Facilitating and following school leaders’ work on reframing the teachers’ activity across time: tracing the objects of a formative intervention

Abstract

This article examines a formative intervention conducted as a series of workshops in partnerships between school leadership teams and researcher-interventionists. The intervention focused on leading reform work in upper secondary schools. This paper contributes to increased knowledge about the processes involved in the development of a joint and durable purpose of collective activity (object) over time. Qualitative content and interaction analyses were employed on video data involving the leadership teams of three upper secondary schools and a team of university researcher-interventionists. The researcher-interventionists applied specific tools to trigger processes of development in the schools. The empirical context is the current curriculum reform in Norway. The study is anchored in cultural historical activity theory. Zooming in on one school leadership team, I have traced the object over two years showing how the initially abstract object expanded during the intervention, and how the leadership team developed transformative agency by double stimulation in the workshops when planning and reporting on reframing the teachers’ work activity. I argue that studying object-oriented processes over time is necessary for capturing the slow but observable transformation of a local activity system through double stimulation.