Opettajankoulutuslaitoksen julkaisuja 395

Antti Rajala Toward an agency-centered pedagogy A teacher’s journey of expanding the context of school learning

ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be presented, with the permission of the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences of the University of Helsinki, for public examination, in Room 5 of the University Main Building, Fabianinkatu 33, on Friday 3rd June 2016, at 12 noon

Helsinki 2016

Pre-examiners Professor Anne Edwards, University of Oxford Professor Sten Ludvigsen, University of Oslo Custos Professor Kristiina Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki Supervisors Professor Kristiina Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki Professor Lasse Lipponen, University of Helsinki Docent Annalisa Sannino, University of Helsinki Opponent Honorary Professor Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, University of Neuchatel Front cover photo Lissu Lehtimaja Yliopistopaino Unigrafia, Helsinki

ISBN 978-951-51-2251-3 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-51-2252-0 (PDF) University of Helsinki, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences Department of Teacher of Education Research Report 395

Antti Rajala Toward an agency-centered pedagogy A teacher’s journey of expanding the context of school learning

Abstract Despite the immense stability of the social structure of schooling, recent social, economic, and technological developments are widening the gap between schools and the surrounding societies so much as to challenge the foundations of public education. Conventional educational practices are hard-pressed to deal with the challenges that contemporary knowledge societies pose for learning and education as lifelong and lifewide processes.

This dissertation project is about my journey as a teacher, researcher, and teacher educator to develop a pedagogical model for expanding the context of school learning to engage with students’ lives and the wider society.

My argument draws upon the analyses of three data sources. The backbone of the dissertation study is a retrospective analysis of the video data collected from my own pedagogical practice as a primary school teacher. As a teacher, I intend-ed to bridge the gap between the students’ personal worlds and the world of school and to promote their agency and personal sensemaking. Together with my coauthors, I engaged in a critical analysis of my pedagogical practices. These analyses contribute to the agency-centered pedagogical model that I outline in this summary. To enrich the pedagogical model, I build on the analyses of two datasets in which I am not myself involved as a participant. The first is derived from an innovative upper secondary school project that aimed to develop stu-dents’ citizenship and agency by involving them in efforts to influence local political decision-making concerning cycling. The second concerns a literature review of pedagogical approaches that sought to expand the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society.

I draw upon a sociocultural and activity-theoretical conceptual framework for the study of learning and education. I posit a transformative ontology that not only focuses on how individuals are enculturated into existing social practice through participation but emphasizes how individuals contribute to the transfor-mation of the norms, discourses, and forms of activity of their communities. Thus, learning is a contested process that inevitably involves a struggle over what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts. In particular, I build on

the theory of expansive learning and the concepts of context, agency, and per-sonal sense.

The empirical data consist primarily of video-recorded classroom interac-tions. These data were analyzed with micro-level interaction analysis. In addi-tion, I analyzed interviews of teachers and students as well as documents.

The findings of this dissertation study underline that a broad definition of pedagogy is needed to study and design pedagogical approaches for expanding the context of school learning. Moreover, they show how pedagogical features that do so make specific forms of agency available to students. Furthermore, they illuminate the tensions and challenges that emerge for students and teachers when the context of school learning is expanded.

Based on these findings, I present an outline of the agency-centered pedagog-ical model that has the following features: (a) building a pedagogy on the foun-dation of students’ personal sense and agency, (b) connecting instruction to ac-tivity systems and expert communities outside school, (c) mastering the institu-tional context of public schools, and (d) pedagogy as a continuing journey.

This dissertation study is timely from the perspective of current educational policy in Finland. In August of 2016, Finland will start to implement the new National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (FNBE, 2014), which explicitly encourages teachers to experiment with student-centered pedagogies and to take learning out of the classroom. In this study, my coauthors and I have analyzed two empirical cases that can be regarded as realizations of the recent Finnish educational policies which have culminated in the new national core curriculum.

Overall, this dissertation study argues for an approach, which does not in-volve excessive control and assessment of students, to address the challenges that knowledge societies pose to public education. Instead, a basic premise of this approach is that teachers and students are seen as contributors to educational change. The study concludes with suggestions for avenues of further research addressing the consequences of agency-centered pedagogy for students’ devel-opment. In addition, the study raises new research questions about the develop-ment of instructional practices in schools and beyond.

Keywords: Agency, Context, Expansive learning, Pedagogy, Personal sense, School learning

Helsingin yliopisto, Käyttäytymistieteellinen tiedekunta Opettajankoulutuslaitos Opettajankoulutuslaitoksen julkaisuja 395

Antti Rajala Kohti toimijuuskeskeistä pedagogiikkaa Tutkimus kouluoppimisen yhdistämisestä oppilaiden elämään ja ympäröivään yhteiskuntaan

Tiivistelmä Uudet perusopetuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet (POPS, 2014) pyrkivät vastaamaan koulua maailmanlaajuisesti ravisteleviin haasteisiin. Hyvistä oppi-mistuloksista huolimatta suomalaiset koululaiset eivät viihdy koulussa, eivätkä koe voivansa vaikuttaa koulunkäyntiin. Perinteisen koulun käytännöt eivät myöskään enää vastaa nykyaikaisen tietoyhteiskunnan oppimiselle ja koulutuk-selle asettamiin haasteisiin. Uusi opetussuunnitelma on hyvä alku koulunkäynnin kehittämiseen. Hyvätkään ohjeet eivät kuitenkaan itsestään muutu koulun käy-tännöiksi. Tarvitaan tutkimusta koulun arjesta ja sen muutoksesta. On myös tärkeää kysyä, minkälaista muutosta halutaan ja mihin sillä pyritään.

Väitöskirjatutkimukseni kertoo matkastani opettajana, tutkijana ja opettajan-kouluttajana. Tutkimuksessani kehitän toimijuuskeskeisen pedagogiikan mallin. Malli perustuu kouluoppimisen kontekstin laajentamiselle ja se pyrkii yhdistä-mään oppimisen oppilaiden elämään ja yhteiskuntaan laajemmin.

Argumenttini perustuu kolmelle aineistolle. Väitöskirjan selkärangan muo-dostaa omasta opetuksestani alakoulun opettajana kerätyn video-aineiston ana-lyysi. Opettajana kehitin lapsikeskeistä ja dialogista opetusta, jonka avulla pyrin rikkomaan koulun ja ympäröivän yhteiskunnan välisiä rajoja. Yhdessä kanssa-kirjoittajieni kanssa olemme analysoineet kriittisesti pedagogisia käytäntöjäni. Näiden analyysien avulla kehitän pedagogisen mallin, jonka esitän tässä väitös-kirjan yhteenvedossa. Analysoin työssäni myös kahta muuta aineistoa, joissa en itse ole osallistujana. Ensimmäinen niistä käsittelee innovatiivista lukioprojektia, jonka tavoitteena oli kehittää lukiolaisten kansalaisuustaitoja ja toimijuutta. Opiskelijat saivat vaikuttaa kunnallispoliittiseen päätöksentekoon, joka koski kaupunkipyöräilyä. Lisäksi analysoimme kirjallisuudessa esitettyjä pedagogisia malleja kouluoppimisen kontekstin laajentamiseksi.

Käytän työssäni sosiokulttuurista ja toiminnanteoreettista viitekehystä. Työni pohjautuu transformatiiviseen ontologiaan. Siinä painotetaan yksilöiden kykyä vaikuttaa yhteisön normien, diskurssien ja toiminnan muotojen muodostumiseen. Tarkastelen oppimista prosessina, joka väistämättä sisältää kamppailuja siitä, mikä ymmärretään tiedoksi ja kenen tiedolla on merkitystä. Käytän analyysissä

erityisesti ekspansiivisen oppimisen teoriaa sekä kontekstin, toimijuuden ja hen-kilökohtaisen mielekkyyden käsitteitä.

Työn empiirinen aineisto koostuu pääasiassa videoiduista luokkahuonevuo-rovaikutustilanteista. Tätä aineistoa on analysoitu mikrotason vuorovaikutusana-lyysillä. Lisäksi analysoin opettajien ja lasten haastatteluja sekä dokumentteja.

Väitöskirjani tulokset painottavat pedagogiikan laajaa määrittelyä, kun tutki-taan ja suunnitellaan pedagogisia ratkaisuja kouluoppimisen kontekstin laajen-tamiseksi. Lisäksi tulokset osoittavat, kuinka kouluoppimisen kontekstia laajen-tava pedagogiikka tukee oppilaiden toimijuutta. Tulokset valottavat myös jännit-teitä ja haasteita, joita syntyy, kun kouluoppimisen konteksti laajenee.

Tuloksiin perustuen esitän työssäni toimijuuskeskeisen pedagogiikan mallin. Malli sisältää neljä periaatetta: (a) opetuksen perustuminen oppilaiden henkilö-kohtaiselle mielekkyydelle ja toimijuudelle, (b) opetuksen yhdistyminen koulun ulkopuolisiin toimintajärjestelmiin ja asiantuntijayhteisöihin, (c) koulun institu-tionaalisen kontekstin hallinta ja (d) pedagogiikka jatkuvana matkana.

Uudet perusopetuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet tekevät tämän väitöskir-jan hyvin ajankohtaiseksi. Elokuussa vuonna 2016 Suomessa otetaan käyttöön uudet opetussuunnitelman perusteet, jotka kannustavat opettajia tekemään oppi-laskeskeisiä pedagogisia kokeiluita ja viemään opetusta ulos luokasta. Tässä väitöstutkimuksessa olen kanssakirjoittajieni kanssa analysoinut kahta empiiristä tapausta, joiden voidaan nähdä olevan uusiin opetussuunnitelman perusteisiin kulminoituneen koulutuspolitiikan toteuttamista.

Tutkimukseni tulosten perusteella esitän suosituksia opettajille ja päättäjille siitä, minkälaisia asioita tulee ottaa huomioon, kun uusi opetussuunnitelma ote-taan käyttöön kouluissa. Tutkimus nostaa esiin jatkotutkimuksen aiheita siitä, miten toimijuuskeskeinen pedagogiikka vaikuttaa oppilaiden kehitykseen. Tä-män lisäksi se herättää uusia kysymyksiä, miten kouluopetuksen käytäntöjen kehittymistä voidaan tutkia.

Avainsanat: Expansiivinen oppiminen, Henkilökohtainen merkitys, Konteksti, Kouluoppiminen, Pedagogiikka, Toimijuus

Acknowledgments

I feel that I cannot claim this text as my own. I have been extremely fortunate to have been surrounded by so many amazing people whose thinking has inter-twined and mixed with mine to the extent that it is difficult to say where my thinking ends and others’ thinking begins. Not only have we given and received intellectual support from each other but what is as important, we have shared friendship.

First of all, I would like to express my greatest gratitude to my three supervi-sors, Kristiina Kumpulainen, Lasse Lipponen, and Annalisa Sannino. What a dream team of supervisors! You have not only allowed me to learn from three great minds; you also have shown me your generosity and wisdom both by giv-ing me the freedom to develop my own stance as a researcher and by providing me crucial guidance in times when I most needed you. You were there and be-lieved in me when I myself doubted my skills and ability. You have also opened all doors for me and supported me in becoming an independent scholar, a part of an international research community.

You all three have your own ways of doing research. It has not always been easy to put all of it together. But thanks to your open-mindedness, patience, and trust, I feel that we have been able to compile a remarkable synthesis of diverse sets of ideas. Kristiina, thank you for the sessions of writing together in Google Drive; it has been such a privilege to see you at work and learn. You have an amazing magic touch – those small but significant things that you do to a manu-script to let it fly. Thank you also for the joint trips and for all the wonderful conversations we have had. It has been an honor to have been treated as a peer by a scholar like you. Lasse – thank you for your friendship and mentorship that created a most solid ground for me to grow as a scholar. You have an amazing ability to listen and let others invent themselves what you already knew in the beginning. Already when I started my doctoral studies you made feel like an equal with such a brilliant scholar and teacher, like you are. Thank you for those critical remarks that were made as if in passing; those kinds of remarks that in the end change everything, for the better. Annalisa, thank you for your theoreti-cal and methodological profoundness, you did not let me pass with easy solu-tions. I never forget your passionate and caring supervision that challenged – and continues to challenge – me to strive for excellence. Your work has been a great inspiration for me; you have shown me a glimpse of what it means to change the very logic of my thought. I know I want to learn more.

Jaakko Hilppö – you were there in the beginning. You were always reading books several years before I found those same books. Your influence on my research has been without comparison. You are a great listener and have the

capability of making other people feel what they do is important. You have also been a great friend, someone who has made the academic work meaningful for me, something worth doing. It is too long time since we wrote together, sitting three days in the sofa of a conference hotel. Juhana Rantavuori – my critical thinking partner and extraordinary friend. You were always there when I needed someone to discuss my research or writing. Your advice has been invaluable! What would have I done without you and the long walks around Tervasaari! Giuseppe Ritella – thank you for the long theoretical discussions and your friendship! You are a wonderful person with whom I always enjoy working to-gether. Anna Rainio – you are one of the inspirational figures whose work influ-enced my decision to start to do research. Throughout my work you have been a role model. You are a great coauthor who always has razor-sharp insights. It has been a privilege to get to know you personally. Katariina Stenberg – the quality of your work as a teacher has always amazed me! This dissertation would not be what it is if I had not had the opportunities to collaborate with you in developing pedagogical insights. You are also wonderful co-researcher and friend.

I am grateful for the two reviewers of this work, Professor Anne Edwards from the University of Oxford, U.K. and Professor Sten Ludvigsen from the University of Oslo, whose invaluable comments helped me to rethink the key concepts of this work and push it one step further. I also thank all the reviewers and editors of the articles and book chapters for their work to improve the quali-ty of my writing and research.

Åsa Mäkitalo, Ola Erstad, Tania Zittoun, Sanne Akkerman, Yrjö Engeström, and Annika Lantz-Andersson – you have almost been my additional supervisors. Thank you so much for your support and interest in my work. I cannot exagger-ate how much it has meant to me.

There are several communities and research networks that have been crucial for me and my work in so many ways. I want to thank people in LinCS research center of University of Gothenburg as well as in Institute of Psychology and Education in University of Neuchâtel both of which I have visited several times. Both of these places feel like intellectual homes for me. I could not be more grateful for your generosity and hospitality. You have always made me feel like a welcome guest and friend. My thanks go also to the people in CRADLE re-search center and NordLAC network with whom I have shared so many enlight-ening discussions and seminars. You are great people!

I also want to thank the following people for their significant role in my doc-toral work (not in any particular order): Kirsti Lonka, Fritjof Sahlström, Leena Krokfors, Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Patrik Lilja, Per Linell, Roger Säljö, Thomas Hillman, Natalia Monjelat, Russell Francis, Jonas Linderoth, Mikaela Åberg, Kenneth Silseth, Øystein Gilje, Nathalie Muller Mirza, Elisa Cattaruza, Maarit Arvaja, Erik Boström, Crina Damsa, Peter Renshaw, Kreeta Niemi, Kari Kosonen, Louise Wilkinsson, Robin Danzak, Lotta Sjövall, Kalle Juuti, Hongda

Lin, Liubov Vetoskhina, Monica Lemos, Reijo Miettinen, Sami Paavola, Olli Vesterinen, Leila Rikabi-Sukkari, Laura Salo, Kaisa Kopisto, Varpu Tissari, Kreeta Niemi, Tuure Tammi, Maiju Paananen, Riikka Hohti, Topi Litmanen, Kaiju Kangas, Marjut Viilo, Jake McMullen, Jenny Martin, Anna-Maija Niemi, Eleonora Lundell, Mohsen Saatmand, Lauri Heikonen, Jenny Ros, Rupert Wegerif, Beatrice Ligorio, Sini Juuti, Anna Mikkola, Saara Salmi, Kathy von Duyke, Ana Marjanovich-Shane, Eugene Matusov, Liisa Karlsson, Liisa Tainio, Päivi Tynjälä, Sherice Clarke, Christina Siry, Laura Hirsto, Anna Stetsenko, and Thomas Regelski. In addition to these names, there are many others who have been very important for me. Lissu Lehtimaja made the amazing front cover pic-ture and Ilmo Anundi made the lovely drawings in Chapter 5.

I would also thank all the students (and their parents) and teachers and prin-cipals who have participated in this research or been around in one way or an-other. Without you this study would not have been possible. My former students – who are now turning adults – I hope taking part in this research was also an interesting experience for you and that it enriched your school work.

I am grateful to Doctoral Programme for Multi-Disciplinary Research on Learning Environments (OPMON), The Finnish Doctoral Programme in Educa-tion and Learning (FiDPEL), Emil Aaltonen Foundation, and Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation for financially supporting this thesis.

It is time to thank my friends and relatives for your support and for not for-getting me when I was buried under all the books and articles. My brother Mik-ko, I almost feel we did this work together. Thank you for being a thinking com-panion and trusted support. My mother Rauni, I am grateful for you for always supporting me in pursuing my own path and believing in me. You have been so important! I would like to thank my father Pertti who sadly and unexpectedly had to leave us too early. I wish you could have participated in my defense and seen me graduate. I always felt you were walking with me on this journey.

Lopuksi kaikkein suurin kiitos kuuluu perheelleni Kaisalle, Violalle ja Toi-volle, joille haluan omistaa tämän työn. Viola ja Toivo – vihdoin työ on (oikeasti!) valmis. En voisi olla onnellisempi, kun minulla on teidänlaisenne ihanat ja persoonalliset lapset. Ihailen joka päivä teidän intoanne ja taitojanne. Rakkaani Kaisa – ilman sinua ja sinun tukeasi en olisi ikinä saanut tätä työtä valmiiksi. Olen ikuisesti kiitollinen, että jaksoit kärsivällisesti tukea minua te-kemään työn loppuun asti, vaikka tiedän, että usein usko työn valmistumisesta oli koetuksella. Sen lisäksi, että olet tukenut minua niin monin tavoin kuin vain on mahdollista, sinun ajattelusi ja keskustelumme ovat tärkeä osa tämän työn sisältöä. En voi kuin ihailla viisauttasi ja olla onnellinen, että saan jakaa elämäni kanssasi. In Helsinki, 17th May 2016 Antti Rajala

List of original articles

This thesis is based on the following articles: 1. Rajala, A., Kumpulainen, K., Hilppö, J., Paananen, M., & Lipponen, L.

(2016). Connecting learning across school and out-of-school contexts: A review of pedagogical approaches. In O. Erstad, K. Kumpulainen, Å.Mäkitalo, K., P. Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt & T. Jóhannsdóttir (Eds.), Learning across contexts in the knowledge society (pp. 15–38). Sense publishers: Rotterdam.

2. Rajala, A., Hilppö, J., Lipponen, L., & Kumpulainen, K. (2013). Expand-

ing the chronotopes of schooling for the promotion of students' agency. In O. Erstad, & J. Sefton-Green (Eds.), Identity, community, and learning lives in the digital age (pp. 107–125). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Rajala, A. & Sannino A. (2015). Students’ deviations from a learning task:

An activity theoretical analysis. International Journal of Educational Research, 70, 31-46.

