory methodology

Following Clark’s early work, the concept of the entrepreneurial university has been circulating for a number of years. Being entrepreneurial entails that staff develop the sort of open-ended, problem-solving, and innovative solution-generating thinking underlying the concept. This manner of thinking may be important as an orientation to working life both inside and outside the university, not only in the commercial sense, but also in dealing with societal issues. Although there are guides as to what areas a university should develop to become entrepreneurial, there is little guidance as to how staff may explore and develop their own entrepreneurial thinking. This article suggests that the problem and solution generating approach of the change laboratory, underpinned by the theory of expansive learning (and transformative agency), may provide such guidance. Furthermore, forwarding this approach may support the critical developmental and transformative role that universities can play in society and so serve to balance out the more commercial thrusts often proposed by managing bodies