ABSTRACT
This chapter characterizes education in schools and communities as a collaborative intervention in which participants’ expansive learning is facilitated. Expansive learning is characterized by the active participation of learners in the collective design and transformation of their own activity systems. In expansive learning, learners are change agents, and the idea of learning as a controlled process is abandoned. The process of learning can be directed by learning itself and not by instructors. Based on the expansive learning theory, this chapter examines the activity-theoretical methodology of formative interventions to grasp a new form of educational research, which is an alternative to traditional, standard interventions such as those monopolized by policymakers and researchers, and is thus based on linear causality. The core mechanism of formative interventions enables the participants to become agents to produce collaborative interventions to collectively create their new activity system and new agency simultaneously. Here, the principles of collaborative and participatory interventions in the expansivity of learning can be seen in a two-dimensional fashion: through the principles of agency and hybridity. The former’s direction of expansion points downward and inward, while the latter’s points upward and outward. These two principles operate by closely interacting with each other.