4. Rajala, A., Kumpulainen, K., Lipponen L., Rainio, A., & Hilppö, J. (2016).

Dealing with the contradiction of agency and control during dialogic teaching. Learning, Culture, & Social Interaction.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................. 7

LIST OF ORIGINAL ARTICLES ................................................................ 11

1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 15

1.1 Schools at a crossroads ............................................................................. 15

1.2 Sociocultural research addressing the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning ................................................................................................ 19

1.3 My journey of expanding the context of school learning ......................... 23

1.4 Outline of the thesis .................................................................................. 24

2 STUDENT AGENCY IN EXPANDING CONTEXTS OF SCHOOL LEARNING: A SOCIOCULTURAL AND ACTIVITY-THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE .......................................................................................... 25

2.1 Expanding the context of school learning ................................................. 25

2.2 Chronotope ................................................................................................ 28

2.3 Personal sense: A subjective perspective on instructional activity ........... 29

2.4 Agency ...................................................................................................... 30

2.5 Pedagogy ................................................................................................... 33

3 AGENCY-CENTERED PEDAGOGY ....................................................... 34

3.1 Promoting student agency in knowledge practices ................................... 34

3.2 Promoting student agency as relational engagement with other people ... 37

3.3 Promoting agency as the transformation of given practices in the classroom and beyond ..................................................................................... 39

4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...................................................................... 41

5 RESEARCH DESIGN ............................................................................. 42

5.1 The Forest and Animal projects: My own practice as a primary school teacher ............................................................................................................. 43

5.2 Bicycles on the Move! .............................................................................. 50

5.3 Review of pedagogical approaches presented in the literature ................. 53

5.4 Research ethics ......................................................................................... 54

6 MAIN FINDINGS .................................................................................. 56

6.1 Article I: Connecting learning across school and out-of-school contexts: A review of pedagogical approaches ................................................................... 56

6.2 Article II: Expanding the chronotopes of schooling for the promotion of students' agency ............................................................................................... 57

6.3 Article III: Students’ deviations from a learning task: An activity-theoretical analysis .......................................................................................... 59

6.4 Article IV: Dealing with the contradiction of agency and control during dialogic teaching .............................................................................................. 60

6.5 Summary of the main findings .................................................................. 62

7 GENERAL DISCUSSION ....................................................................... 70

7.1 An outline of an agency-centered pedagogy in expanding contexts of formal education .............................................................................................. 70

7.2 Implications for educational practice and policy ....................................... 76

7.3 Reflections on the journey and its continuation ........................................ 79

7.4 Openings .................................................................................................... 80

REFERENCES .......................................................................................... 84

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1 Introduction

The aim of this dissertation study is to develop an agency-centered pedagogical model for expanding the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society. I develop this model by analyzing firstly my own pedagogical practice as a primary school teacher, secondly an innovative project in an upper secondary school, and finally pedagogical approaches for expanding the context of school learning as presented in international research literature. I first contex-tualize my research with societal-level discussions about the future of education and, in particular, about recent developments in Finnish public schools. I then give a rough outline from a sociocultural and activity-theoretical perspective of the theoretical developments in research on learning that lend support to the suggested educational reforms. Finally, I frame this dissertation project as an expansive journey that I have undertaken as a teacher, researcher, and teacher educator. The chapter concludes with an outline of the thesis.

1.1 Schools at a crossroads School learning has long been criticized for being isolated from students’ lives and the wider society (Dewey, 1915; Whitehead, 1929; Vygotsky, 1926/1997; Freire, 1970). Despite the wide-ranging academic interest, these critiques have had relatively little impact on the practices of public schooling (Sarason, 1993; Tyack & Cuban, 1993; Hubbard, Mehan & Stein, 2003; Salminen, 2012). Even today, classroom interactions around the world are largely dominated by teacher-controlled interaction patterns (Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mehan, 1979) that leave little room for students to integrate their personal interests and knowledge into the instruction (see also Gutiérrez et al, 1995; Moll et al., 1992; Kumpulainen et al., 2011). The most important structuring resource of school instruction is still the textbook (Miettinen, 1990, 1999; Karvonen et al., in press; Vitikka, 2009; Layton, 1999). According to these critics, the problem is not textbooks in them-selves but the role that school texts acquire as the object of instruction; students are often required to reproduce the contents of the textbooks in one form or an-other instead of using these contents for making sense of and orienting in the world (Dewey, 1898; Dewey & Childs, 1933; Whitehead, 1929; see also Miet-tinen, 1999; Engeström, 1987; Roth & Barton, 2004). In addition, school learn-ing largely relies on fostering external motivation in students through an empha-sis on grades and measured success (Roth, 2015; Engeström, Engeström, & Sun-tio, 2012).

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Despite the immense stability of the social structure of schooling, recent so-cial, economic, and technological developments are widening the gap between schools and the surrounding societies so much as to challenge the foundations of public education. Conventional educational practices are hard-pressed to deal with the challenges that contemporary knowledge societies pose for learning and education as lifelong and lifewide processes (Ito et al., 2013; Kumpulainen & Sefton-Green, 2012; Erstad et al., 2016; Ludvigsen et al., 2010). Firstly, young people appear less committed to school learning than previous generations, and many are investing their energy in other contexts (Säljö, 2004; Ito et al., 2010). The challenge of making school learning more relevant and meaningful for stu-dents is increasingly recognized as an acute problem or even as a crisis of schooling in many countries (FNBE, 2014; Lemke, 2001; Salmela-Aro et al., in press). Secondly, the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity among students brought about by globalization and migration is challenging the normative defi-nitions of what counts as knowledge and knowing in schools (Hjörne, van der Aalsvoort, & de Abreu, 2012; Gonzales et al., 2005; Heath, 1983; Mehmeti & Perret-Clermont, 2015). Thirdly, new kinds of digital tools and virtual spaces are profoundly transforming social interactions and learning practices (Lantz-Andersson et al., 2013; Drotner, 2008). Fourthly, conventional education is not adequately preparing students to tackle the complex and contested problems that students will face as future citizens and employees (Edwards, 2010; Zeidler & Nichols, 2009; Dumont, Istance, & Benavides, 2010; Binkley et al., 2012). The-se social, cultural and technological demands have aroused a great deal of confu-sion as well as educational and political debate concerning how schools should be defined and developed in this century (Biesta, 2013).

Globally, the dominant response to the demands of contemporary knowledge societies has been to reform schools by tightening the control over teachers and students (Sahlberg, 2011; Ravitch, 2011; Biesta, 2009). This reform agenda, named the global education reform movement, is associated with increasing standardization and test-based accountability policies that decrease the degrees of freedom for the teachers and students to the minimum (Sahlberg, 2012). This involves reducing learning and education to a technical matter of the measure-ment and comparison of educational outcomes; consequently, less attention is devoted to the question of purpose in education (Biesta, 2009). In line with many others, I argue that this response is not likely to resolve the crisis of education in a generative way but instead is probably making the situation worse. A major problem is the emergence of unproductive testing cultures that narrow the cur-riculum down to what is tested (Nichols & Berliner, 2007; Renshaw, 2013), undermining the relevance and validity of students’ personal and cultural knowledge (see also, Mehmeti, 2015; Serder & Jakobsson, 2015; Perret-Clermont, Perret, & Bell, 1991). The testing cultures give rise to narrow and abstract professional categorizations of students that make it more difficult for

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teachers to recognize and build on the full potential of their students (Sannino, 2010; Virkkunen et al., 2012; Renshaw, 2013; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). Final-ly, the climate of control and competition produced by high-stakes testing cre-ates an educational structure that subverts the initiative of students – and of teachers (Matusov et al., 2015; Hargreaves, 2003).

In this dissertation study, I argue in favor of an alternative approach for ad-dressing the challenges which contemporary knowledge societies pose for public education that does not involve excessive control and assessment of the students and teachers. In doing this, I align myself with recent influential initiatives emerging from different parts of the world that seek to transform formal educa-tion and expand the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society (Banks et al., 2007; Ito et al., 2013; Kumpulainen et al., 2011). The pro-ponents of these initiatives build on advances in research on learning that illumi-nate the educational value of expanding the context of school learning by con-necting learning across school and out-of-school contexts. Here, learning is un-derstood as an integral aspect of living in different sociocultural contexts, not as something that takes place exclusively in formal education (Akkerman & van Eijck, 2013; Hull & Schultz, 2001). This alternative educational approach is gaining increasing momentum not only among researchers (for reviews of re-search, see Bronkhorst & Akkerman, forthcoming; Hogg, 2011; Hull & Schulz, 2001) but also among policy-makers (Dumont, Istance, & Benavides, 2010; Binkley et al., 2012; FNBE, 2014; Ouakrim-Soivio, Rinkinen, & Karjalainen, 2015).

Finland and its public schooling represent a fertile ground for studying and developing pedagogical approaches for expanding the context of school learning for two reasons. Firstly, during the past decade, the Finnish educational authori-ties have supported and invested significantly in funding initiatives and projects that address the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning (Manninen et al., 2007; Rajala et al., 2010; Kumpulainen et al., 2011; Smeds et al., 2010; Ra-jala et al., 2011; Thornberg et al., 2011; Mikkola et al., 2011; Krokfors et al., 2015; see also Peterson, in press). These developments have culminated in the new National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (FNBE, 2014), which en-courages teachers to experiment with student-centered pedagogies and to take learning out of the classroom. In an interview for an external report, Director Jorma Kauppinen of the National Board of Education explained the underlying rationale of the new curriculum reform: “It may be that students’ lives are here, and school learning is here. The school’s meaning and purpose is to somehow connect that” (Peterson, in press, p. 45). Secondly, the Finnish education system provides the teachers in comprehensive school with the greatest freedom from evaluative control and testing in Europe (EURYDICE, 2004). This is important for my argument because, according to a literature review by Bronkhorst and Akkerman (forthcoming), the degree of freedom of teachers is the main underly-

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ing condition for supporting continuity in learning across school and non-school contexts. Against the growing international tide, the Finnish education system has so far avoided the standardization of school learning and test-based account-ability policies associated with the global education reform movement (Sahl-berg, 2011; Simola, 2015). Instead, the Finnish education system is decentral-ized and operates on trust-based governance (Miettinen, 2012); the basic princi-ples of education policies are equity, flexibility, creativity, teacher professional-ism, and trust (Sahlberg, 2007).

Yet it appears that Finnish teachers do not take full advantage of the peda-gogical freedom that the educational system provides them with. Research in classroom interactions and practices in Finnish schools suggest that fairly tradi-tional teacher-centered and textbook-centered pedagogical approaches have been widely used (Lahelma & Gordon, 2003; Norris et al., 1996). An example is the report of a British team of researchers (Norris et al., 1996), who observed class-room interactions in 50 comprehensive schools with a reputation of being good or innovative schools. The researchers found that from school to school the les-sons were almost identical; frontal teaching of the entire group of students was the most common teaching method, and student-centered or individualized methods were rare (see also Simola, 2005). However, to my knowledge, recent research on the topic does not exist (see also Simola, 2015). Perhaps partly as a consequence of the use of traditional pedagogical approaches, Finnish students appear not to enjoy school, despite being ranked highly in international assess-ments of student achievement (OECD, 2010, 2014). For example, in a PISA survey, fewer Finnish students were found to like school than in most other countries (OECD, 2013). Moreover, in a recent large-scale survey, almost half of the sixth-grade pupils reported experiencing a lack of meaning in relation to school and having adopted a cynical orientation toward schooling (Salmela-Aro et al., in press). Furthermore, although Finnish students are ranked highly in societal knowledge and competence in international comparisons, they do not take part in politics or public affairs in general (Schulz et al., 2010).

Tackling the problem of students’ disengagement is one of the main goals of the latest curriculum reform in Finland (FNBE, 2014; see also Peterson, in press; Ouakrim-Soivio, Rinkinen, & Karjalainen, 2015). However, reforming school instruction is a complex task that can only succeed by involving the teachers and schools as contributors to the process, which is evidenced by the long history of failed school reforms (Hubbard, Mehan & Stein, 2006; Tyack & Cuban, 1997; Kennedy, 2005). From this perspective, how schools change reforms is perhaps a more important research focus than how reforms change schools (Tyack & Cuban, 1997). Based on his empirical study of official Finnish school discourse over three decades from the 1960s, Simola (1998; see also 2015) characterized the reform discourse in Finland as wishful rationalism associated with the persis-tence of traditional schoolwork despite promises to deliver personalized instruc-

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tion. The discourse of wishful rationalism focuses on decontextualized pedagog-ical goals and means by neglecting the institutional context of the instructional activity (Simola, 1998).

In sum, these broader societal and educational policy concerns point to the need to generate empirical research knowledge about pedagogical practices and experimentation in actual classrooms that address the gap between students’ worlds and the school world. Despite the laudable ambitions of the ongoing edu-cational reform in Finland, the current policy discourse and the underlying vi-sion of what school education should look like in this century appears to remain at a fairly abstract level (see also Simola, 2015). To avoid remaining at the level of wishful thinking when addressing the demands of the current knowledge soci-ety, it is imperative that policymakers understand the institutional and sociocul-tural conditions teachers and students inhabit in their everyday lives in class-rooms and beyond.

In the next section, I give a rough overview of the advances in sociocultural and activity-theoretical research on learning during the past decades. I build on this research to further develop my argument on the need to expand the context of school learning beyond the classroom.

1.2 Sociocultural research addressing the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning In the 1980s research in cognitive anthropology started to accumulate empirical evidence of discrepancies between learning in and outside of school (Scribner, 1984; Saxe, 1988, Hutchins, 1995; Lave, 1988). Learning in school was charac-terized as the individual and decontextualized manipulation of symbols, in con-trast to the socially shared and contextualized reasoning occurring in out-of-school settings (Resnick, 1987). More recent research in this tradition has cor-roborated the early findings and foregrounded the narrow definitions of cogni-tive activity in school compared to how it is defined in everyday out-of-school settings (McDermott, 2013; Esmonde et al., 2013; Stevens, 2013; Callanan et al., 2013; Zimmerman & Bell, 2012). Similarly, research on informal literacies par-allels the cognitive anthropological research on discrepancies between school and non-school learning. This research has investigated literacy practices in school and non-school settings (Heath, 1983; Lee, 2001), literacy as a compo-nent of religious practice and other non-school activities (Scribner & Cole, 1981), and the relations between literacy, culture, identity, and power (Street, 1995). The findings emerging from this research point to narrow definitions of literacy in school and show that the discontinuities between school and non-school learning are more evident for non-dominant than for dominant cultural groups (Heath, 1983; Lee, 2001; Gutiérrez et al., 1995; Moll & Greenberg, 1990). More recent studies have focused on informal digital literacies and fore-

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grounded a digital divide separating young people’s open-ended and shifting engagements with digital tools and new media outside school and the more structured engagement in school (Ito et al., 2013; Buckingham, 2007; Hietajärvi et al., 2014; Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013). Taken together, the research on in-formal learning points to a need to broaden the canonical definitions of what counts as literacy, mathematics, and science in schools. Notwithstanding these advances, there are also downsides to emphasizing a sharp distinction between school and non-school contexts of learning. Invoking a dichotomy between the two types of contexts may result in an overly simplified view that romanticizes one end of the dichotomy and condemns the other (Engeström, 1998; Hull & Schultz, 2001).

The dichotomous view of school and non-school contexts has been overcome in research focusing on the negotiation of continuity and discontinuity in learn-ing across contexts (Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013; Akkerman & van Eijck, 2013; Barron, 2006). This research has shown that individual students experi-ence boundaries and continuity across learning settings in varied ways (Phelan et al., 1991; Roth & Erstad, 2016; Marsico, Komatsu, & Iannaccone, 2013). Phelan and colleagues (1991) showed that making transitions across family, peer, and school worlds was smoother for some secondary students than for others because of the close alignment in culture and values between school and the worlds of their family and peers. For underrepresented students, making the transition between school and their personal worlds was more problematic. Another find-ing of this strand of research is that for understanding school learning in its full complexity, it is necessary to shift attention from learning in the classroom to students’ overall ecologies of learning (Barron, 2006; Crowley & Jacobs, 2002; Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013; Barron et al., 2013). Roth and Erstad (2016; see also Roth, 2016) showed that the negotiation of contradictory social positions in and outside school had a large impact on how Norwegian adolescent immigrant girls conceived of themselves as learners. Barron (2006) showed how adoles-cents’ self-initiated activities mediated their learning about digital technology within and across multiple life settings. The students played an active role in structuring and extending their learning in school, for example, by personalizing the assigned school tasks through creative interpretation. The teachers were able to support their students’ self-initiated learning journeys by recognizing and capitalizing on the students’ expertise. Moje et al. (2004) showed that adolescent minority students did not use their personal experiences in school despite the direct bearing these experiences had on the science they were learning in the classroom. In short, from a student perspective, continuity and discontinuity between contexts of learning is a product of complex interactions between the students and their overall learning ecologies.

Recently, a rapidly growing number of pedagogical approaches has been de-signed, enacted, and researched to create continuity in learning (Bronkhorst &

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Akkerman, forthcoming; Hogg, 2011; Hull & Schulz, 2001). An influential pio-neering approach was the funds of knowledge approach, which aimed to pro-mote social justice and inclusive educational practices for minority students (Moll et al., 1992; Vélez-Ibáñez & Greenberg, 1992). The notion of funds of knowledge refers to the bodies of knowledge and skills that children and their families develop in everyday practices to meet their needs in their particular social and economic circumstances (Gonzales et al., 2005). The funds of knowledge perspective focuses primarily on the strengths and resources of chil-dren and their communities, contrary to a deficit perspective that depicts diverse students as deficient or lacking in knowledge and resources (Delpit, 1995; Lad-son-Billig, 1994). In the funds of knowledge approach, the teachers visited the homes and neighborhoods of students whose cultural and socioeconomic back-grounds diverged from their own. The intention was to learn about the everyday lived contexts of the students and their families. The teachers then capitalized on the insights that they had gained from the home visits to reorganize their class-room instruction. The notion of funds of knowledge helped the teachers to avoid reducing their students’ lives to abstract cultural traits and to shift the focus to the cultural repertoires that had developed in children’s actual involvement in cultural practices (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003).

In further research, the funds of knowledge approach has been applied to the teaching of a range of curriculum areas, including literacy and language arts, history and social studies, mathematics, and science (Hogg, 2011). Over the years, the original definition of the funds of knowledge concept has broadened from its initial focus on adult practices and social worlds to also include the ex-pertise and interests that children and young people develop (Moje et al., 2004; Barton & Tan, 2009; Zipin, 2009; Thomson & Hall, 2008; Warren et al., 2001; Kamberlis & Wehunt, 2012). Accordingly, in many of the more recent versions of this pedagogical approach, the non-dominant students themselves have been invited to bring aspects of their lives to be discussed and explored in the class (e.g., Zipin, 2009; Barton & Tan, 2009; Rosebery et al., 2010; Varelas & Pappas, 2006).

Another significant conceptual framework used in the research promoting in-clusive instructional practice involves the concept of hybridity (Gutiérrez et al., 1995, 1999; Gutiérrez, 2008; Moje et al., 2004; Bhapha, 1994; Soja, 1996). Hy-bridity accounts for the creation of new hybrid cultural forms in productive en-counters between cultural practices. Classroom interactions and practices have been designed to foster hybrid encounters between non-dominant students’ worlds and the world of school. In such transformative pedagogical approaches, the tensions between different social and cultural worlds are harnessed for their expansive potential to radically restructure teaching and learning practices (Gutierrez et al., 1999). Taking students’ diverse everyday sensemaking practic-es (Kamberlis & Wehunt, 2012; Warren et al., 2001; Rosebery et al., 2010) or

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literacy practices (Solsken et al., 2001) seriously has enabled contesting and expanding the canonical understanding of school subjects. In short, hybrid dis-course practices have the potential to disrupt unequal power relations that favor dominant cultural groups and redefine what counts as legitimate ways of know-ing and being in classrooms in a more equitable way (Gutiérrez, 2008).

