USING CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY AND CRITICAL REALISM TO ANALYZE THE EMERGENCE OF...

USING CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY AND CRITICAL REALISM TO ANALYZE THE EMERGENCE OF CONTRADICTIONS IN BILINGUAL TEACHER PREPARATION

Alcione N. Ostorga and

Iskra Nunez

Copyright © 2013, 2010, and 2007, Pearson Education, Inc. The University of Texas-Pan American

2014 ISCAR: The 4th Congress of the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research in Sydney Australia 29 September – 3 October

Introduction

Aim:

to explore the points of tension and their resolution among the multi-voiced discussions of a collective group of teacher educators in the CASSO project, a five-year federally funded interventionist research project.

The University of Texas-Pan American


Contextualization Teacher Preparation in the US

From the

Macro to

the Micro

Level


• US Teacher preparation and reductionist accountability reforms

• Texas accountability policies

• Impact on the US-Mexico Border in Texas

• University-based bilingual education teacher preparation program

• The Curriculum Assessment for Successful Students Outcomes – CASSO Project


Questions

• What might constitute a CHAT- and CR-informed vision of the conceptualization of a border university-based teacher preparation program as an activity system within Texas-style accountability?

• What tensions do teacher educators encounter in developing and enacting critical pedagogies?

• What emerging conceptual tools may help us to theorize agency in the time of reductionist education reforms?



Contextualization



The US-Mexico Border

Dual-Dialectical Framework

•Macro(micro(x))



• CHAT• Activity system• Micro/empirical level

Source: Yrjö Engeström’s Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research (1987)

• Critical realism (CR)• Transformational Model

of Social Activity (TMSA)• Macro/theoretical level

Source: Roy Bhaskar’s The possibility of naturalism (1979)

Methodology

• CASSO Activity System

• The activity system

• CASSO



Data Collection and Expansive learning

9 transcriptions of focused-group discussions across a five year span


Timeline of the project


Expansive Learning Cycles

The University of Texas-Pan AmericanX

X

X


Tensions and Contradictions that promote expansive learning

• “Contradictions are historically accumulating structural tensions within and between activity systems” (p. 137)

Source: Yrjö Engeström’s Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. (2001)

• “Expansive learning activity produces culturally new patterns of activity…new forms of work activity.” (p. 139)

Source: Yrjö Engeström’s Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. (2001)



Analysis of tensions

• Accountability vs. access



Subject:

Rules CommunityDivision of labor

Instruments

Object:

Professor 1 transcript 1:

“…They (administrators) are freaking out, they are like; that’s too many, we need to lower the number of rejects … you have these standards to come in but we don’t want that many students not making it because we have the competition out there’. And I think that tension will be present until our quality gets built up.”


• Accountability vs. access



Subject:


Instruments

Object:

Professor 2 – transcript 2:

“…they [student teachers] come from a weak K-12 system, they don’t really have study skills … and we address that collectively, and two people here actually had ... ‘how to read for comprehension’ study sessions.”


• Intensity vs. efficiency



Subject:


Instruments

Object:

Professor 1 – transcript 1:

“There was no way …they could have gotten it done; they would have been overwhelmed with the three exams, so I had to cut it out ...because I felt that they just weren’t going to get it done and everything would just come crushing down on them.”

• Transformational Agency as part of expansive learning

"Transformative agency is about working with the contradictions of an activity system. It includes actions of questioning the status quo and of search for new possibilities. Although initiated by individuals, agentive actions gain their meaning, their consequences and their continuity in the interplay between individuals and their collective”

Source: Haapasaari, A., Engeström, Y., & Kerosuo, H. The emergence of learners’ transformative agency in a Change Laboratory intervention (2014, p.4)


Conceptual Tools


• Transformational Agency as part of expansive learning in the CASSO Project

• Address students’ needs as they occur• Work collaboratively

Example: Professor 5 – transcript 1:

“I just think the message is staring right at us, we need to start working together and its not going to come from the outside, it’s something that we have to have to initiate ourselves.”


Conceptual Tools


Discussion and Recommendations

Dual dialectical framework:

• CHAT provided a tool for analyzing the expansive learning process by examining the CASSO project as an activity system at the micro level.

• Critical Realism provides a tool for theorizing the tensions found at the micro level as they appear as contradictions at the macro level.

• Combining CHAT and CR provides deeper means by which to understand the expansive learning process by examining the tensions and theorizing contradictions that may lead to expansion.



ReferencesBhaskar, R. (1979). The possibilities of naturalism. Harvester Brighton, UK.

Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Orienta-Konsultit, Helsinki.

Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133–156.

Haapasaari, A., Engeström, Y., & Kerosuo, H. (2014). The emergence of learners’ transformative agency in a Change Laboratory intervention. Journal of Education and Work, 0(0), 1–31. doi:10.1080/13639080.2014.900168



AcknowledgmentsThe authors gratefully acknowledge the

• Faculty Development Council at The University of Texas-Pan American, and

• The National Science Foundation

for partially funding this research.



Thank You

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