ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the creation of hybrid learning activity in which an advanced network of learning is generated among a variety of participants both inside and outside a school—teachers, children, parents, producers, experts, volunteer organizations, government agencies—gradually transcending the school’s institutional boundaries. Applying the expansive learning theory to research school–community collaboration, the results indicate that such hybrid contributions to participants as activity networks expand school activity and bring about hybrid activity systems of learning as well as alignments with productive social movements for the transformation of real life-worlds such as community revitalization. In this way, the creation of hybrid learning activity goes beyond the narrow conceptualizations of pedagogical activity prevalent in traditional schools. By applying the intermediate theoretical concept of hybrid educational innovation, which is based on the principle of hybridity of collaborative and participatory interventions, this chapter focuses on the idea behind the intervention research presented here, namely, that school activity (and learning) is best expanded not from the inside alone, but by creating hybrid and symbiotic activities in the real life-world. The discussion presented in this chapter is based on an analysis of findings from longitudinal intervention studies on hybrid educational innovation in Japan.