In recent years, the funds of knowledge and hybridity conceptual frameworks have been used to study and design pedagogical approaches whose underlying pedagogical rationales diverge from the original rationale of promoting social justice and inclusive educational practices. For example, some pedagogical ap-proaches have incorporated new online spaces and digital tools to create hybrid spaces for meaning-making where children and young people’s out-of-school identities, interests, and discourses can intersect with those promoted in school (Lantz-Anderson et al., 2013; Erstad, 2014; Vasbø, Silseth, & Erstad, 2014; Kumpulainen & Mikkola, 2014; Vigmo & Lantz-Anderson, 2014). In these ped-agogical approaches, the students are seen not so much as representatives of non-dominant social or cultural groups but as individuals struggling to craft co-herent identities in and across increasingly diverse and fragmented learning ecologies (Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013; Kumpulainen et al., 2011; The New London Group, 1996; Barron, 2006). In addition, fostering robust disciplinary learning has motivated the development of pedagogical approaches to connect student learning across contexts in other subject areas, such as science education (Engle, 2006; Scott, Mortimer, & Amettler, 2011), music (Green, 2005), lan-guage (Wiseman, 2011; Wong et al., 2010; Dyson, 1993), mathematics (Cribbs & Linder, 2013), and sports (Enright & Mary O'Sullivan, 2012).

To summarize, pedagogical approaches that expand the context of school learning have been studied, designed, and enacted to address a rich variety of distinct rationales. The differences between the rationales are likely to be re-flected in how learning and instruction are organized, what tools are used, and what is eventually learned. Because earlier reviews of research on the topic have focused on pedagogical approaches that promote social justice and inclusive educational practices which somewhat disregard the other pedagogical rationales (Hogg, 2011; Hull & Schultz, 2002; Banks et al., 2007)1, a more comprehensive overview of research is needed that would cover the field of research more broadly. Such a review of research is needed to build a more coherent under-standing of the nature of pedagogical practices that connect learning across con-texts and their underlying rationales. A consideration of pedagogical rationales is essential because talking about learning without a reference to the purpose for which something is learned is arguably meaningless (Biesta, 2009, 2013;

1 The forthcoming literature review about continuity in learning across school and out-of-school contexts by Bronkhorst and Akkerman (forthcoming) does not explicitly ad-dress pedagogical rationales.

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Daniels, 2007). Focusing on pedagogical rationales foregrounds schools as sites of societal and political struggle where multiple interest groups, ranging from students and their parents to the representatives of working life and transnational organizations such as the OECD or UNESCO, aspire to redefine what schooling should entail in this century.

1.3 My journey of expanding the context of school learning This dissertation project is about my journey as a teacher, researcher, and teach-er educator to develop a pedagogical model for expanding the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society. The journey started at the end of 2007 when I was working as the teacher of a third-grade class in a Finnish comprehensive school. Around that time, I had just graduated as a primary school teacher and had become involved in the research and development project Learning Bridges: Learning and Teaching at the Intersection of Formal and Informal Learning Environments (2008–2010, Kumpulainen et al., 2011). The project was based in the University of Helsinki and funded by the Finnish Minis-try of Education and Culture. Its aim was to develop and research pedagogical approaches and models for bridging learning across school and non-school con-texts. Inspired by the ideas of the Learning Bridges project, I started to develop student-centered and dialogic pedagogy and to do research on my own pedagog-ical practices. Together with the project researchers, we collected video data of the social interactions among the students as well as between them and their teachers (including myself). In 2009, I left my job as a teacher and was em-ployed by the Learning Bridges project as a full-time researcher.

My argument draws upon analyses of three data sources. The backbone of the dissertation study is a retrospective analysis of the video data collected from my own pedagogical practice as a teacher (Articles III and IV). Together with my coauthors, I engaged in a critical analysis of my pedagogical practices. These analyses contribute to a pedagogical model that I outline in this summary. To enrich the model, I build on the analyses my coauthors and I conducted on two additional datasets, in which I was not myself involved as a participant. The first of these is from an innovative project, Bicycles on the Move!, that took place in a Finnish upper secondary school (Article II). The project aimed to develop stu-dents’ citizenship and agency through involving them in efforts to influence local political decision-making concerning cycling. Bicycles on the Move! was part of a larger project funded by the National Board of Education that was se-lected to represent Finnish “innovative learning environments” in an OECD-sponsored international evaluation study. The National Board of Education ap-pointed the Learning Bridges project to conduct that study regarding the three Finnish cases (Rajala et al., 2011). For this dissertation study, we reanalyzed the materials collected from Bicycles on the Move! Finally, my coauthors and I

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conducted a literature review of pedagogical approaches that sought to expand the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society. The anal-ysis of the research literature has helped me to enrich the pedagogical model developed in this dissertation by providing an international perspective on the topic.

Thus, in this dissertation study I investigate my journey of developing school pedagogy to address the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning and outline the pedagogical model that emerges as an intermediate outcome of this journey. As the study will show, this has been an expansive journey that has helped me to reconceptualize my understanding of instructional activity and its object, the student.

1.4 Outline of the thesis In Chapter 2, I present the sociocultural and activity-theoretical conceptual framework that I draw upon to inform my analyses. In particular, I build on the theory of expansive learning and the concepts of context, agency, and personal sense. In Chapter 3, I provide an overview of the literature on pedagogical ap-proaches and the models for promoting students’ agency. In particular, I pay attention to how and to what extent these approaches and models conceptualize school learning and student agency as expansively distributed across space and time. This review of the literature complements the literature review on peda-gogical approaches to connecting students’ learning across school and out-of-school contexts, which constitutes one of the sub-studies of this dissertation study. In Chapter 4, I present the research questions of the study. In Chapter 5, I introduce the research sites and the collection and construction of the data. I also discuss the methods of data analysis. The main findings of the dissertation study are discussed in Chapter 6. Finally, in Chapter 7, based on these findings, I will construct and discuss the agency-centered pedagogical model for expanding the context of school learning. I also discuss the limitations of this research and suggest avenues for further research.

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2 Student agency in expanding contexts of school learning: A sociocultural and activity-theoretical perspective

This dissertation study builds on and develops a sociocultural and activity-theoretical conceptual framework for the study of learning and education (Engeström, 2015a; Kumpulainen et al., 2011; Vygotsky, 1987, 1998). In this framework, learning is seen as an integral aspect of social activity in and with the world; what is learned is constituted in and through the activity in which the learners participate and to which they contribute (Greeno, Moore, & Smith, 1993; Lemke, 1997; Lave, 1993). Of particular interest for the purposes of this dissertation is the learning that takes place as a movement across boundaries between multiple communities and the social practices of children and young people’s lives (Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013; Kumpulainen et al., 2011; Engeström, 1996). In today’s societies, this form of learning is becoming in-creasingly more important, as schools struggle to fulfill their role as providers of pre-defined routes towards adulthood, citizenship, and working life (The New London Group, 1996; Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013; Ludvigsen et al., 2010).

I posit a transformative ontology (Stetsenko, 2008) that not only focuses on how individuals are enculturated into existing social practice through participa-tion but emphasizes how individuals contribute to the transformation of the norms, discourses, and forms of activity of their communities (Kumpulainen & Renshaw, 2007; Engeström, 2011). Thus, learning is a contested process that inevitably involves a struggle over what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts. This perspective foregrounds tensions and conflicts as ob-jects of empirical analysis, and contrasts with a common way of framing learn-ing as simply a technical matter of effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness and efficiency underlie the initiatives that advocate for an “evidence-based” educational policy based on the measurement of educational outcomes and their correlation with educational input (Kumpulainen & Renshaw, 2007). A problem with such a framing of learning is that effectiveness is an instrumental value that only concerns the capability of education to bring about given ends; the question of whether these purposes are desirable and for whom is often given less atten-tion (Biesta, 2009).

2.1 Expanding the context of school learning My conceptualization of the expanding context of school learning diverges from the common understanding of context as a container for activity or as something

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that simply surrounds activity (see also Goodwin & Duranti, 1992; Cole, 1996; Van Oers, 1998; Rajala & Akkerman, submitted). Instead, in line with Yrjö Engeström (2009), I hold that human activity creates its own dynamically chang-ing context. Just as a rope is composed of multiple fibers, context can be seen as being woven together from the multiple threads of action that realize a joint ac-tivity (Cole, 1996; McDermott, 1993). The actions become meaningful and un-derstandable in relation to the social activity of which they are a part. Thus, for example, the physical setting in which an activity takes place does not constitute the context for that activity in any simple or predetermined way but can become woven into the activity in multiple ways. A mundane element of a physical set-ting, such as a wall, can serve multiple purposes for different activities even for the same individual: an object to be created when building a house, a tool that is used to rearrange living space, or a designated space defining the division of labor between family members (Engeström, 1996).

In these terms, I define instructional activity as object-oriented and institu-tionally stabilized social formations that are realized through situated actions (Engeström, 1987). Actions and interactions are mediated by cultural tools that have both material and semiotic dimensions (Cole, 1996; Wertsch et al., 1993); the cultural resources and tools that people activate and mobilize to reach their goals shape the range and structure of their actions and interactions (Vygotsky, 1978). Moreover, instructional activity is socially mediated by the division of labor, community, and rules (Engeström, 1998). In classroom interactions, for example, often-implicit discursive norms and scripts define repertoires of appro-priate actions and interpretive resources (Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Gutierrez et al., 1995).

The most important component of an activity is its object; the object gives an activity meaning and sense and is what makes one activity differ from another (Leontiev, 1978, 1981). The object of a given activity defines its purpose and the horizon of possible actions (Engeström, 1998). For example, if the object of the instructional activity is for the students to acquire routine knowledge and proce-dural skills to perform well in tests, the scope of their appropriate actions is more limited than for other students for whom the object of activity is the generative use of concepts and principles (Greeno & Engeström, 2014). Conventionally, the object of instructional activity is the written or verbal school text, displayed in textbooks and in teachers’ talk. Thus, the authorized text replaces everyday problems and phenomena from the students’ lifeworlds or the wider society as the object of learning (Leander, 2002; Engeström, 1994). An empirical example of how the object of the instructional activity shapes students’ actions is Säljö and Wyndhamn’s study (1993; see also Perret-Clermont, Perret, & Bell, 1991), which showed that when students were tasked with determining the cost of a letter in a mathematics lesson and a social science lesson, the students’ cognitive actions significantly differed in response to the two different framings of the

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task. In the social science lesson, the students mostly used their everyday reason-ing to read the cost from the table of postage rates with ease, whereas in the mathematics lessons they predominantly started calculating and came up with inadequate solutions.

The institutional context and systemic organization of a school activity con-tribute to the ways in which students interpret tasks. For example, time and space in school are patterned and organized in a peculiar way (Lemke, 2004; Jackson, 1968). Time is standardized and segmented in weekly schedules, and activities happen in well-circumscribed, crowded spaces within specified time segments. Similarly, Jackson (1968) lists three main aspects of the structure of schooling that are pervasive in students’ experience (see also Simola, 2015). First, since classrooms are crowded places, students must deal with many kinds of delay, the denial of desire, interruption, and social distraction. The crowded condition means that movement and speech are strictly controlled and managed. Second, students’ performance and actions are under constant evaluation by the teacher and their peers. Third, classroom interactions are characterized by sharp differences in authority between the students and teacher. In sum, aspects of everyday life in the classroom that are taken for granted constitute the substance of students’ educational experience, and hence are essential for students’ inter-pretation of their tasks.

The notion of expansive learning is important for my argument. Expansive learning accounts for a course of actions and interactions that results in the trans-formation of social practices (Engeström, 1987). Expansion usually begins with the questioning of an existing social practice and is followed by critical analysis, modeling of new forms of activity, the implementation of and reflection on changes, and eventually the consolidation of the new practice. Expansive learn-ing signifies a qualitative transformation of an activity and the reconceptualiza-tion of its object; it involves learning what does not yet exist. In the theory of expansive learning, contradictions – manifested as historically evolving and systemic tensions and conflicts in an activity – are seen as a driving force of transformation (Engeström & Sannino, 2011). The change of social practice is seen to evolve from individual actions that deviate from accepted and normative courses of conduct and gradually become the new established norm (Ilyenkov, 1982; Engeström, 1999; Engeström, Rantavuori, & Kerosuo, 2013). Thus, con-flicts and disruptions as well as student resistance are regarded as potentially generative indications of opportunities for a constructive change of the instruc-tional activity. Hakkarainen (2009; see also Ritella & Hakkarainen, 2012) sug-gests that spontaneously emerging expansive learning processes could explain why some teachers have been able to develop successful technologically mediat-ed inquiry cultures in their classrooms. Such processes, Hakkarainen argues, involve collaborative work with students and researchers striving to iteratively

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and continuously transform prevailing knowledge practices toward more innova-tive ones.

In particular, this dissertation study focuses on the spatial and temporal ex-pansion of the context of school learning. Such an expansion is indicated in at-tempts to connect students’ learning in school to their learning, concerns, and social practices outside school (Hull & Schultz, 2001; Kumpulainen et al., 2011). By “expansion of the context of school learning”, I refer to a mutually transformative boundary crossing between the instructional activity and social practices outside school (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011). Expansion is distin-guished from a mere extension (Engeström et al., 2003); instructional activity can, for example, be routinely extended to students’ homes without any signifi-cant expansion of the instructional activity, for example, when students are as-signed homework (Hughes & Greenhough, 2008). In contrast to the mere exten-sion of instructional activity in space and time, expansion of the context of school learning can involve working with objects across multiple lessons, di-verse contexts, and extended periods of time (Engeström & Greeno, 2014; Engeström, Puonti, & Seppänen, 2003; Hakkarainen, 2010).

From the definition of context as being woven together by the activity itself, it follows that school learning can be expanded across times, spaces, and com-munities without physically leaving the classroom (see also Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2010; Engle, 2006; Kumpulainen & Mikkola, 2014; Lantz-Anderson et al., 2013; Kamberelis & Wehunt, 2012). Gutiérrez and her colleagues’ re-search (e.g., 1995, 1999) on hybrid learning practices is an illustrative example. Their studies foreground the negotiation of diversity, as well as the encounters and collisions between diverse cultural and linguistic practices in urban multi-cultural classrooms. In this research, hybridity accounts for the improvisational negotiation of meanings and the production of new cultural forms of dialogue. In hybrid interactional spaces, discourses and practices of schooling can produc-tively intersect and merge with those of students’ everyday life.

2.2 Chronotope In one of the articles of this dissertation study, I use the concept of chronotope as an analytic tool to unpack the temporal and spatial dimensions of the expanding context of school learning. The concept of chronotope originates in the literary analyses of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), and it was originally used to describe the contextual grounding of dramatic events in a literary narrative, such as a novel. In this context, different chronotopes correspond to literary genres. Chronotopes conceptualize space and time as intrinsically interconnected. Moreover, space and time are not seen as neutral abstractions but as varying in quality and im-bued with meaning, values, and ideology (Morson & Emerson, 1990).

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In educational research, the scope of the chronotope has been extended to the analysis of the contextual grounding of discourse and activities in educational settings (Brown & Renshaw, 2006; Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2010; Ligorio & Ritella, 2010; Ritella, Ligorio, & Hakkarainen, 2015). Lemke (2004) defines chronotopes as “typical patterns of organization of and across activities in space and time as well as defining features of a culture or a subculture, and of commu-nities of practice.” Thus, chronotopes characterize the implicit contextual under-pinnings of instructional activity that provide students with varying opportunities and constraints to act upon social and material worlds (Kumpulainen & Lippo-nen, 2010; Matusov, 2015a).

A chronotopic analysis can shed light on the dynamically shifting and con-tested contexts of school learning. Brown and Renshaw (2006) showed that time-space configurations resulted in complex negotiations of established and emergent chronotopes when a novel pedagogical approach was introduced in an Australian elementary mathematics classroom. For example, one of the students resisted the teacher’s attempts to develop a flexible use of classroom space that disrupted the conventional boundary between teacher and student spaces. Lean-der (2001) examined the joint reflections of a student group, their teachers, and parent volunteers on a field trip, showing that multiple past, present, and imag-ined future time-spaces were invoked in the participants’ discourse. In this dis-course, these time-space contexts interacted and inter-animated one another, and new meanings and action possibilities were created as a result. For example, a parent volunteer gave an emotional speech in which she encouraged the students to relate the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. to what could happen in their personal lives. This speech contrasted with that of the teacher who in her speech privileged the institutional time-space of the school. In their study of Canadian indigenous students’ participation in an environmental education pro-ject, van Eijck and Roth (2010) used chronotope to foreground sociocultural tensions in how place was construed in a dialogue between scientific and indige-nous voices. They showed how these tensions could both contribute to the expe-rience of marginalization and result in a negotiation of difference and the crea-tion of new learning opportunities and hybrid forms of activity. In all, these works demonstrate that chronotopes may compete and form a dialogic relation with each other (Morson & Emerson, 1990; Bakhtin, 1981).

2.3 Personal sense: A subjective perspective on instruc-tional activity Students relate to classroom instruction by elaborating on their personal sense of it in the course of their interactions with the teacher, the institutional context, the materials, and other students (Leontiev, 1978). While understanding that person-al sensemaking is a continual process, in one of the articles of this dissertation

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study, I focus on those moments when an elaboration of the students’ personal sense of instruction is made visible in classroom interactions. By “elaboration of personal sense,” I refer to a social activity in which students connect the contents of the classroom instruction to their reality, knowledge, and relationships. The elaboration of personal sense, therefore, accounts for an expansion of the context of school learning, while the range of personal meanings that students can in-voke across spaces, times, and communities is expanded as they make sense of the instructional activity.

In school, the curriculum, textbooks, and the teacher’s voice are usually con-sidered the key sources of meaning, but students also appropriate meanings, even disciplinary meanings, in their everyday life outside of school. If the mean-ings associated with classroom instruction do not resonate with students’ lives, they probably interpret them as uninteresting, irrelevant, or even nonsensical. Overcoming such a discrepancy between sense and meaning is an expansive process that can result in the creation of new meanings and experiences that account for personal meaningfulness (Liberali, 2009; Arvaja, 2015). However, when the discrepancy is maintained, students may engage in resistant or disrup-tive behavior (Gutierrez et al., 1995).

Despite its importance as an aspect of students’ holistic learning, fostering students’ elaboration of their personal sense of classroom instruction is an elu-sive instructional goal for teachers. Personal sense cannot be taught, but it can emerge as the outcome of an educational process that engages students with the manifold contexts of their lives and permits them to create new contexts for making sense of their experiences (Leontiev, 2013). In other words, student agency in this sense becomes observable as they elaborate on their personal sense of classroom instruction.

2.4 Agency During the last decade, the concept of agency has become very popular in educa-tional research, practice, and policy discourses (Eteläpelto et al., 2013; Matusov et al., 2015). In these discourses, agency has been primarily associated with positive connotations, such as purposiveness, freedom, and creativity.

Despite the popularity of agency, providing it a precise definition has been an elusive goal for researchers (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Rainio, 2010; Arnold & Clarke, 2014; Doyle, 2015). In psychology (e.g., Bandura, 2001; Deci & Ryan, 1995), agency has been conceptualized primarily as a property of an indi-vidual. These accounts of agency do not give adequate tools for investigating the role that culture and social structure plays in enabling and constraining human action (see also Clarke et al., in press). By way of contrast, some strands of so-cial science stemming from structuralist and poststructuralist research traditions have dissolved human agency altogether, positing social structure or discourse as

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causally determining human action (e.g., Durkheim, 1915; Foucault, 1994).2 Similarly, the pioneers in sociocultural research on learning and development (Vygotsky, 1987; Leontiev, 1978) tended to emphasize the enculturation of indi-viduals into existing culture while leaving the transformative potential of indi-vidual actions undertheorized. More recently, these classical works have been reinterpreted and extended in ways that foreground both enculturation and trans-formation (Engeström, 1987; 1996; 2006; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 1997; Stetsen-ko, 2008; Kumpulainen & Renshaw, 2007).

