Expansive learning actions for leadership in a teacher training school’s Change Laboratory

Abstract

Drawing from cultural-historical activity theory and the theory of expansive learning, our study investigates an expansive learning process in a Change Laboratory intervention in a Finnish teacher training elementary school, facing a transformational curriculum reform. New subtypes of expansive learning actions and a novel analytical category within expansive learning are induced, employed and discussed for a more nuanced understanding of the learning process in which the participants tackled a contradiction between historically formed individualistic teacher-autonomy vs. collectivistic curricular demands of collaboration and interdisciplinarity. As an outcome, a model of distributed leadership was produced and later implemented as new school practice.