Event Details

EdRes would like to welcome you to an occasional series of in person, informal lunchtime chats around different ideas and issues in educational research.

We call these “What is….?” chats because each session will focus on a member of EdRes (or our wider community) offering to discuss something they are passionate about with a group of interested colleagues. We welcome people who know nothing about the topic, but are just curious to find out – “What is…?”

Our first chat is: “What is a change laboratory?”

Bring your lunch, your Tupperware and your tartan thermos! Though teas and coffees will be provided.

“The Change Laboratory is an innovative form of participatory research in which researchers and practitioners collaboratively explore the potential for change in their existing activity systems and produce enacted utopias: more just futures for their own practices which address acute systemic challenges. The methodology moves back and forth between moments of ethnographic investigation, regular collaborative workshops based around structured tasks, and the testing of new ideas in everyday practice. Considered as a practical intervention, Change Laboratory projects aim to produce new activity systems, develop new concepts and tools, and empower the transformative agency of the participants. Considered as a research methodology, the Change Laboratory projects aim to produce ‘possibility knowledge’ about the potential future—the Zone of Proximal Development—of some activity system or network of activity systems. The methodology is based around two core theoretical frameworks (expansive learning, transformative agency by double stimulation) derived from the activity theory tradition, which in turn derive their heritage from the developmental research of Vygotsky, who, nearly a century ago, used double stimulation methods to explore the Zone of Proximal Development of individual learners. Brett Bligh and Phil Moffitt will describe what the Change Laboratory might contribute to our research, and how we might join a global community of Change Laboratorians undertaking highly disparate projects in different disciplines across the globe”.

Any queries, please contact: Jan McArthur j.mcarthur@lancaster.ac.uk and Katy Jordan k.jordan@lancaster.ac.uk