In sociological theory, a proposed way to overcome the dualism between structure and agency without either reducing structure to agency or vice versa is to conceptualize them in a dialectical relationship (Giddens, 1984; Sewell, 1992; McFadden, 1995; Shilling, 1992). In this conceptualization, agency and structure are not opposed but presuppose each other; structures shape people’s practices, and conversely, people’s practices constitute (and reproduce or transform) struc-tures (Sewell, 1992). A number of studies on learning and education have adopt-ed this sociological conceptualization of agency in order to theorize student agency in connection with the transformation of educational practice (e.g., Gutierrez & Calabrese Barton, 2015; Goulart & Roth, 2010; Varelas, Martin, & Kane, 2015; Siry & Lang, 2010; Siry, Wilmes, & Haus, in press).

The sociocultural and activity-theoretical conceptualization of agency that I adopt and develop in this dissertation study shares the commitment of going beyond the agency–structure dichotomy in the study of human action. I define agency in broad terms as the realized capacity of people to act upon and trans-form their activities and social circumstances (Holland et al., 1998; Engeström, 2006). I regard this capacity as constituted in relation to other people and objects of activity (Edwards, 2005; Holland et al., 1998), as well as mediated by discur-sive and practical tools (Wertsch et al., 1993). Put another way, altering student agency requires altering its constituent social relations (Ratner, 2000). Thus, the way in which instructional activity is organized and what resources are made available for students mediates the students’ possibilities to achieve agency; different pedagogical approaches and practices position students with varying degrees and forms of agency (McFarlain, 2001; Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011; Gresalfi et al., 2009).

Previous sociocultural research on learning and education has foregrounded several distinct but interrelated forms of agency (for overviews see, e.g., Rainio, 2008; Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011). Some of these forms of agency revolve around responsible participation and intentional membership in pedagogical practices that position students as actors and authors of their learning (Brown &

Comprehensive discussions of different ways of theorizing agency have been reported elsewhere (see Eteläpelto et al., 2013; Sugarman & Sokol, 2012; Archer, 2000).

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Renshaw, 2006; Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2010; Greeno, 2006). Other forms of agency involve relational engagement with the dispositions of others to inter-pret, act on, and expand objects of activity (Edwards & D'Arcy, 2004; Edwards, 2009). Yet other forms of agency involve actions that break away from given frames of actions and take the initiative to transform given social practices (Virkkunen, 2006; Engeström, 2006). In this dissertation I refer to the last-mentioned forms of agency as transformative. 3

Teachers aspiring to foster student agency often experience tensions between the goal of supporting agency and the institutional demands of classroom man-agement and transmission of knowledge (Bruner, 1996; Van Oers, 2015). Class-room interactions are situated in and framed by the local institutional culture and organization of the school, including the curriculum and the school policies, and by the wider institutional practices and societal functions of schooling. Like their students, teachers are subject to institutional demands and control, and thus their possibilities to foster and give room to student agency are constrained by institu-tional framings and structures. As a result, when promoting student agency in daily educational practice, teachers need to live through and manage the contra-diction between agency and control (Rainio & Hilppö, 2016; McNeil, 1986).

However, the agency–control contradiction can be partially and momentarily overcome in situated classroom interactions through creative actions on the part of both the students and the teacher (Rainio, 2008; Gutierrez et al., 1995). This creative struggle may enable the emergence of new forms of teaching and learn-ing. Rainio’s studies (2008, 2009, 2010; Rainio & Hilppö, 2016) have shown how the reconfiguration of instructional activity can transform the form taken by the dialectics of agency and control. She found that the introduction of a play-world activity repositioned the teachers in fictive roles that enabled them to en-gage in joint imaginative play with their students and to create more opportuni-ties for student agency to develop. However, the reconfiguration of instructional roles did not remove the contradiction of control and agency but merely changed its form. Even during the playworld activity, the teachers were accountable to the institutional constraints of the school and had to switch back and forth be-tween their fictive roles and the teacher role (Rainio, 2010).

3 The definition of transformative agency used in this dissertation study is broader than the definition given for this concept in some activity-theoretical works in which specific actions of transformative agency are related to working with systemic contradictions of the activity and the ideal-typical cycle of expansive learning (e.g., Engeström, 2006; Vänninen, Querol, & Engeström, 2015, Haapasaari, Engeström, & Kerosuo, 2014). In many of these studies, the data has been derived from a Change Laboratory intervention (see e.g, Virkkunen & Newnhamn, 2013) that is specifically designed to promote this form of agency. In its ideal-typical form, expansive learning rarely takes place in non-intervention settings (Engeström & Sannino, 2012).

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2.5 Pedagogy I define pedagogy and the pedagogical approach broadly from a sociocultural perspective as a purposive cultural intervention in human development that is informed and shaped by the values and history of the society and the community in which it is located (Alexander, 2008; see also Edwards, 2001; Daniels, 2007). A pedagogical approach includes not only acts of teaching but also the wider pedagogical arrangements, such as study materials and other pedagogical tools, grading and testing practices, the distribution and locus of authority, the pattern-ing of time and space, and implicit or explicit definitions of what counts as legit-imate ways of knowing and communicating.

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3 Agency-centered pedagogy

In this chapter, I give an overview of existing research on pedagogical approach-es and models for promoting student agency. In particular, I pay attention to how and to what extent these approaches and models conceptualize school learning and student agency as expansively distributed across space and time. The con-cept of agency has emerged in educational research relatively recently (Eteläpel-to et al., 2013), but there is a long history of educational theories presented in different parts of the world that constitute historical precursors for the current discussions on the topic (e.g., Rousseau, 1762/1972; Dewey, 1915; Neill, 1960; Illich; 1970; Freire, 1970; Schoolboys of Barbiana, 1970). Similar ideas have also been presented in research on self-regulated learning (Paris & Paris, 2001; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). However, since the primary focus of this disser-tation is on student agency in expanding contexts of formal education, the scope of this chapter is limited to sociocultural and activity-theoretical accounts be-cause this research perspective provides a robust basis for conceptualizing the contextual grounding of learning and agency necessary for my argument.

3.1 Promoting student agency in knowledge practices In studies of learning, the promotion of student agency has been primarily asso-ciated with attempts to engage students as active agents in knowledge construc-tion (Zhang et al., 2009; Engle & Conant, 2002; Herrenkohl & Guerra, 1998; Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991). These attempts involve reconceptualizing the object of instructional activity from the reproduc-tion of knowledge and the accurate use of procedures to understanding the con-cepts and principles of a domain and developing productive habits of mind that support the productive and generative use of concepts and principles (Engeström & Greeno, 2014).

Perhaps the best-known pedagogical approach of this research strand is the knowledge building approach of Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia (Scar-damalia & Bereiter, 2003). In knowledge building, students’ ideas are put in the center while the students engage in sustained pursuit of their own research ques-tions, generating and evaluating intuitive theories and explanations. Scardamalia (1999) criticized both conventional and child-centered pedagogies for focusing too much on tasks and classroom procedures and setting students’ ideas aside to the periphery of the instructional activity. The core principle of knowledge building is the promotion of epistemic agency, which is promoted by providing the students with opportunities and guidance for taking collective cognitive re-sponsibility for advancing knowledge (Scardamalia, 2002; Scardamalia & Berei-

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ter, 1991). Epistemic agency is defined as a metacognitive ability, and it reflects a shift in the responsibility for setting learning goals from the teacher to students (Van Aalst & Chan, 2007). It involves students taking increasing responsibility not only for their individual contributions to knowledge in the classroom but also for the overall progress of knowledge building.

Epistemic agency can be promoted by creating classroom communities of in-quiry that are focused on the collective advancement of knowledge, supported by the use of technology-mediated collaborative learning environments (Van Aalst & Chan, 2007; Scardamalia, 2002; Moss & Beatty, 2006; Muukkonen et al., 2005). The technology mediation provides external support for students’ high-level cognitive processes and makes metacognitive activity explicit and accessible for public consideration (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991). For exam-ple, students’ meta-cognitive knowledge processes can be supported by suggest-ing that they use a variety of epistemological terms in their discourse (Scardama-lia, 2002). Van Aalst and Chan (2007) promoted students’ epistemic agency by using electronic portfolios to involve students in the assessment of their own and community learning and collaboration. Muukkonen et al. (2005) showed that the heuristic pedagogical model of Progressive Inquiry could support the epistemic agency of undergraduate psychology students. Progressive Inquiry is a Finnish elaboration of knowledge building (Hakkarainen, 1998; Hakkarainen, 2003; Hakkarainen, Lonka & Lipponen, 2004). It specifies a cyclic and progressively deepening process of inquiry that makes visible the strategies and activities that are crucial in knowledge-building efforts and inquiry practice (Muukkonen et al., 2005).

However, a limitation of this research on epistemic agency is that the social practices that account for the emergence of student agency and the particular forms it takes are not conceptualized or made visible by the researchers. In other words, the research methods and the pedagogical principles for promoting stu-dent agency are not sufficiently grounded in theories of social practice. Hakkarainen (2009) holds that this lack of attention to the social practices has made it difficult to adequately explain why some implementations of the knowledge building approach have been successful while others have failed to support epistemic agency, resulting in excessive copying of information instead of progressively deepening cycles of inquiry (see, e.g., Hakkarainen et al., 2002; Lipponen & Hakkarainen, 1997).

The role of social practices in creating opportunities and constraints for stu-dents’ conceptual agency has been studied by James Greeno and his colleagues (Boaler & Greeno, 2000; Engle & Conant, 2002; Engle, 2006; Gresalfi et al., 2009). Conceptual agency entails actions depending on students' choices of the types of material or conceptual resources to be appropriated, adapted, or modi-fied for a specific purpose in the learning activity (Greeno, 2006). This notion of agency derives from Pickering's (1995) analysis of agency in the conceptual

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practice of professional mathematics. Pickering showed that mathematical prac-tice should be understood as a dialectical interplay between free moves and dis-ciplined forced moves by the mathematician. When conducting forced moves, the mathematician becomes relatively passive, while the discipline asserts itself. These moments correspond to the agency of the discipline, or in other words, disciplinary agency. However, mathematical work also involves moments in which the mathematician takes over the agency by making free moves of active sensemaking that extend the boundaries of the discipline. The free moves trigger a need for further forced moves and vice versa, constituting a “dance of agency.”

Greeno and colleagues’ sociocultural conceptualization of the formation of conceptual agency characterizes mathematics and science education as interpret-able realms, in which students and teachers are positioned with respect to each other and to the discipline. Gresalfi et al. (2009) compared social interactions in two middle school mathematics classrooms differing in terms of task character-istics and associated participation frameworks. In the more conventionally orga-nized classroom, the tasks were relatively closed and emphasized the accurate use of procedures, and the students were accountable for providing a correct answer to the teacher. These classroom interactions provided restricted opportu-nities for students’ mathematical agency. Conversely, in the other classroom, students could achieve conceptual agency due to open-ended tasks that involved creating and collectively discussing mathematical symbols. The students’ con-ceptual agency was further supported by the participation framework that made them accountable for convincing not only their teacher but also their peers. Simi-larly, positioning fourth-grade science students with the authority to problema-tize and resolve substantive issues of the disciplinary domain and with accounta-bility to each other and to disciplinary norms supported their active engagement and the creative interplay of conceptual and disciplinary agency (Engle & Co-nant, 2002).

The research on students’ conceptual agency in educational practice has shed light on how to overcome the gap between students’ learning in and outside of school by means of pedagogy. Engle (2006) showed that the expansive framing of classroom interactions could support students in connecting their learning across the diverse settings and activities of their lives. In expansive framing, students are positioned as actively contributing to larger conversations that ex-tend across time, places, and people (Engle 2006; Engle et al., 2011, 2012). Moreover, an essential part of expansive framing is that students are positioned with the authority and accountability to problematize and resolve issues of the disciplinary domain, promoting their conceptual agency (Greeno, 2006). Kum-pulainen and Lipponen (2010) showed that the expansively framed dialogic in-teractions of a third-grade classroom community enabled the students to connect learning across contexts by negotiating time-space relationships, revisiting past

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experiences as a learning potential, and weaving experiences and worlds togeth-er during their collective discussions.

Studies conducted within the knowledge creation perspective further illumi-nate how the expansion of the context of formal education can provide expanded opportunities for student agency. The knowledge creation perspective (Paavola, Lipponen, & Hakkarainen, 2002) advocates an object-centered approach to in-quiry learning in place of an idea-centered approach (cf. Scardamalia, 2002). Damsa et al. (2010) studied the emergence of epistemic agency in a higher edu-cation project that broke institutional boundaries by engaging the students to develop a knowledge object that connected to professional communities outside the educational institution. In particular, the study focused on the social interac-tions of two groups of university students that conducted an instructional design project for external clients. The study showed that while engaging in sustained work on complex knowledge objects, the students displayed a rich array of epis-temic and regulative actions indicating shared epistemic agency. However, the authors did not explicitly discuss in what way the students’ agency was specific to working on knowledge objects connected to activity systems outside the edu-cational institution. Kosonen et al. (2012) studied a group of university students developing a mobile application in a course that involved a client partner from a large mobile phone company. The findings of the study showed that the connec-tion of the knowledge object to professional communities outside of the univer-sity and the guidance given by the representatives of the client organization pro-voked the students to achieve specific forms of conceptual agency. The students’ accountability was extended to using domain-specific methods in framing their initial ideas and analyzing the related problems. The students displayed concep-tual agency by modifying these conceptual resources and adapting them to the purposes of their project.

3.2 Promoting student agency as relational engagement with other people The proponents of epistemic and conceptual agency usually depict student agen-cy as a shared and relational endeavor. Epistemic agency is indicated in taking responsibility for collective knowledge advancement (Scardamalia, 2002; Muukkonen et al., 2005). Actions of a relational nature, such as transcending social conflict and creating space for others’ contributions, are considered im-portant for creating premises for convergent interaction that indicates shared epistemic agency (Damsa et al., 2010). In accounts of conceptual agency in mathematics and science education, the emphasis on student authority is coun-terbalanced by accountability to others and disciplinary norms (Engle & Conant, 2002; Gresalfi et al., 2009; Greeno, 2006; Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008).

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This emphasis on the relational aspects of student agency is also reflected in attempts to convert classrooms into communities of inquiry that center on the relational negotiation of meaning and multiple positions of authority (Kaartinen & Kumpulainen, 2001; Kovalainen & Kumpulainen, 2005, 2007; Scardamalia, 2002; Brown, 1994; Brown & Renshaw, 2006). Communities of inquiry rely on reciprocity and support among classroom members; it is essential that ideas and experiences are collectively shared and built upon to further extend the students’ collective and personal thinking about the issues at stake (Kumpulainen & Lip-ponen, 2010; Mercer & Littleton, 2007). However, productive and constructive social interaction does not usually emerge by itself but requires establishing shared values and a joint interactive space for promoting reciprocity and mutual respect, reasoned argumentation, and collective reflection (Mercer & Howe, 2012; Resnick et al., 2015; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003). This can be done by establishing ground rules for social interaction, which demand systematic and longitudinal collective efforts (Mercer & Littleton, 2007).

Beyond these formulations of student agency as shared engagement in dia-logic inquiry, Anne Edwards (2005) has developed the notion of relational agen-cy, which revolves around relational and affective aspects of social activity. Relational agency is defined as “a capacity to work with others to expand the object that one is working on and trying to transform by recognizing, examining, and working with the resources that others bring to bear as they interpret and respond to the object” (Edwards, 2009, p. 208–209). In other words, students display relational agency when they seek others’ support for their endeavors and respond to the need for support from others. Through the achievement of rela-tional agency, students rely on others’ diverse interpretations and sensemaking to expand the objects of their learning activity (Edwards & D’Arcy, 2004).

Edwards and D’Arcy (2004) showed how student teachers supported ninth-grade bilingual students’ relational agency by reversing the roles of students and teachers. These students were invited to teach their diverse home languages to student teachers and university staff. The disruption of the traditional classroom power dynamics appeared to expand the students’ possibilities of acting on the object of language acquisition and to help to reposition themselves as effective users and learners of language. Conversely, being put into the position of learn-ers helped the student teachers to redefine their relationship to the students and to recognize the students holistically as persons with particular histories and dispositions. Moreover, the student teachers began to learn about the affective dimension of teaching while starting to appreciate the vulnerability that learners can feel in the classroom. Lipponen and Kumpulainen (2011) similarly showed how an innovative teacher education program redefined the roles of teacher edu-cators and student teachers. The student teachers participating in the program achieved relational agency by crossing and transforming traditional expert-novice boundaries.

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By way of contrast, students can also display relational agency as a way to successfully navigate conventional school activity and its power dynamics. In a study in which children aged between five and seven years were interviewed about writing in school, the relational agency of the students was identified as manifesting in the recognition of what and who mattered for their writing within the power relations of the classroom (Fisher, 2010). Many of the students held that it was most useful to rely on the teacher and his or her evaluation of their writing. The author interpreted this as a useful strategy in becoming a successful student within the confines of the traditional school norms. In line with these findings, Matusov (2011) argues that in conventional school practice, finding creative ways to adapt to the unconditional demands of the teacher (e.g., know-ing how to please the teacher and anticipating the criteria that the teacher uses) is a form of student agency.

Despite the fact that the concept has mainly been used to research boundary crossing across professional practices (Edwards, 2005; 2011; Edwards & Mac-kenzie, 2005), not much research exists on relational agency in pedagogical set-tings that involve the crossing of boundaries between school and the wider so-ciety. Emerging findings from the existing research suggest that such settings can give rise to specific forms of relational agency. In particular, Kosonen et al. (2012) documented moments of university students’ relational agency while they were developing a knowledge object for external clients; the expansive way of organizing the context of learning provoked the students to display relational agency by contacting and collaborating with potential customers as well as pre-senting business ideas or solutions to them.

3.3 Promoting agency as the transformation of given prac-tices in the classroom and beyond Students’ resistance to teachers and instruction has long been recognized as a salient feature of instructional activity (McFarlain, 2001; Waller 1932; Stinch-combe 1964). However, research accounts and pedagogical approaches differ with respect to the stance they take on students’ resistance. While students’ re-sistance is often depicted as disruptive and indicative of students’ maladaptation (e.g., Lewis et al., 2008; Evertson & Weinstein, 2013), critical social and peda-gogical research has regarded student resistance as a collective strategy of un-derprivileged students to overcome alienation and to acquire a greater degree of cultural freedom (Willis, 1977; Apple, 1979; Giroux, 1983; Eckert, 1989). Yet student resistance is not reducible to dispositions associated with social class and cultural background, but is strongly mediated by classroom interactional dynam-ics and organizational structure (Kim, 2010; McFarlain, 2001). McFarlain (2001) showed that teacher-centered formats of instruction could suppress stu-dents’ opportunities to challenge teacher authority and tasks that they did not

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consider meaningful. Conversely, student-centered instruction enabled students to express and spread their discontent in ways that were difficult for teachers to deal with.

