ABSTRACT
This chapter tackles the problem of how teachers themselves can gradually change and improve school activities and organizations and create experimentation and innovations for school change. In this chapter, based on the principle of agency of collaborative and participatory interventions in teachers’ expansive learning, the intermediate theoretical concept of a teacher as a collaborative change agent is applied to analyze and promote the collective redesigning and transformation of schools by the teachers themselves. Traditional, standard intervention studies in the field of school reform are based on linear causality, where teachers are regarded from the top-down view as entirely passive agents without the agency of policies. Conversely, activity-theoretical formative intervention studies, as a basic principle, adopt the fact that teachers will themselves gain agency and take charge of the process. Thus, they will become change agents. Here, the focus is on triggering and sustaining an expansive transformation process led and sustained by teachers. The discussion presented in this chapter is based on findings from a formative intervention study of teachers’ expansive learning and transformative agency in a Japanese elementary school.