In this dissertation study, I align with an understanding of students’ resistance as an emergent property of classroom dynamics and consider it as an incipient form of their agency. Through being recognized as agency, student resistance can become a generative force that helps students to avoid becoming passive and uninterested (Rainio, 2008; Litowitz, 1997). Roth et al. (2004) showed how the negotiation of a conflictual classroom event between an urban street youth stu-dent and his teacher resulted in a productive renegotiation of the situated identi-ties of both. The teacher earned the respect of his students; and the student, who faced a threat to his identity when assigned a low grade, was able to renegotiate his identity as a successful student in the classroom. Rainio (2008) showed how jointly imagined play changed the adult–child relationships in a primary school classroom in ways that enabled the development of student resistance into agen-cy. Building on a reluctant student’s resistance and responding to it in a fictive role helped the teachers to provoke a more constructive orientation to the activi-ty in the student. The play provided mediating means, such as fictive roles and the narrative plot, for achieving incomplete and open-ended activities that stimu-lated children’s initiatives. This open-endedness permitted flexible and creative ways for treating students’ resistance and destructive engagement as forms of agency (see also Rainio, 2008, 2009, 2010). Thus, creative engagement with student resistance has the transformative potential for developing more meaning-ful instructional practices.

The students can also be invited to devise ways of reorganizing instructional practice. For example, Siry and Lang (2010) investigated how teachers and se-cond-grade students cocreated participatory structures in a science classroom. These structures provided the students with opportunities for negotiating the organization of teaching and learning and for sharing their own interpretations of task contents.

Finally, in some pedagogical approaches, in particular those aligned with crit-ical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), students have been guided in using mathematics (Turner & Font, 2007) or science (Basu, Calabrese Barton, Clairmont, & Locke, 2009) for questioning and trying to change social practices in school and in the wider society. Similarly, Yamazumi (2014; see also Vianna, Hougaard, & Stet-senko, 2014) conducted intervention research in a Japanese school to create partnerships with local farmers, experts, and social activist movements. In the project, students were engaged in gardening practices to revitalize a local endan-gered plant. By crossing the institutional boundaries of school in the study, stu-dents, teachers, and other stakeholders were able to pursue an object of instruc-tional activity that had pressing societal relevance.

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4 Research questions

The aim of this dissertation study is to develop an agency-centered pedagogical model for expanding the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society. I develop this model by analyzing my own pedagogical practice as a primary school teacher, an innovative project in an upper secondary school, and pedagogical approaches for expanding the context of school learning pre-sented in international research literature. I pose the following research questions for my inquiry: RQ 1: What characterizes pedagogical approaches that expand the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society outside of school? RQ 2: What opportunities for student agency are manifested in expanding the context of school learning? RQ 3: What tensions and challenges emerge when the context of school learning is expanded?

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5 Research design

The data for this dissertation comprise three datasets. Firstly, I conduct retro-spective analyses of video records of my own pedagogical practice in a primary school classroom in which I intended to bridge the gap between the students’ personal worlds and the world of school and to promote their agency and per-sonal sensemaking. My teaching was inspired by my participation in the project Learning Bridges: Learning and Teaching at the Intersection of Formal and In-formal Learning Environments (Kumpulainen, Krokfors, Lipponen, Tissari, Hilppö, & Rajala, 2010), funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Cul-ture. The Learning Bridges project also provided financial support for my class for various field trips. Thus, my pedagogical practice can be regarded as an ex-ample of the realization of recent Finnish educational policy, which supports pedagogies that develop connections between school instruction and the com-munities and society outside of school. My pedagogical practice also exemplifies the attempts of a beginning teacher to make sense of the pedagogical idea of expanding the context of school learning while putting this idea into practice in my classroom.

Secondly, I analyze an innovative upper secondary school project – named Bicycles on the Move! – as an example of a “best practice” conducted by expe-rienced teachers. The Bicycles on the Move! project was selected for this disser-tation study firstly because of its distinct and innovative pedagogical approach to the expansion of the context of school learning, which differed significantly from my pedagogical approach in the Forest and Animal projects. The second reason for selecting Bicycles on the Move! was its connection to the societal level of educational development in Finland. Bicycles on the Move! was part of a larger project funded by a developmental grant by the National Board of Edu-cation to develop learning environments. This project was selected to represent Finnish “innovative learning environments” in an OECD-sponsored international evaluation study. The National Board of Education appointed the Learning Bridges project to conduct two evaluation studies, in which On the Move! fea-tured as one of the studied projects (see Rajala et al., 2010; Rajala et al., 2011). In this dissertation study, I reanalyze the materials collected from Bicycles on the Move! (Rajala et al., 2011).

Thirdly, I analyze pedagogical approaches for expanding the context for school learning presented in research literature.

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5.1 The Forest and Animal projects: My own practice as a primary school teacher 5.1.1 Settings and participants

Redhill Comprehensive School (pseudonym) is located in a metropolitan area of Finland. It is a public school with 700 students (grade levels one through nine, aged between 7–15 years) and 60 teachers. About 20 percent of the students are from an immigrant background. As is typical for Finnish comprehensive schools, the students are from socioeconomically heterogeneous backgrounds. Redhill school benefits from the Finnish positive discrimination policy. This means that the city allocates extra funding to schools where poorer functioning is predicted. The prediction is based on high percentages of immigrant children, and low parental levels of education and income (Lankinen, 2001).

Redhill school was founded in 1997. At that time the school had a strong pedagogical vision that emphasized encountering each student as they were. The emphasis was also more on students’ learning and growth than on teaching and pedagogy, which appears to reflect a constructivist conception of learning that was being introduced to Finnish teachers (Rauste-von Wright & von Wright, 1994; Rauste-von Wright, 1997). The school has always been a pioneering school with a strong vision of inclusion of students with special needs. Accord-ing to the principal who founded the school, the idea was that the school should take into account the natural diversity of all children, including the disabled ones. He believed that considering every student as a valued member of the school community would remove all barriers to learning.

I worked in Redhill school from 2007 to 2009, teaching the same class from second to fourth grade. I graduated as a teacher at the end of 2007. 5.1.2 Data collection and analytical procedures

The data for this dissertation study was collected during 2008 from the Forest and Animal projects. In the following I describe the project as well as the data collection and analytical procedures for Articles III and IV, in which we ana-lyzed these projects.

Forest project The Forest project began with a field trip to a nearby forest, and the students took photographs and created research questions. As the teacher, I organized the continuation of the project according to three themes based on my interpretation of the students’ questions (Table 1; Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Whole class discussions during the Forest project

Table 1. Forest project structure (Spring 2008)

Project phases Project activities

1. Formulating and discuss-ing the research questions (Feb. 1 – Feb. 8)

- Field trip to a nearby forest (taking photographs and formulating research questions) - Collective discussions of the research questions - Writing down prior knowledge of the topic

2. Trees and Wood (Feb. 13 – Mar. 12)

- Visit to the Museum of Technology - Collective and small group discussions - Reading and discussing newspaper articles

3. Rocks and Stones (Mar. 18 – Apr. 8)

- Collective discussions - Reading a textbook and completing assignments in small groups - Visit to the Science Center - Visit to the Museum of Technology - Examination of the topics of Trees and Stones in groups (essay)

4. Ecology of a Forest (Apr. 30 – May 5)

- Reading a textbook - Collective and small group discussion - Field trip to a forest - Examination of the topics of Ecology of a Forest individually (essay)

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In the Forest project, I strove to position the students as actors and authors of their learning. My intention was also to create opportunities for students' person-al interests, experiences, and knowledge developed outside of school to be in-terwoven with instruction to advance students' agency in collective mean-ing-making and knowledge creation. I had been influenced by dialogic ap-proaches to teaching, mainly the Thinking Together program, which stresses the importance of ground rules for educationally productive interaction (Dawes, Mercer, & Wegerif, 2000). Accordingly, the classroom community had collec-tively formulated ground rules for classroom interaction (e.g., everyone is lis-tened to and noticed, everyone is helped when in need, and arguments are ex-pected from everyone) to promote constructive and exploratory ways of using language as a social mode of thinking. Furthermore, both the teacher and stu-dents were held accountable for managing turn-taking during whole class dis-cussions.

The primary data from the Forest project were recorded using two video cameras. Varpu Tissari was mainly responsible for data collection. Moreover, worksheets and textbooks were collected and analyzed as a secondary data source when relevant to interpret the video data (e.g., when they were referred to in the interactions).

The data were analyzed with an interaction analysis of the participants’ talk-in-interaction and significant nonverbal actions (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). First, rough content logs were produced from the videos. Whole class interac-tions were then selected for further analysis (altogether 7 hours 19 minutes from 17 lessons), and all speech was transcribed and divided into interactional epi-sodes, constituting the unit of analysis. Non-verbal interactions (e.g., regarding the use of instructional tools) were annotated to the transcripts when considered significant for the interpretation of interactional events. An interactive episode was defined as a thematically meaningful unit of interactional exchange, and a new episode begins when the topic of discussion shifts. The excerpts used in Article IV were translated from Finnish to English by a professional translator. Standard punctuation was added for readability.

Second, all student initiatives were identified that questioned or were in op-position to the teacher or some aspects of the instructional activity (altogether 153 episodes). Students' initiatives were interpreted as part of the interactional context from which they were taken (Linell, 1998). Due to the nature of the in-teractional data, we limited the scope of our analysis to active displays of oppo-sition, although passive opposition can be an important manifestation of agency (Rainio & Hilppö, 2016). Then, using analytic induction and systematic compar-ison (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), we categorized oppositional initiatives into five types, paying attention to their forms and objects. Third, we inductively identi-fied three distinct responses that the teacher displayed toward students' opposi-tional initiatives. In our analysis and interpretation, we paid attention to how the

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teacher drew on institutional resources and recognizable patterns of interaction in his responses to the students' oppositional initiatives.

Finally, we traced the consequences of individual oppositional initiatives for the transformation of interactional events. We also traced all later explicit and implicit references to the initiatives to determine what kinds of transformation of interactional practices these initiatives may have engendered.

Animal project The Animal project was a semester-long project about Finnish wild animals (Table 2; Figure 2). I had two main instructional intentions for the Animal pro-ject. The first intention, fostering personal sensemaking, involved harnessing the students’ interests and local knowledge (Kumpulainen et al., 2011; Matusov, 2009). The second intention, fostering scientific sensemaking, involved connect-ing the students’ learning to big ideas of biology, such as biodiversity and evolu-tion. For this purpose, I adapted ideas from the pedagogical model of progres-sive inquiry, which imitates the practices of scientific research communities, and students were guided to participate in ‘‘extended processes of pursuing their own questions and explanations’’ (Hakkarainen, 2003, p. 1073). Accordingly, the project started with the students, guided by the teacher, formulating research questions about animals, resulting in two main questions: How do animals sur-vive? How have animals developed? The students subsequently formulated their own explanations as solutions to their questions. To refine their understanding of the topic, they used textbooks and the knowledge acquired from experts during field trips. The intermediate results were shared and discussed with the class.

The data were recorded by two video cameras focused on a student group, with a microphone placed on the focal students’ table. I was myself mainly re-sponsible for the data collection. Worksheets and other materials produced by the students were collected. The last phase of the project was selected for analy-sis because it comprised a prolonged learning task with the same participants cooperating over seven consecutive lessons (Table 3). The selected data focus on the social interactions of two focal students, Samira4 (immigrant background, low test performance, Finnish language skills below the native level) and Vilma (Finnish background, average test performance). They were selected because we expected variability in their interpretations of the task and open negotiations about different interpretations.

4 All names used to refer to the students in my classroom are pseudonyms.

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Table 2. The structure of the Animal project (Autumn 2008)

Project phase Project activities

Orientation to the project (Aug. 27 – Sep. 15)

- Forming the working groups - Writing down prior knowledge about animals - Classifying animals - Two field trips: bird observation and a field trip to an outdoor environ-mental education center

Making the research questions (Sep. 16 – Sep. 24)

- Orientation to the project as a whole - Discussion about what a research question is - Forming research questions for the projects - Classifying research questions.

Inquiry about ani-mals’ environments (Sep. 26 – Oct. 15)

- Each small group is assigned an environment: forest, swamp, city, field, and wetland. - Students search for information in small groups. - The results are presented as a poster. - A field trip to the Museum of Natural History

Inquiry about food chains (Oct. 28 – Nov. 18)

- Small groups create a network of food chains from their environment. - Concepts related to food chains are introduced. - A field trip to an outdoor environmental education center

Inquiry about the evolution of animals (Nov. 14 – Nov. 20)

- A brief inquiry project about the evolution of life - A field trip to the Museum of Natural History

Examination (Nov 24. – Dec. 12)

- Preparation for an examination - The material examined includes the knowledge the students have pro-duced so far. Each group has their own question and materials about their environment. There are common test items about food chains.

Inquiry about new research questions (Nov. 21 – Dec . 16)

- The teacher gives four research questions, from which the students select those that they want to pursue. - The teacher provides material for the given research questions. - Small groups share with other groups what they have learned in their inquiry about new research questions.

Sharing and reflection on the results of the project (Dec. 12 - Dec. 19)

- Small groups share with other groups what they have learned so far in the project. - Exhibition for parentsTeaching first-grade students - Students make concept maps from the knowledge that they have learned during the project.

A field trip to Korkeasaari Zoo (Dec. 17 – Dec. 19)

- Students prepare for the field trip by designing a learning task about endangered species. - A field trip to Korkeasaari Zoo

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Figure 2. Students’ small group work in the Animal project

The interactions between the students and their teacher were analyzed with the help of interlocutionary logic (Sannino, 2008; Trognon, 1999) and interac-tion analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Interlocutionary logic identifies the pragmatic and cognitive functions of individual discursive contributions as they evolve through the subsequent speaking turns of a conversation. This method allowed us to trace participants’ interpretations from their conversations. Interac-tion analysis enabled us to capture the interplay between verbal and non-verbal actions. The analysis involved three steps.

First, we described all the interactions of the focal students in common-sense terms. Task-related talk was transcribed verbatim and translated from Finnish into English. Standard punctuation was added for readability. We then segment-ed the transcripts into topical episodes based on the substantive contents of the talk and non-verbal conduct. Simultaneously occurring episodes were considered to be separate episodes.

Second, we identified all the deviations from the official script in the video and the transcripts. The official script consisted of episodes of students working to accomplish the task as formulated by the teacher. Episodes that featured the delivery of task instructions and preparations for the task were also included.

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Table 3. The analyzed lessons in the Animal project

Les-son

Date Brief description of the contents of the lesson Length of video

1. Nov 21, 2008

The teacher announces the new project phase and formu-lates its task. The task includes the following compo-nents: choosing the research question, writing down prior knowledge about the topic, starting to investigate the topic from textbooks; the use of personal knowledge and experiences is encouraged (half class).

45 min

2. Nov 26, 2008

The inquiry continues; investigating textbooks (half class) 44 min

3. Dec 3, 2008

The inquiry continues; investigating textbooks, choosing a new question (half class)

48 min

4. Dec 10, 2008

The inquiry continues; investigating textbooks (half class) 41 min

5. Dec 12, 2008

The inquiry continues; investigating textbooks (half class) 44 min

Dec 12, 2008

Reproducing the results as a poster not recorded

6. Dec 16, 2008

Sharing the results with other students (whole class) 43 min

7. Dec 16, 2008

Sharing the results continued (whole class) 32 min

Deviations from the assigned task were defined as actions and interactions that interfered or conflicted with the focal students’ work on the task or that diverted from straightforward adherence to the assigned task. We analyzed the talk and actions in these episodes in terms of how they contributed to the accomplish-ment of the task. We also systematically compared the contents of the students’ worksheets to the contents of the textbooks.

Third, the deviations were organized into three layers. Layer 1 deviations in-volved students’ talk and actions that connected to the multiple non-school activ-ities that they inhabited. Through the parallel scripts, the students thus brought the wider contexts of their lives into the classroom. Layer 2 deviations con-cerned the functional arrangements and structural components of the classroom activity on which engagement with the task relied. Layer 3 involved interpretive engagement with the task, that is, the attempts to make sense of the task or ac-

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tions that hampered these attempts. Analytical subcategories within each of the three layers and the interpretations of excerpts were iteratively created, revised and refined in repeated critical discussions between the two authors.

5.2 Bicycles on the Move! 5.2.1 Settings and participants

The Bicycles on the Move! project was run at the Etelä-Tapiola Upper Second-ary School in the City of Espoo, Finland. The project, running for the third time at the time of our data collection, was first implemented during the 2009/10 school year and had been a huge success, arousing interest in the media even internationally. Two teachers, Mikael Sorri5 and Pentti Heikkinen, had started the project in order to take learning into “authentic environments.” The project aimed to increase students' cooperation with different social actors in order to develop their sense of citizenship and agency. During the project, students col-laborated with city authorities and influenced the decision-making of the city council concerning cycling (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Students negotiating with authorities at Tapiola Info Center

5 With the permission of the teachers and to give them credit for their work, I use their real names as well as the real name of the school, for the same reason. The students’ names are not mentioned in this dissertation study.

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Etelä-Tapiola Upper Secondary School is a public school with 500 students (ages 15+). In Finland, students can apply to upper secondary schools based on their grades at the end of comprehensive school. The students accepted to Etelä-Tapiola Upper Secondary school need to have very high grades (the average across subjects needs to be 9.31/10), and the students have had the best scores in the standardized matriculation exams in the whole country in 2014 and 2015, according to the headmaster of the school. The headmaster was proud of the student-centered operating culture of the school and was supportive of the Bicy-cles on the Move! project. However, in a group interview, one of the students described that the usual way of working in other courses of the school as, “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.”

Bicycles on the Move! was inspired and supported by two nationally operat-ed projects, On the Move! (Liikkeelle! in Finnish) and Location Learning (Paik-kaOppi in Finnish), funded by the Finnish National Board of Education. The larger projects provided teachers and students with, among other things, the Link learning environment, which featured an interactive virtual map that was used in the Bicycles on the Move! project (see Figure 4). As part of the course activities, students added photographs of their cycling experiences to the map, details of places where cycling conditions needed improvement, and suggestions for new or alternative cycling routes. These photographs then provided opportunities for sharing experiences and observations when they were discussed collectively in the classroom. Link also served as a forum for social networking among stu-dents, teachers, and various experts.

Figure 4. The interactive virtual map in use in Bicycles on the Move!, © MML, permission number 53/MML/11

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5.2.2 Data collection and analytical procedures

The data from the Bicycles on the Move! project was initially collected for an OECD-sponsored international evaluation study (Rajala et al., 2011) and reana-lyzed for Article II of this dissertation study. Anna Mikkola and I observed and video-recorded the learning activities in one randomly selected lesson of the project (45 minutes). Six students took part in the lesson. Furthermore, we con-ducted semi-structured interviews for the students (a focus group interview with all six students, 40 minutes) and teachers (40 minutes) after the lesson. The questions asked in the interviews were taken from the OECD guidelines for the evaluation study (for details, see http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/49800227.pdf). The interviews were recorded on either video or audiotape. In addition, we col-lected various documents relating to the project, such as a public talk, newspaper articles, and a television program.

The questions for teachers covered the following themes: • professional background/training; • description of a typical lesson in the project; • sequencing of learning activities over time; • types of resources available and the strategies for using them; • typical interactions with the students and other stakeholders; • types and strategies of learner assessment and their rationale; • goals in the learning process, strategies for accomplishing them; • longer-term aims and intended outcomes of the learning pro-

cess; • professional development strategies, communication structures,

and knowledge management among professionals in the project; and

• The availability of evidence on the effectiveness of the project strategies.

The questions in the focus group interview with the students covered the fol-

lowing themes: • description of a typical lesson; • perceived opportunities for linking formal and informal learn-

ing, including how effective, how valued, how assessed; • perceptions of the positive advantages of the project, its weak-

nesses/limitations, and potential barriers to learning; • key differences between the project and other learning settings

known to the student(s); • student perceptions of typical interactions with facilitators and

with other learners;

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• descriptions of motivation and perceptions of how well learner interests, opinions, and needs were taken into account; and

• student perceptions of the types and strategies of assessment used – how well understood, how fair, and how effective.

In our analysis, we first transcribed the video and the interviews verbatim.

Based on our initial reading of the transcripts and my impressions from the visit and the informal discussions with the teachers, we selected certain key aspects of the project for chronotopic analysis. In our judgement, (a) accountability, (b) meaning-making, and (c) relationships and developmental aspects could capture important ways in which the chronotopes produced in the project diverged from the chronotopes of more conventional schooling. These three aspects also exem-plify how we empirically investigated the chronotope of the project. Here, we used the idea of a chronotope more like a heuristic tool, not as an empirically tested and rigorous research approach.

First, concerning students' accountability, we analyzed the introduction of a typical learning task in the project and illustrated how the audiences to which the students were made accountable were situated in space and time. We also ana-lyzed the spatial and temporal connections of the criteria for students' contribu-tions.

Second, concerning meaning-making, we analyzed the classroom interactions during the observed lesson and the teacher interview to show how the resources utilized in the project were located in and across space and time. We additionally examined whether and how the project fostered interpersonal relationships with stakeholders within and outside of school.

Finally, we analyzed the developmental aspect of chronotopes. Bakhtin (1986) addresses how people and their lifeworlds mutually influence each other. That is, chronotopes differ in the extent to which people, their lifeworlds, or both are seen as either static or in a process of (mutual) change (Bakhtin, 1986). To capture the developmental aspect of the chronotope of Bicycles on the Move!, we identified those passages from student and teacher interviews in which the interviewees talked about change as they experienced it. In order to identify indications of transformations in the local environment initiated by the class-room community, we analyzed various documents relating to the project, such as a public talk, newspaper articles, and a television program.

5.3 Review of pedagogical approaches presented in the lit-erature The data source of our thematic research review consists of empirical research publications that can be located in official academic databases. We began our analysis in March 2014 by conducting a number of systematic database searches

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(ERIC, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts/CSA) with the search terms “third space,” “funds of knowledge,” “hybri*,” “seamless learning,” “boundary cross-ing,” “informal learning,” and “connected learning” in order to build a relatively comprehensive dataset of articles (years 2010–2014). The keywords were select-ed based on our prior understanding of the topic. We complemented this search by searching several key journals for articles published in 2010–2014 and stud-ies that had cited certain classical texts on the topic. Finally, we used our knowledge of the field and recommendations from colleagues to include articles that we knew were relevant. In our search process for the studies, we attempted to identify studies that were about pedagogical approaches that explicitly sought to incorporate students’ out-of-school learning into instruction at the levels of primary and secondary school. We excluded studies that dealt with home–school connections in general and did not address learning explicitly. Moreover, we only included studies in which learning across contexts was one of the key foci of analysis. Altogether our analysis covered 50 publications. In this connection, we want to stress, however, that due to the heterogeneity of the studies in the field and their use of conceptual language to characterize their research on stu-dents’ learning across contexts, our selection process of the core papers for the analysis has limitations. It is possible that we have missed articles that would have enriched our analysis and subsequent findings.

We looked at various aspects in our analysis of the selected articles, includ-ing the rationale that was given to connecting learning across school and out-of-school contexts, types of research questions and findings, the description of ped-agogical practices and tools, and the theoretical orientation underpinning the work. In some cases, a pedagogical approach was interpreted as addressing more than one pedagogical rationale. In the final stage of our review process, we in-ductively generated categories that captured the various dimensions of our anal-ysis. These categories also helped us to form the framework via which to exam-ine research in the field and to envision new directions for future work.

5.4 Research ethics In our research, we followed the ethical principles of research in the humanities and social and behavioral sciences provided by the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity (2009). In addition, video research methodological research literature was consulted on the ethical questions related to video material (Derry et al., 2010; Heath, Hindmarsch, & Luff, 2010). Informed consent was obtained from the course participants and from the parents of my students. The upper secondary school students were old enough to make the decision about their participation in the research themselves. We stressed that participation was vol-untary and that the participants could withdraw from the research at any time. A few times some of the students asked not to be video-recorded, and we acceded

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to their requests. For the most part, everyone was willing to participate. To pro-tect anonymity, pseudonyms are used to refer to the school where I taught and to the students.

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6 Main findings

In this chapter I will summarize the main findings of the dissertation. Further details of the studies are available in the original publications.

6.1 Article I: Connecting learning across school and out-of-school contexts: A review of pedagogical approaches Article I reports a thematic review of literature of pedagogical approaches for connecting school learning to students’ learning in out-of-school contexts. The aim was to create conceptual clarity about the topic and to contribute to the building of a more coherent understanding of the nature of pedagogical ap-proaches and their underlying rationales that intend to transcend the divide be-tween the students’ worlds and the school world by creating connectedness in students’ learning. Through our analysis, we identified three pedagogical ration-ales for connecting student learning across school and out-of-school contexts: (a) educational equity and inclusiveness, (b) learning requirements and competences of the 21st century, and (c) learner agency and identity across contexts. The dif-ferences between the rationales were reflected in how learning and instruction were organized and what tools were used.

Firstly, the rationale of educational equity and inclusiveness addressed the concern that instructional and evaluative practices in schools tend to favor the knowledge and experiences of students whose backgrounds are similar to those of teachers and dominant cultural groups over the knowledge and experiences of underrepresented students. A common orientation of the teachers and research-ers was to learn from and reflect on the diverse funds of knowledge of these students and to connect these with the instruction. The reviewed studies indicate that incorporating minority students’ funds of knowledge in instruction was not straightforward but often challenged the values and norms of the school.

Secondly, the rationale of learning requirements and competences of the 21st century involved fostering students’ competences required in the academic, working, or civic lives of this century. Some pedagogical approaches argued that robust engagement in authentic disciplinary practices should involve juxtaposing and merging forms of thinking, communicating, and material practices across multiple contexts. In other approaches, learning the creative production skills crucial in today’s working life was seen to rely on a creative process distributed across the different sociocultural contexts the students inhabited. The approaches which concerned civic education argued that active citizenship developed through dealing with complex problems that intersected with students’ lives and had wider social significance. Finally, a capacity to use digital technology to

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sustain and bridge learning across contexts was seen as an essential competence in itself for adapting to the demands of life in this century.

Thirdly, the rationale of learner identity and agency across contexts took stu-dents’ entire learning ecologies as a starting point for pedagogy. This rationale challenged the view of schools as providers of predefined routes towards adult-hood, citizenship, and working life. In particular, granting legitimacy to a variety of literacies, practices, and forms of knowledge that the children and youth had developed and employed outside of school was considered important in this rationale. For example, some of the reviewed studies foregrounded the ways in which the students’ framing of virtual pedagogical spaces clashed with how formal instruction framed these spaces, creating hybrid forms of engagement.

The three pedagogical rationales were further discussed with respect to the qualification, socialization, and subjectification functions of education (Biesta, 2009). The rationale of learning requirements and competences of the 21st cen-tury mostly revolved around the qualification function, arguing that the current knowledge society involved a change in what qualifications schools should pro-vide for the students. The socialization function was also emphasized in this rationale. By way of contrast, in the two other rationales, the diversity of stu-dents’ out-of-school learning and interests was seen to be in sharper contrast with official school learning. These rationales emphasized the subjectification function, that is, learners’ agentive responses to the demands that are posed on them. It was precisely the differences and tensions between the official and unof-ficial identities, knowledge, and discourses that were seen to have the expansive potential to advance the rationales of educational equity and inclusiveness, and of learner agency and identity across contexts.

Overall, the findings of Article I point out that the connection between school learning and other, more informal, learning practices is more complex than would seem at first sight. Our findings illuminate the multiplicity and heteroge-neity of the reasons for connecting student learning across school and out-of-school contexts.

6.2 Article II: Expanding the chronotopes of schooling for the promotion of students' agency In Article II, we examined an innovative elective project in a Finnish upper sec-ondary school, named Bicycles on the Move! In the project, the students collab-orated with the authorities of the city of Espoo and influenced the decision-making of the City Council concerning cycling. The aim of our study was to understand what opportunities this project and its pedagogical principles provid-ed for students and their teachers to transform and refine the conventional time-space dimensions of schooling. We also investigated the implications for the opportunities for promoting student agency as active citizens.

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The findings of our chronotopic analysis show that the pedagogy employed in Bicycles on the Move! involved chronotopic features that distanced it from chronotopes typical of conventional schooling. The pedagogy represents what we called an expansive chronotope, characterized by the following three fea-tures. The first pedagogical feature involved a temporal and spatial expansion of the students’ accountability. In the project, the students were held accountable not only to their teachers, but also to a broader audience, such as city officials whom they met during the project, newspaper readers when coauthoring opinion pieces with their teachers, and current and future citizens living in the area. Moreover, the feasibility of the students' contributions was connected to multiple activity systems, and their chronotopes, outside of school. The second pedagogi-cal feature involved an expansion of how meanings were negotiated in the class-room dialogues. The classroom dialogues provided a bridge across past, present, and future learning contexts in a way that allowed students to weave their expe-riences and worlds together. In addition, the project provided students with op-portunities to establish personal and meaningful contacts with expert communi-ties and peer students abroad. The third pedagogical feature involved an orienta-tion of the teachers and students to transforming the local environment. The students, together with their teachers, contributed to the local political debates by questioning assumptions and decisions about local cycling conditions. Thus, the surrounding environment was perceived as historical and political and, hence, transformable.

Our analysis of the Bicycles on the Move! project illuminates how the spatial and temporal expansion of instructional activity created expanded contexts for engagement and agency that would not have been possible in the classroom. In particular, we identified conceptual, relational, and transformative forms of agency that were made available for the students by the pedagogical features characterizing the expansive chronotope. Firstly, the project provided supportive grounds for developing relational agency (Edwards & D’Arcy, 2004; Edwards, 2005), as the students were able to build and connect to a network of relevant others to ask for help, seek opinions, or take joint action. Moreover, meeting city officials and decision-makers helped the students to understand their views, which is another aspect of relational agency. Secondly, conceptual agency (Greeno, 2006) was fostered as the students’ accountability as active agents was extended across space and time. Students were able to achieve conceptual agen-cy, for example, by juxtaposing expert voices against each other and against their own experiences and observations. Thirdly, the project provided spaces for the development of transformative agency (Engeström, 2006; Virkkunen, 2006). The students exercised transformative agency in breaking away from traditional taken-for-granted practices and contributing to public political debate about cy-cling issues. Through taking part in the project, the students learned to see their

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lifeworlds and their embedded practices as being changeable, and they also changed themselves in the process.

In all, the reconfiguration and expansion of time and space in the Bicycles on the Move! project created distinct opportunities for the students to expand their agency as active citizens within the broader contexts of their lives outside of school. Through participating in the collective effort to transform the local con-ditions of cycling together with their teachers, the students were learning about how society and its political institutions work and how they themselves can play a part in changing their circumstances.

6.3 Article III: Students’ deviations from a learning task: An activity-theoretical analysis

In Article III, we investigated and conceptualized the interpretive dynamics in play when students deviate from an assigned task. The data were taken from my own pedagogical practice with fourth-grade students during the Animal pro-ject. In particular, we followed the social interactions of a pair of students facing a learning task that extended over seven lessons. By analyzing the students’ elaboration of their personal sense involved in the deviations from the assigned task, we were able to gain insight into the connections that the students made between the given task and the broader contexts of the activities they inhabited, and into the socio-emotional aspects of the task.

As the teacher, I had two main instructional intentions for the Animal project. The first intention involved connecting the students’ interests and local knowledge developed outside of school with instruction (Kumpulainen et al., 2010; Matusov, 2009). The second intention involved connecting the students’ learning to big ideas of biology, such as biodiversity and evolution. The findings show that neither of these instructional intentions were successfully translated into the students’ practice. Instead, Vilma and Samira enacted the official script in terms of reproducing passages from the textbooks in their worksheets and poster.

The findings also show how the students’ interpretations of the task interact-ed with the institutional context of the instructional activity and with the multi-ple contexts of their lives. The interpretive dynamics in play were conceptual-ized in terms of three nested layers of deviations from the assigned task. The first layer of deviations involved parallel scripts through which the students’ actions were connected to the wider contexts of their lives. The parallel scripts consisted of the students’ engagement in off-task actions and talk that did not contribute to the accomplishment of the task. Parallel scripts occurred consist-ently, indicating only a partial engagement with the task. In and through the second layer of deviations, the students’ task interpretations interacted with vari-ous components of the institutional context. These deviations concerned time

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constraints, evaluation, discipline, placement in space, writing, and reading ma-terials. Our analysis of these deviations indicates that the new learning practices added complexity to the organization of the instruction that the students were already used to. This complexity appeared to confuse the students and diverted them from interpretive engagement with the epistemic content of the task to dealing with the conflicts and disruptions in the flow of activity.

The third layer of deviations involved students’ interpretive engagement with the epistemic contents of the task. Some of the deviations of this layer involved uncertainties, restrictions, and workarounds that were associated with counter-productive and restrictive task interpretations. The analysis indicates that the task procedures functioned as rules for the students by dictating a set of actions to be performed for their own sake instead of serving as tools for making sense of the contents. However, some of the deviations of the third layer evidence the students’ attempts at deliberate sensemaking. These deviations represent a po-tentially productive and expansive interpretive dynamics that, at times, engen-dered students’ elaboration of their personal sense of the task, accounting for expansive interpretive dynamics in which the students temporarily transcended the boundaries between their personal worlds and the school world. Elaborations of their personal sense of the task were relatively rare and did not occur in every lesson. They were also not further developed outside the episodes of their occur-rence.

In all, the study showed that providing students with possibilities for incorpo-rating their lived experience and interests in school work requires teachers and students to deal with deviations that arise when students face school tasks. Arti-cle III accounted for these dynamics and elucidated the expansive potential in-volved in transforming classroom instruction together with the students.

6.4 Article IV: Dealing with the contradiction of agency and control during dialogic teaching The aim of Article IV was to generate understanding of the tensions that can emerge when teachers intend to promote students’ agency in classroom interac-tions within the context of public schooling. The study focused on interactional moments when the students opposed or questioned the instructional activity, because it was hypothesized that the agency-control contradiction becomes par-ticularly evident in these moments. In contrast to a deficit perspective, according to which students’ opposition indicates problems in their adaptation to school and society, we held that it is important to frame student opposition as an educa-tional challenge and in terms of its transformative potential for developing more meaningful educational practices. The data were taken from my own pedagogi-cal practice with the third-grade students during the Forest project. My pedagog-ical practice was guided by dialogic teaching. That is, I strived to position stu-

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dents as actors and authors of their learning. My intention was also to expand the context of school learning by creating opportunities for students' personal inter-ests, experiences, and knowledge developed outside of school to be interwoven with instruction to advance students' agency in collective meaning-making and knowledge creation.

The results illuminate my attempts as the teacher to establish and sustain an interaction order associated with dialogic teaching, which provided the students with opportunities to manage the turn-taking and share and debate their own understandings of the issues at stake. This interaction order diverged from the triadic communication typical of more traditional teaching approaches in which teachers ask known-answer questions and evaluate students' responses. The al-ternative interaction order created opportunities for students to publicly voice and negotiate criticism of the instruction targeted at the contents, procedures, and purpose of the instructional activity.

The findings show inconsistency with regard to my responses to student op-position, which was related to the type of student oppositional initiative. By creating spaces for the negotiation of the students' opposition, I was able to sup-port the achievement of student agency. I negotiated with the students almost every time they contested instructional content, which engendered momentary expansions of joint meaning-making when the students used their personal knowledge and experiences to problematize the content. I also created spaces for negotiating students' contestations of the instructional procedures but not as of-ten as when students contested instructional contents. The negotiations about the instructional procedures resulted in practical adjustments, making me, as the teacher, accountable to existing procedures, and a few times contributing to a qualitative change in the instructional procedures.

However, despite my intention to implement dialogic teaching in the class-room, imposing an authoritative view or sanction was my most common re-sponse to students' oppositional initiatives, resulting in interactions that sup-pressed their agency or increased their resistance. I most often responded to the students' disruptions of the instructional activity and refusal to participate by imposing my own views on the matter or sanctions such as reprimands or pun-ishments. I responded by imposing my own views also when students contested instructional procedures and the purpose of instruction. Notably, every time the students contested the purpose of the instruction, I silenced their questioning.

In sum, in Article IV we have suggested interpreting student opposition and resistance as opportunities to promote their agency. However, our findings indi-cate that dealing with these uncooperative acts in a generative way is a complex and contradictory endeavor, even for well-intentioned teachers.

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6.5 Summary of the main findings This section summarizes the main results of this dissertation in relation to the research questions I posed for my inquiry. 6.5.1 RQ 1: What characterizes pedagogical approaches that expand the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider soci-ety outside of school?

The findings of this dissertation study underline that a broad definition of peda-gogy is needed to study and design pedagogical approaches for expanding the context of school learning. Pedagogy is not a mere matter of teaching methods (Alexander, 2008; see also Edwards, 2001; Daniels, 2007) but happens in en-counters between students’ and teachers’ activities, situated in the cultural, his-torical, and institutional context of school and beyond (see also Engeström, 1998; Hakkarainen, 2009).

Our analysis of the Bicycles on the Move! project (Article II) illuminated how reconceptualization of the object of instructional activity from the (re-)production of school texts to working on problems that had relevance out-side of school was associated with the restructuring of the whole instructional activity and its components. In the pursuit of this spatially and temporally ex-panded object, the relationships between the students and the teachers were re-negotiated, and new, mutually transformative relationships were forged with stakeholders and activity systems situated outside of school. The new object of instruction, which involved influencing local political decision-making, ap-peared to give an entirely new sense to the instructional contents and procedures. We identified three pedagogical features of the Bicycles on the Move! project that created the conditions for the expansion of the context of school learning to the communities and activity systems surrounding the school: (a) expanding students' accountability across space and time, (b) making meaning and estab-lishing relationships by connecting to surrounding communities, and (c) orient-ing to transforming the local environment. In all, our analysis of the Bicycles on the Move! project shows how the expansion of the context of school learning can result from a pedagogical design and its realization in cooperation with the students.

The retrospective analyses of my own pedagogical practices in the Forest and Animal projects (Articles III and IV) show that a broad definition of pedagogy for expanding the context of school learning also needs to take into account stu-dents’ interpretations that deviate from the assigned tasks and their agency to oppose instructional activity. Article III illuminated student deviations from the assigned task in the Animal project, through which the focal students, Vilma and Samira, were able to elaborate their personal sense of the task to connect the instruction to the wider, personally relevant contexts of their lives. Yet our

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analysis also shows that these moments in which the focal students were able to expand their dominant reproductive task interpretation were rare and were not developed further or sustained. Although I had designed the pedagogical ap-proach to foster personal sensemaking, my imposition of this approach in terms of non-negotiable procedures appeared to have contributed to the focal students’ interpretation of the task as yet another school task with correct answers known by the teacher or given in the textbook. The findings also suggest that the coun-terproductive interpretive dynamics partly stemmed from my lack of awareness of the contextual grounding of the students’ task interpretations. The introduc-tion of the new instructional procedures appeared mainly to have affected the surface-level of the instructional activity; in particular, the object of the instruc-tional activity was not expanded beyond the classroom but involved solving curriculum-related problems to produce school texts, such as worksheets, post-ers, and answers to exams, that were subject to the evaluation of the teacher (see also Engeström, Engeström, & Suntio, 2002; Hakkarainen, 2010).

The findings of Article IV illuminate how the alternative interaction order (Goffman, 1983) of dialogic teaching that I established and sustained in the whole-class discussions during the Forest project created moments of student agency that enabled the students to discursively transcend the boundaries be-tween the school world and their personal worlds. However, the results also show that my attempts to promote student agency and expand the context of school learning were compromised by my imposition of authoritative proce-dures. My pedagogical approach gave only limited space for the students to question the procedures and purposes of the instructional activity, or to refuse to participate. In other words, there was no room for the students to publicly ques-tion what the instructional activity was about and what its object was.

The findings of our review of literature (Article I) underline that in defining the pedagogy for studying and designing pedagogical approaches for expanding the context of school learning, it is important to pay attention to the pedagogical rationales that motivate and direct the teachers’ and researchers’ attempts to do this. The three distinct pedagogical rationales that were identified in the study played a large role in how learning and instruction were organized, what tools were used, and what role the students’ agendas as well as their personal and cultural ways of transacting knowledge played in the instruction.

In all, these findings help to distinguish an expansion of the context of school learning from its mere extension. Extension of school learning can be defined as taking instruction to out-of-school settings or using resources developed outside of school as part of instruction. However, for expansion of the context of school learning to take place, a qualitative transformation of the instructional activity was needed (see also Engeström et al., 2003). The findings of the four articles of this dissertation illuminate how this kind of transformation could take place, even if it was sometimes short-lived, through the pursuit of problems and phe-

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nomena that had relevance in the wider society outside of school, through trans-formative encounters with non-school stakeholders and activity systems, and through a redefinition of what counted as knowledge and knowing by recogniz-ing and building on students’ divergent task interpretations, opposition, and ways of transacting knowledge. 6.5.2 RQ 2: What opportunities for student agency are manifested in expanding the context of school learning?

It is interesting to compare the forms of agency that were made available for the students through the expansion of the context of school learning in the Bicycles on the Move! project (Article II) and in my own pedagogical practice in the For-est project (Article IV). Firstly, in both projects, the students achieved conceptu-al agency (Greeno, 2006) by drawing on their personal knowledge and experi-ences as a resource and by juxtaposing these with expert voices in the unfolding instructional activity. In the Forest project, the students met other experts than the teacher in the field trips that the class took to a museum and a science center. These field trips provided possibilities for me as the teacher to draw on alterna-tive expert voices in the instruction. The alternative expert voices also appeared to provide sufficient distance to support the students in taking up negotiating positions in relation to the issues discussed.

Secondly, although we did not explicitly mention relational agency in Article IV, it is clear that the alternative interaction order of dialogic teaching in play provided the students with opportunities to achieve a degree of relational agency while they built on and debated each other’s ideas, and took joint action to con-test instructional contents and procedures (see, e.g., the analyses of Excerpts 2 and 3 in Article II; see also Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2012). However, these forms of relational agency were somewhat confined to the relations available within the classroom. By way of contrast, the students’ relational agency in Bi-cycles on the Move! was extended beyond the classroom; they were able to en-gage with other students locally and abroad, their teachers, cycling activists, and policy-makers to interpret, act on, and expand problems emerging in the unfold-ing activity (Edwards & D'Arcy, 2004; Edwards, 2009). Moreover, the opportu-nities for relational agency were also expanded because these other stakeholders were not only knowledge sources but served a rich variety of purposes for the instructional activity: as politicians who were to be convinced, as partners in the joint activity, and ultimately as cyclists who used the cycling routes. Further-more, the demand for feasibility in the students' contributions fostered their sen-sitivity to the perspectives of the policy-makers.

Thirdly, comparing our analyses of the two projects shows that we identified two different forms of transformative agency (see also Engeström, 2008; Virk-kunen, 2006) that were made available to the students in the Bicycles on the

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Move! and the Forest projects. In the Bicycles on the Move! Project, the stu-dents’ orientation to transform the local environment was directed to social prac-tices beyond the classroom. Accordingly, the students achieved transformative agency by breaking away from traditional taken-for-granted practices, taking the initiative to influence local cycling conditions and contributing to public politi-cal debate about cycling issues. In our analysis of the Forest project, in contrast, we identified the students’ achievement of the agency to transform classroom interactional events. Thus, the students’ transformative agency was directed to the instructional activity within the classroom. Yet these transformations con-tributed to the expansion of the context of school learning by connecting the instructional activity to the wider contexts of students’ lives. In a similar vein, the notion of personal sense employed in Article III adds an important agency-related dimension to the understanding of the expansion of the context of school learning. It foregrounds the personally and emotionally relevant connections that students themselves make between aspects of the instruction and the broader contexts of their lives.

Finally, our review of the pedagogical approaches presented in the literature (Article I) showed that some pedagogical rationales for expanding the context of school learning were more attuned than others to recognizing the positive trans-formative potential in the students’ sensemaking practices and agency that di-verged from given cultural norms and values. 6.5.3 RQ 3: What tensions and challenges emerge when the context of school learning is expanded?

Expanding the context of school learning is by definition a transformative en-deavor. As such it gives rise to tensions and challenges, as evidenced by all four studies of this dissertation.

Article III unpacked the tensions and challenges that arose for the focal stu-dents, Vilma and Samira, while they attempted to make sense of the assigned Animal project task. Our analysis of the students’ interactions with various com-ponents of the institutional context suggests that the introduction of new instruc-tional practices mainly affected the surface level of the instructional activity. Despite the new practices, regular aspects of schoolwork, such as spelling and handwriting, played an important role in the students’ interpretations of the task. The added complexity appeared to confuse the students and diverted them from interpretive engagement with the epistemic content of the task to dealing with the conflicts and disruptions in the flow of activity. Moreover, the partitioning of the focal students’ activities to official and parallel scripts suggests that the stu-dents’ keeping of their personal lives separate from the tasks was firmly estab-lished as an essential aspect of what schooling meant for them. Furthermore, the analysis shows that although I had designed the task procedures to foster sense-

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making, my authoritative imposition of these procedures on the students under-mined the original intention. My guidance was contradictory in this respect (see also Mehmeti & Perret-Clermont, 2016; Greco, Mehmeti, & Perret-Clermont, submitted). On the one hand, I encouraged dialogic negotiations of the task con-tents. On the other hand, I prescribed authoritative task procedures without being sensitive to the students’ own interpretations of the task. Concomitantly, the students treated their attempts at sensemaking as sidetracks or cheating. This contradictory situation resembles the contradiction between agency and control that teachers aspiring to promote student agency need to deal with (Rainio, 2008; McNeil, 1986). This contradiction was the focus of Article IV.

Article IV illuminated tensions that I had to deal with as a teacher when I strove to promote students’ agency and to create opportunities for students' per-sonal interests, experiences, and knowledge developed outside of school to be interwoven with instruction. In particular, the findings of the study revealed the contradictory demands involved in my dialogic teaching approach with respect to its task to serve both personal and institutional needs. For the most part, I acted as the author of the institutional arrangements. This was evident, in partic-ular, in my attempts to achieve and institutionalize an alternative interaction order of dialogic teaching. However, in some situations, I acted as an animator of the voice of the curriculum designers and the Board of Education, locating the authority to transform educational practices beyond my own frame of action and responsibility. The study underlined that, despite its positive connotation, stu-dent agency is not easy to handle but also takes forms that undermine the teach-er’s intentions and pedagogical approaches.

In the Bicycles on the Move! project (Article II), the elective nature of the project provided the teachers with opportunities to organize the instructional activity in a different way than normally. Yet the teachers reported that the year-long timespan of the project conflicted with the course-per-period method of organizing teaching in the school. This manifested, for example, as difficulties with allocating times for meetings with the students. Moreover, pursuing the transformative stance and questioning established social practices aroused ten-sions and stirred up negative emotions in stakeholders outside of the school.

Our review of literature (Article I) showed that in the pedagogical approaches guided by the rationale of educational equity and inclusiveness, the teachers struggled with the tensions and challenges involved in dealing with students’ diverse out-of-school learning within the confines of institutional schooling and its values. Reconciling these tensions was shown to be an expansive process that questioned established practices and transformed what counted as knowledge (Rosebery et al., 2010; Gutiérrez et al., 1999). For example, the concept of dark funds of knowledge was used to refer to aspects of the students’ lives that were considered dangerous or negative in school (Zipin, 2009; see also Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Matusov, 2009; Thompson & Hall, 2008). Students’ dark funds of

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knowledge were found to be risky to deal with for the teachers because they posed a threat to students’ wellbeing and could disrupt institutional arrange-ments that had been taken for granted. Nevertheless, attending to the dark funds of knowledge was considered important because they provided opportunities to connect instruction to vital personal meanings in the students’ lives and to foster deep engagement in school learning. Similarly, in some of the pedagogical ap-proaches guided by the rationale of learner agency and identity across contexts, conventional educational activity was found to be resistant to being extended to incorporate students’ out-of-school identities, interests, and discourses (e.g., Lantz-Anderson et al., 2013). 6.5.4 Summary

Table 4 summarizes the findings of this dissertation study.

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7 General discussion

The aim of this dissertation study was to develop an agency-centered pedagogi-cal model for expanding the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society. In order to develop this model, I engaged, together with my coau-thors, in critical analysis and questioning of my own pedagogical practice as a primary school teacher (Articles III and IV). To enrich the model, I also built on the analyses my coauthors and I conducted on two additional datasets, in which I was not myself involved as a participant. The first of them was from an innova-tive project, Bicycles on the Move!, which took place in a Finnish upper second-ary school (Article II). The project aimed to develop the students’ citizenship and agency through involving them in efforts to influence the local political decision-making concerning cycling. The second additional dataset was derived from research literature. My coauthors and I conducted a literature review of pedagogical approaches that sought to expand the context of school learning. The results of these analyses were reported in the substudies of this dissertation (Articles I–IV).

In the following, based on the results so far (Chapter 6), I present an outline of the pedagogical model.

7.1 An outline of an agency-centered pedagogy in expand-ing contexts of formal education 7.1.1 Building a pedagogy on the foundation of students’ personal sense and agency

The critical analysis of my own pedagogical practice helped me to reconceptual-ize how I construct the students as the object of my work. It appears that my understanding of the students was mediated by a deficit perspective common in formal education, according to which students who display personal or cultural divergence from the age-appropriate normative classroom practices are judged as less adequate than students who conform with the normative practices (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Ladson-Billig, 1995; Mehmeti & Perret-Clermont, 2016). The deficit perspective is enforced by the use of abstract professional categories for categorizing students, such as “low achieving” or “at risk” (San-nino, 2010; Virkkunen et al., 2012; Mehan, 1993).

Samira, whose interactions were analyzed in Article III, was a student I had categorized as “low achieving”; this was the reason for selecting her as a focal student whose social interactions were followed and video-recorded during the Animal project, because my intention was to support her to become better in-

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volved in the project. Samira had an immigrant background, and she displayed low test performance. Her language skills were also below the native level. However, regarding the Animal project, perhaps the most problematic issue from my perspective as the teacher was that she did not contribute much to the whole-class and small group discussions. Her non-participation in this respect was in discrepancy with my version of talk-based dialogic teaching (Dawes et al., 2000) that I was putting into practice in my classroom. My approach to solv-ing this problem was to encourage Samira and other students who participated less than others to take a larger role in the discussions. At that time, it did not occur to me that the instructional procedures I had introduced to promote per-sonal sensemaking ironically did not make much sense to some of the students. Indeed, our analysis in Article III showed that for the most part Samira appeared not to understand what the task was about. Neither did her partner Vilma always understand the premises of the task, although she complied with them nonethe-less. Of the two students, Samira was the one who questioned the authoritative instructional procedures, showing evidence of deliberative attempts to construct a personal sense of the task amidst the contradictory demands of the instruction-al activity. She did this when the teacher was not present but did not get the sup-port of her partner. As the teacher I was not aware of Samira’s actions until I analyzed the video.

Similarly, in the Forest project (Article IV), some students regularly disrupt-ed and distanced themselves from the instructional activity despite my attempts to promote student agency. My response as the teacher was to impose sanctions on these students, which did not resolve the issue but instead increased the stu-dents’ resistance and disengagement. In line with a deficit perspective (Litowitz, 1997), as the teacher, I interpreted the students' resistance in terms of behavioral problems instead of as an indication of their agency. Using the concept of per-sonal sense, a possible interpretation of the students’ disruptions and resistance is that they were displaying difficulties in constructing the instructional activity as relevant for their lives and concerns. As our analysis showed, the instructional procedures were to a large extent imposed on the students, leaving no room for negotiating the purpose of the instructional activity. Consequently, some of the students were left without support in elaborating their personal sense of the in-structional activity.

Giving primacy to students’ personal sensemaking and agency in the peda-gogical model I develop in this dissertation helps to overcome the deficit per-spective. At the core of the model is an expanded and holistic conceptualization of students as agentic and capable sensemakers who are given opportunities to elaborate on the connections between the classroom instruction and the wider contexts of their lives. In this conceptualization, the students are assigned a more active role in shaping the instructional activity, allowing them to manifest their individual potential (see also Virkkunen et al., 2012; Engeström et al., 2002;

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Sannino, 2010; Perret-Clermont, 2015). This conceptualization requires a genu-ine interest on the part of the teacher to learn about and from the students and their lives (Freire, 1970; Gonzales et al., 2005). Supporting students’ elaboration of their personal sense of the instructional activity is a transformative endeavor that requires readiness to redefine and expand the canonical definitions of what counts as knowledge and knowing in the classroom (Warren et al., 2001; Kam-berlis & Wehunt, 2012; Rosebery et al., 2010).

The pedagogical approaches we reviewed in the research literature (Article I) provide ways of connecting instruction to the students’ lives, interests, and learn-ing outside of school. For example, in the funds of knowledge approach, teach-ers visit the homes and neighborhoods of their students and then capitalize on the insights that they gain from the home visits to reorganize the classroom in-struction (Moll et al., 1992). Students can also themselves be invited to bring aspects of their lives into the class (Zipin, 2009; Rosebery et al., 2010) or be involved in the design of instruction (Barton & Tan, 2009; Siry & Lang, 2010). Ultimately, students bring to the classroom not only their knowledge but also their ways of transacting knowledge (Lantz-Anderson et al., 2013; Zipin, 2009; Heath, 1983). It requires more effort and interpretation on the part of teachers to go beyond mere knowledge content to recognize ways of knowing and transact-ing knowledge, but the latter two concepts carry deeper resonance and familiari-ty for the students (Zipin, 2009). For example, my own teaching was primarily based on talk and other discursive modes of participation, whereas Bicycles on the Move!, while also involving these modes of participation, provided the stu-dents with opportunities to participate through multiple forms of practical ac-tions. Finally, what the analyses of my own pedagogical practice (Article III and IV) suggest is to pay attention to students’ deviating task interpretations and oppositional initiatives as involving a potential for their elaboration of personal sense. 7.1.2 Connecting instruction to activity systems and expert commu-nities outside of school

The second component of the pedagogical model I propose in this dissertation study involves connecting instruction to activity systems on the civic, academic, and economic spheres of the wider society. The analysis of the Bicycles on the Move! project suggests that working on complex and current problems that have relevance outside school can have a powerful role in restructuring instructional activity (see also Hakkarainen, 2010; Engeström, Engeström, & Suntio, 2002). Classes can, for example, take part in projects of citizen science in which their learning outcomes contribute to scientific endeavors and have societal relevance (Roth & Barton, 2004), such as when taking part in bird observation research to compile a bird atlas (Engeström, 2015b). Non-school actors can participate in

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such projects by helping with coordination or providing expert tools needed in the project. A large-scale example is a nationwide project that recruited thirty-six schools in Finland and provided them with tools to make measurements of air quality and record the results on interactive maps that were compared at the national level (Rajala et al., 2011).

Thus, in the pedagogical model, the contexts to which school learning is ex-panded are not understood as given and static (e.g., as knowledge sources) but as dynamically created by human activity (Engeström, 2009; Rajala & Akkerman, submitted). Connecting the school tasks to non-school activity systems can ex-pand the form of students’ accountability by changing the nature of students’ contributions and bringing in new audiences with whom students can share and discuss their observations, opinions, and reflections (see also Kosonen et al., 2012; Damsa et al., 2010). Moreover, the knowledge and skills that students learn can acquire new uses in other activity systems beyond school. Notably, our analysis of the Bicycles on the Move! project illustrated a transformative stance that students could take in order not only to participate in activities outside of school but to contribute to the change of these activities (Stetsenko, 2008; Freire, 1970; Turner & Font, 2007; Basu et al., 2009). Here, they collaborated and built on the energy of transformative social movements of cycling activists to support their goals (Yamazumi, 2014; Engeström, 2015b; Vianna, Hougaard, & Stetsen-ko, 2014).

Obviously, engaging students in projects that connect to non-school activity systems does not guarantee that students experience the projects as meaningful. In the pedagogical model I propose, students’ concerns and interests should play a role in the selection of the objects of instructional activity to be pursued. In Bicycles on the Move! the students were not able to contribute to the formation of the overall goal of improving local cycling conditions; it was decided in ad-vance by the teachers. Furthermore, I suggest that during the projects that con-nect instruction to other activity systems beyond school, students’ interpretations that deviate from assigned tasks and their oppositional agency can serve as a fruitful resource for developing the projects and making them more meaningful for students. Finally, I suggest that schools can deliberately support students’ individual interest-driven learning and engagement by creating opportunities for them to pursue objects of their interest across contexts of their learning ecologies (Barron, 2006; Barron et al., 2013).

7.1.3 Mastering the institutional context of public schools

In order to serve the needs of public schooling, the pedagogical model proposed in this dissertation study needs to account for the institutional context of instruc-tional activity. Indeed, Article III showed that students’ task interpretations were partly constituted by the institutional school context. Moreover, Article IV

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showed that my attempts to foster students’ agency were constrained by my need to maintain control of the instructional contents and procedures stemming from my institutional role as a school teacher (McNeil, 1986; Rainio, 2008; Van Oers, 2015). Thus, I propose a pedagogical model that relies on a conceptualization of pedagogy that goes beyond accounts of classroom interactions and instructional procedures to encompass the relatively durable systemic organization of the instructional activity. Ultimately, the institutional contexts of schools are con-strained by the societal preconditions of schooling that are beyond the influence of the teachers and schools, such as its compulsory nature, its crowded condi-tion, and its responsibility to sort students into different tracks in the societal division of labor (Simola et al., 2015; Tyack & Cuban, 1997). However, as ar-gued by Yrjö Engeström (1998), between the level of classroom interactions and macro-level social structures exists a middle-level systemic organization of the instructional activity in relation to which teacher and student actions become meaningful and understandable. This middle-level organization of activity is to some extent within the power of schools to reorganize (see also Barma, Lacasse, & Massé-Morneau, 2015; Engeström, Engeström, & Suntio, 2002; Kajamaa, Riisla, Lipponen, & Rajala, forthcoming).

Thus, to expand the context of school learning, I propose that the instruction-al activity be organized around work on objects that have relevance for students and the wider society. Moreover, I propose that the new instructional activity would not just be added on top of the old activity; all components of the instruc-tional activity – such as evaluation practices, the use of study materials, the tem-poral organization of school work, the extension of the activity in space and time, the relationships between school and actors in the surrounding community, rules, the division of labor, and the participants and stakeholders in the activity – need to be critically examined for how they contribute to or hamper the joint effort. Given that the relevant activity system of the teacher comprises the whole school, the reorganization of instructional activity for the most part requires the joint effort of more than one teacher or even the whole school (Barma, Lacasse, & Massé-Morneau, 2015; Engeström, Engeström, & Suntio, 2002; Kajamaa, Riisla, Lipponen, & Rajala, forthcoming). Since instructional activity is partly defined and constrained by broader educational structures and policies, opportu-nities for reorganizing the instructional activity may be limited, even when the whole school is involved in the transformation. For this reason, expanding the context of school learning may first need to be piloted on a smaller scale, such as in the elective course of the Bicycles on the Move! project (Article II). Similarly, the final project created in a Change Laboratory intervention involving a whole lower secondary school was intended to serve as a Trojan horse that would make visible, problematize, and overcome undesirable constraining structures of the larger school activity system (Engeström, Engeström, & Suntio, 2002).

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7.1.4 Pedagogy as a continuing journey I defined pedagogy as a purposive cultural intervention in human development (Alexander, 2008). Thus, when considering how the pedagogical model I pro-pose here might be implemented, it is useful to reflect on educational interven-tion research.

In educational intervention research, high-fidelity implementation of given instructional procedures is a key principle (e.g., O’Donnell, 2008). Fidelity of implementation characterizes “how well an intervention is implemented in com-parison with the original program design” (O’Donnell, 2008, p. 33). An impli-cation is that deviations from the given procedures are considered problematic. However, through the analyses of my own pedagogical practice in Articles III and IV, I hope we have shown that students’ deviations from the normative in-structional procedures were crucial opportunities for the students to elaborate their personal sense of the instructional activity (see also Gutiérrez et al., 1995; Rosebery et al., 2010). The critical analysis of my own practice helped me to realize that by imposing the instructional procedures – which I had designed to promote students’ agency and sensemaking – on students, I reduced their oppor-tunities to connect the instruction to the wider contexts of their lives (Article III). Moreover, my control of these procedures and the students’ engagement in their realization for the most part only gave room for domesticated forms of their agency (Matusov et al., 2015), while marginalizing other forms of opposition, including such potentially transformative interactions as constructive question-ing of the purpose of the instructional activity (Article IV).

Thus, in line with other critics of established intervention research (Krange & Ludvigsen, 2008; Penuel, 2014; Engeström, 2011; Engeström, Sannino, & Virk-kunen, 2014; Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2014), I stress the importance of educational interventions that give primacy to the teachers’ and students’ agen-cy. This involves the idea that teachers co-configure educational designs togeth-er with the students as an integral part of the enactment of these designs (Engeström, 2008; Penuel, 2014).

For these reasons, I use the metaphor of journey to refer to the agency-centered model for expanding the context of formal education I am developing in this dissertation study. The development of the model is a continuing journey because in principle it is not possible to perfect it without neglecting the trans-formative agency of the students, teachers, and other stakeholders in educational practice (see also Krange & Ludvigsen, 2008). For instance, it may be that in some situations students do not want to bring some aspects of their lives to school but intentionally wish to maintain the discontinuity between their school and out-of-school learning (Bronkhorst & Akkerman, forthcoming). Some stu-dents might also display their agency in showing preference for more traditional methods of learning and instruction in place of methods that supposedly promote

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their authority and agency (see also Matusov, 2015b). While I am not proposing that students should always decide what and how they study in school, what I am proposing is that these displays of their agency should be taken as serious start-ing points for negotiation, if as teachers, we are to build the pedagogy on the foundations of students’ personal sense.

7.2 Implications for educational practice and policy Pedagogics is never and was never politically indifferent, since, willingly or unwillingly, through its own work on the psyche, it has always adopted a particular social pattern, political line, in accordance with the dominant social class that has guided its interests. (Vygotsky, 1926/1997, p. 348)

This dissertation study is timely from the perspective of current educational pol-icy in Finland. In August of 2016, Finland will start to implement the new Na-tional Core Curriculum for Basic Education (FNBE, 2014), which explicitly encourages teachers to experiment with student-centered pedagogies and to take learning out of the classroom. In this dissertation study, my coauthors and I have analyzed two empirical cases that can be regarded as realizations of the recent Finnish educational policies which have culminated in the new national core curriculum. In addition, our review of pedagogical approaches presented in re-search literature helps to situate the Finnish developments in an international framework. Studying the implementation of agency-centered pedagogy in Finn-ish classrooms is also interesting from an international perspective because of the trust-based governance of education and the high level of teacher autonomy and professionalism in Finland (Sahlberg, 2007; Miettinen, 2012), which poten-tially create fertile conditions for the promotion of student agency and the ex-pansion of the context of school learning. In this respect Finland diverges signif-icantly from the internationally dominant standardization and test-based ac-countability policies that have been heavily criticized for their inability to re-spond to today’s educational challenges (Ravitch, 2011; Biesta, 2009; Nichols & Berliner, 2007).

A key implication emerging from this dissertation study for educational prac-tice and policy lies in its capacity to suggest directions for carrying out the ongo-ing educational reform in Finland. For one, it is crucial that educational reforms are informed by robust documentation and analysis of how the key reform ideas are played out in the actual, everyday practice of schools. This is important be-cause school reforms can only succeed if teachers and schools – as well as stu-dents – are seen as contributors to the process (Hubbard, Mehan & Stein, 2006; Tyack & Cuban, 1997; Kennedy, 2005). For example, based on their analysis of the failure of a major school reform in San Diego, Hubbard, Mehan, and Stein (2006) concluded that educational reform should be conceived as a two-way

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learning process at every level of education, from students to policy-makers (see also Liberali, 2009). One way to involve students as contributors in the reform effort is to involve them in the design of pedagogical practices (see also Siry & Lang, 2010; Barton & Tan, 2009), which is also recommended in the new na-tional curriculum guidelines (FNBE, 2014, p. 24). However, the findings of this dissertation study also suggest a less obvious way to harness the students’ agen-cy for pedagogical change; that is, the findings foreground the potentially pro-ductive interpretive dynamics in play when students deviate from assigned tasks or oppose the instructional activity. Students’ deviations and opposition can be useful in pointing to ways of organizing instruction by putting the students’ con-cerns and agency in the center. Helping students to find relevance in instruction and to make connections to their lives and interests outside of school is crucial at a time when education systems are losing contact with students – who are be-coming alienated from school in increasing numbers (Salmela-Aro et al., in press; Säljö, 2004).

The findings of this dissertation study show that expanding the context of school learning can be considered educationally valuable from multiple perspec-tives. Such an expansion can support more robust conceptual learning in aca-demic subjects (Rosebery et al., 2010; Warren et al., 2001; Cribbs & Linder, 2013; Wiseman, 2011); help to provide students with the creative capabilities needed in today’s knowledge-intensive jobs (Kumpulainen et al., 2014; de Lange, 2011); be therapeutic for students who try to manage the socioculturally diversifying contexts they inhabit (James, Purohit, & Walsh, 2006); or create conditions for self-realization for students who wish to bring to the classroom their technologically mediated, friendship-related, and interest-driven ways of engaging with social media (Lantz-Anderson et al., 2013), or who wish to help to make school and the wider society more just by questioning exclusive defini-tions of school learning (Moll et al., 1992; Zipin, 2009).

This long list makes evident that when we talk about “taking learning out of the classroom,” which is increasingly recognized as an important educational agenda in Finland and internationally (Article I; Bronkhorst & Akkerman, forth-coming; Peterson, in press), it is not at all clear what kind of instructional activi-ty is being referred to. At its simplest, taking learning out of the classroom can mean a mere extension of classroom activity in space and time that does not imply any qualitative change in the instructional activity but continues with more of the same as before. However, when the question is about expansion of the context of school learning, in contrast to its mere extension, the articulation of pedagogical rationales for doing this becomes important. Indeed, I argue that policy-makers need to articulate what they are trying to achieve by expanding the context of school learning to students’ lives and the wider society and who the stakeholders are that benefit from doing this. For example, a growing agenda from the OECD promotes 21st century skills (Dumont, Istance, & Benavides,

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2010; Binkley et al., 2012) as a way to prepare students for their (working) lives in this century. While I see that this is an important pedagogical rationale, I feel that this endeavor contains a risk of reducing student agency and the expansion of school learning to measurable skills (see e.g., Wong, 2013), and indeed of reducing the expansion of the context of school learning to its mere extension, while simultaneously enforcing deficit perspectives in education. Similar con-cerns have been raised by Julian Sefton-Green (2016), who cautions that the expansion of formal education to students’ everyday contexts can result in the pedagogization of their everyday lives, which signifies increased control of eve-ryday non-school lives by educational authorities. Thus, I argue that the plurality of different pedagogical rationales for expanding the context of school learning should be harnessed; public schools do not need to serve only a single purpose (Schiro, 2008; Vitikka et al., in press; Vitikka, 2009).

From an educational policy perspective, it is worthwhile to consider the ten-sions and challenges that emerged in the collisions between new and old ways of organizing instruction, between students’ informal and formal identities, dis-courses and interests (Lantz-Anderson et al., 2013; Kumpulainen & Mikkola, 2014), or between students’ dark funds of knowledge and official school values (Zipin, 2009; Thompson & Hall, 2008). I argue that these kinds of tensions should not be avoided, but regarded as opportunities for learning to negotiate and encounter social and cultural differences. Like John Dewey famously said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself” (Dewey, 1938). Moreover, the emerging tensions can be indications of more durable contradic-tions internal to the instructional activity or existing in the interrelations with other activities (Engeström, 1987). Collectively working to analyze and resolve such tensions has been shown to be a way to make more enduring changes in the instructional activity (Engeström, 2009; Engeström et al., 2002; Kajamaa et al., forthcoming). Furthermore, working with the tensions that emerge from attempts to reform school is probably a viable and necessary way to go beyond wishful thinking in educational policy-making (Simola, 2015).

Finally, I would like to stress that with the concept of agency in the agency-centered model, I refer in particular to transformative forms of agency (Engeström, 2006; Stetsenko, 2008). In today’s rapidly changing societies, re-productive forms of learning are often not viable. Yet in normative school life, agency easily acquires only domesticated forms (Article IV, Matusov et al., 2015). Putting transformative forms of agency at the center of school education would require profound changes in its organization (see also Roth, 2015). In particular, what is required is that the curriculum and end points of learning are not considered as fixed and pregiven, but that the curriculum is seen as emergent in practice (Goulart & Roth, 2010; see also Matusov & Marjanovich-Shane, 2012). My reading of the new Finnish National Core Curriculum (FNBE, 2014) would seem to allow for the creation of spaces for an emergent curriculum.

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7.3 Reflections on the journey and its continuation The journey I have made in this dissertation project can be characterized as a part of a cycle of expansive learning (Engeström, 1987) that I have undertaken. Here, expansive learning accounts for a course of sustained work as an individu-al and together with other people on the video data collected from my teaching practice that has resulted in a reconceptualization of the object of my instruc-tional activity. Expansion usually begins with the questioning of existing social practice and is followed by critical analysis, the modeling of new forms of activ-ity, the implementation of and reflection on changes, and eventually the consoli-dation of the new practice. Throughout the making of this dissertation, I have analyzed and increasingly begun to question aspects of my pedagogical practice. In one sense, the pedagogical model that I constructed serves for me, and hope-fully for others, as “a second stimulus” (Vygotsky, 1978), that is, a mediating artifact that remediates my relations to students and helps me to reconceptualize students and pedagogy. The next step in the development of the model would be to enrich it by implementing it in practice. In line with my critique of the stand-ardization of pedagogical approaches made above, I stress that it is important to consider the implementation as a creative phase that is open to and harnesses the participants’ transformative agency and opposition (see also Engeström, 2011). Therefore, the model is supposed to be changed and enriched every time it is tested in practice.

While I hope that this dissertation study has generated new insights about the expansion of the context of school and new questions to be researched, I contend that the findings should be regarded as tentative, given the small sample of par-ticipants that have been involved in this research. On the other hand, the small sample of participants has made possible detailed data-driven micro-analyses of classroom interactions. In addition to the small sample size, a limitation of this dissertation is a lack of historical analysis. The concept of activity served in this study more as an explanatory principle rather than an object of analysis (Engeström, 1999). Moreover, the expansive actions that were identified in the analyzed studies (Articles III and IV) were relatively short-lived and not devel-oped further. While this in itself is an empirical finding, it is perhaps not that surprising, given what is already known about classroom interactions. Future research could focus on situations in which students’ deviations and opposition would trigger a more durable expansion in the instructional activity. As I pointed out above, engaging more than one teacher or even the whole school in develop-ing pedagogy would give more possibilities for reorganizing the instructional activity.

A strength of this dissertation study is the analysis of my own practice. Ana-lyzing the data together with my coauthors and other colleagues in joint data sessions (see Jordan & Henderson, 1995) has enabled me to at least partly over-

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come the bias that stems from my professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) as the teacher in the activity. This issue I explicitly discussed above (Section 7.1). My status as the teacher has given the research group sustained access to the field and informed consent from every parent and child involved in this video-based research. This is not easy to accomplish, and in our case it required that the issue be raised in a parent–teacher meeting with an interpreter for one of the immi-grant parents. Moreover, I believe that documenting and analyzing this journey not only reflects my idiosyncratic individual experience but also speaks to wider practices of schooling and instruction. I have also considered criticizing my own pedagogical practice as a powerful tool for voicing a critique of recurrent and taken-for-granted practices of schooling, as criticizing the practices of other people who voluntarily participate in research bears ethical dilemmas. Finally, the analysis of my attempts to develop my pedagogy can perhaps be a helpful resource in the pre-service and in-service training of teachers who wish to ex-pand the context of school learning to the students’ lives and the wider society and to promote students’ agency in their instruction. At least in Finland, there are many teachers in this position, given the demands of the new National Core Curriculum (FNBE, 2014).

7.4 Openings I end this dissertation study by proposing avenues for future research emerg-

ing from the present findings. Future research on student agency and agency-centered pedagogy could extend the exploration of timescales of development, which this dissertation study examines, beyond the microgenetic timescale to explore also the development of agency at the sociogenetic and ontogenetic timescales.

First, at the sociogenetic timescale (Ludvigsen, 2009), a possible direction for future research is on how the agency-centered pedagogical model developed in the present study can be implemented in schools. A suitable methodology would be a child-driven variation in Change laboratory intervention (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). Children, together with their teachers, would be invited to analyze their everyday practices and the contradictions embedded in and be-tween these practices in school and beyond to develop a new pedagogy. As part of Change laboratory, researchers and teachers could use methods similar to the Funds of Knowledge approach (Moll et al., 1992) to learn about children’s lives and their neighborhoods (see also Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013). In addition, participatory research methods could be used to involve children in conducting visual and written ethnographies of their everyday lives in and out of school (see also Hilppö, Kumpulainen, Lipponen, & Rajala, 2016; Lipponen, Rajala, Hilppö, & Paananen, 2015). To further support the expansion of the school learning con-text to the communities surrounding the school, stakeholders outside of the

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school (e.g., parents and other significant others of the students, representatives of local science centers, libraries, or social movements) could be invited to join the intervention as participants.

The data generated by such interventions could be analyzed to trace the de-velopment and transformation of teaching and learning practices over time (see also Engeström et al., 2002; Engeström, 2009; Kajamaa et al., forthcoming). Analyses of the change laboratory sessions and the implementation of the peda-gogical model in the everyday practices of schools could also shed light on the agency-control contradiction teachers experience when they wish to foster stu-dents’ agency within the constraints of institutional framings and structures of school, and what forms this contradiction takes as a result of the intervention (Article IV; Rainio, 2008; Rainio & Hilppö, 2016). Detailed analyses could fo-cus on what aspects of the institutional contexts of teachers’ work give rise to the control of students, or it may be that the institutional context also supports teachers’ attempts to promote student agency. Furthermore, students’ transform-ative agency can be oriented not only to the change in instructional activity but also to social transformation outside of the school, as shown in the analysis of the Bicycles on the Move! project (Article II). Future research of agency-centered pedagogy could also document and analyze to what extent students can trigger change in the social practices outside of the school (e.g., in local cycling practices and infrastructure, see Article II). In principle, as brought forth by the proponents of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; McLaren, 2000), instructional activity can be oriented to the transformation of the broad social structures of society. While such an orientation is often highly controversial and risky for both students and teachers, it can create powerful conditions to elaborate the personal sense of learning for underserved students (Vianna et al., 2014).

Second, at the ontogenetic timescale, future research could explore how an agency-centered pedagogy can support students’ agency, learning, and develop-ment over time and across space (see also Ludvigsen et al., 2010; Kumpulainen & Rajala, in press-a, in press-b; Rainio, 2008, 2010). This line of research could explore the analytic opportunities of Vygotsky’s concepts of social situation of development and emotional experiencing (‘perezhivanie’ in Russian6). In his theory of child development, Vygotsky (1994, 1998) defined the social situation of development as “[a] system of relations between a child of a given age and social reality” (Vygotsky, 1998: 199). These relations – refracted through the “prism” of the child’s emotional experiencing of them – were seen by Vygotsky as the basic source of development. Here, emotional experiencing signifies a holistic unit of analysis, encompassing the dynamic relations between person

6 The translation of this term is highly debated. However, discussions about translating “perezhivanie” are beyond the scope of the present study. I use the translation used in Vygotsky (1994) by Van den Veer and Valsiner.

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and social situation as well as emotion and cognition (see also Ferholt, 2015). In this view, individuals experience the social situation of development in unique ways, depending on their needs, interpretations, and social positions (Vygotsky, 1994; Bozhovich, 2009). As a consequence, the social situation does not consti-tute an external influence on development, but its role as the source of develop-ment is mediated by how it is experienced.

The concepts of social situation of development and emotional experiencing resonate with the conceptual framework developed in this dissertation study, adding a theory of ontogenetic development. What is important is that develop-ment is not seen as purely harmonious but instead, resistance and conflicts are seen as its inherent part (Vygotsky, 1998; Fleer, 2006). Children enact agency in shaping their own development in the social situations they inhabit (Edwards, 2014). This involves constructing and reconstructing relationships with other people, practices and the material environment. While A.N Leontiev’s concept of personal sense (1978, 1981) used in this dissertation study (Article III) is an elaboration of Vygotsky’s concept of emotional experiencing (D. Leontiev, 2014; Gonzales-Rey, 2012), Vygotsky’s theory foregrounds an important con-nection between the concepts of personal sense and transformative agency, cen-tral to my argument; personal sense and transformative agency are crucial mo-ments in the dialectical process of ontogenetic development (see also Stetsenko, 2005, for a dialectical account of the mutual development of subject and object). However, more conceptual and empirical work is needed to elaborate this con-nection.

The culturally, institutionally, and historically situated nature of the social situation of development also calls for further research to update Vygotsky’s theory to address the needs of today’s schooling (see also Hedegaard, 2012; Fleer, 2010; Fleer & Hedegaard, 2010; Renshaw & Tooth, 2016). Vygotsky’s theory characterizes the child’s social situation of development as one uniform overarching social context disregarding the heterogeneity of the multiple social–interactional contexts that children inhabit and the heterogeneity of levels of development that are associated with their varied modes of participation (Cole & Gajdamaschko, 2010). The findings and conceptual framework of this disserta-tion study are useful for elaborating the concept of social situation of develop-ment in terms of multiple contexts, often accompanied by distinct cultural value systems (see also Barron, 2006; Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013; Kumpulainen & Rajala, in press-a). One step in this direction is to conceptualize social situations of development in plural and in terms of actual materially-based activities that children engage in and children’s positions in these activities (see also Leontiev, 2005; Bozhovich, 2009; Sannino, 2008). Emotional experiencing can be concep-tualized as a form of activity that helps students to develop the transformative agency required to overcome the crises and critical conflicts inherent to their

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development as learners and young people (see also Vasilyuk, 1991; Sannino, 2008, 2010).

Overall, these considerations indicate that much work remains to be done to create a solid foundation for agency-centered pedagogy. The creation of this foundation will benefit from research on the development of student and teacher agency in and across multiple settings and timescales. The journey continues.

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