Changing Organisational Practices with Developmental Work Research

1. Changing Organisational Practices with Developmental Work Research Anne Edwards Department of Education, University of Oxford

2. Outline of the talk • Practices and organisations – a cultural historical perspective • DWR – concepts • DWR – how to do it • Strengths and limitations

3. Organisations, practices and motives • Organisations are made up of practices • Practices are knowledge-laden, historically shaped, emotionally freighted and are carried forward by the motives of practitioners • Activities occur in practices and are shaped by them

4. Activity Theory: Leont’ev and object motive • The main thing which distinguishes one activity from another, however, is the difference of their objects. It is exactly the object of an activity that gives it a determined direction. According to the terminology I have proposed, the object of the activity is its true motive.(Leont’ev, 1978, p. 62)

5. Articulating the individual in practices with the organisation • In everyday life roles are dynamic and behavioural; not only are their components negotiated and renegotiated in the flow of activity, but over time old roles disappear and new ones emerge…. What is required is a conceptualisation of role that emphasises action and interaction and that also articulates with an image of organisational structure in an empirically specifiable manner. (Barley and Kunda 2001: 89)

6. Introducing Activity Theory • CRADLE (Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning) • Yrjo Engestrom

7. Mediating Artifacts: Tools and Signs Object Sense Meaning Subject Outcome Rules Community Division of Labour The structure of a human activity system Engestrom 1987 p. 78

8. The interacting elements in an Activity System • Subject: the individual/subgroup selected as the actors on the object for the purposes of the analysis. • Tools: material or conceptual. • Community: individuals/subgroups who share or have an interest in the object. • Division of labour: division of tasks between people involved in the activity. • Rules: explicit/implicit regulations, norms, conventions that constrains action/interaction • Object: “the ‘raw material’ or ‘problem space’ at which the activity is directed and which is transformed into outcomes”

9. Activity Theory What are you using? What are you working on? Who is doing the work? How is the work shared out? What are the rules? Who has an interest?

10. The Zone of Proximal Development • This is usually seen as the difference between what a person can do alone and what they can achieve after guidance. • For Engestrom the ZPD is at the level of the system and not the individual. Systemic change occurs alongside individual learning. • Developmental Work Research (DWR) methodology helps systems to learn.

11. Internalisation and externalisation • Learning is evident in a qualitative change in our relationship with our environment • Learning involves processes of internalisation and externalisation – we are shaped by and shape our worlds • The learning dialectic – the learner creates their own social situation of development

12. Dual stimulation • Vygotsky – give children tools – how they use them to work on a problem will reveal their consciousness i.e. how they are thinking • In DWR participants are given the tools of activity theory to work on the contradictions that are revealed in their everyday practices

13. Dual Stimulation and learning new ways of working DWR uses dual stimulation by: • Focusing on the object of the activity (the task or problem space) and varying interpretations of it • Providing the analytic tools of activity theory to reveal how objects and practices are understood • Creating new concepts which enable new forms of work e.g. aligning practices rather than sequential referral

15. A Developmental Work Research Session • Lasts two Hours (minimum of six sessions - Engestrom does more) • Brings together participants in an activity system or in neighbouring systems • Presents them with everyday evidence gathered in the system(s) using ‘ethnographic’ methods including case studies presented by participants • This is called mirror data and is selected to reveal contradictions, tensions and differences within the system

16. The role of the research team in DWR • ‘Ethnographic’ work between sessions to capture mirror data • Tracking people to see whether new ideas are being taken into practice and what happens or working with participants to develop case study examples of new practices • Taking the lead in DWR sessions: presenting mirror data, orchestrating the session, drawing on activity theory concepts, asking questions etc.

17. DWR • Researchers work with participants so that everyday understandings are transformed into the meta concepts of activity theory so participants can see the relationships between actions, intentions histories, expectations and so on. • As they do that work, everyday understandings are reshaped to reveal emergent concepts.

18. Engestrom demonstrating DWR

19. The Dynamic Nature of an Activity System • There is constant construction and renegotiation within the activity system. • Objects are reinterpreted and worked on, rules are bent and reinterpreted and there is movement between the nodes of the activity. • What initially appears as object may soon be transformed into a tool, and perhaps later into a rule

20. A Learning Challenge: working on collaboration Meetings, history Building trust CF workers CF workers take lead Professional tribalism CF Partnership, CYP, families, practitioners

21. T 3 1 2 T T ‘Trust’ moves from object to tool to rule over time

22. Working with contradictions internal contradictions are the driving force of change and development in activity systems Evald Il'enkov (1977; 1982)

23. Contradictions, tensions, conflicts, breakdowns

24. Mirror data - Old or existing object: preventing school failure ‘When kids come into school we do the nurture bit, to help and prevent the child from feeling that they have to fail at school. We were dealing with something yesterday and I said, “There’s no need for you to fail at school. We know it’s awful outside but we’re here to make sure that you don’t...”.’ VP (Workshop 4)

25. Mirror data - Beginning to identify the problem: a stressed system ‘We are headless chickens’ teachers (workshop 1) ‘…if you’ve got a system where the school is under stress, one way of relieving it is to take out ‘the stressor’, the child or the case, and hand it to somebody else and it’s their problem then. So we need to change that attitude. We need to think about looking at joint assessment, joint problem solving …Sharing um our expertise, knowledge across the school boundary…referring is an old fashioned word.’ Educational Psychologist (Workshop 4)

26. Beginning to articulate the problem • (Social Worker ) It comes down to the expertise that everybody's got – but all in different settings. And I think it is about respecting one another and trying to work in a way where each bit of that expertise is important to use in a piece of work, be that with the a family or a child • (EP) I think you’re right…that we don’t look at the bits of the child and send bits off to be sorted out

27. Need to make tools that can work on the problem (new assessment tool as object) • (Teacher)The personal development plans are something that are very useful because you have targets for everybody, school, parents, the child – and the child goes away with those targets – so if the pdp can be part of the common assessment framework…. • (EP) And there is no reason why not – that is something we have got to work on.

28. The next stage: object to tool and changing the rules • They needed to work on the common assessment framework. • But once the CAF is in place they will need new rules to work with it – they will work in parallel not sequentially • New concepts in use in working with the CAF e.g. being clear what they are working on and being open to alternative interpretations? Aligning practices? Developing two way knowledge flows?

29. DWR in summary • The DWR session is a space in which problems are revealed and the contradictions that give rise to them are discussed. • Focus may be the relationship between the object (what is being worked on), the tools, (the strategies being used) and the rules (what the current ways of working are). • This might e.g. raise the question: if you say you want to work on capacity for multi-agency working (the object) do you have the right tools (a single assessment system) and do current rules (ways of working) enable it? • If the answer is no then you need to work first on the tools and the rules and in doing so reveal the thinking embedded in practices

30. Moving to the future? • Bringing together practice-driven redesign of processes and idea-driven construction of visions for the future in a dialectic i.e. participants are helped to distil their understandings so that are not simply embedded in accounts of practice • A sequence of DWR sessions will end with a session or sessions where participants envision the future - what more needs to be done with rules, DoL etc….

31. DWR: implications and opportunities • Reveals concepts (understandings) in the ways that material tools and language are used • Focuses on the social situation of development • Follows the object • Activity system is a dynamic unit of analysis and a good way of anchoring a case study • Reveals power in e.g. ready-meanings, rule bending, division of labour • Theoretical generalisation

32. Reflections on DWR in Research • Participatory: feeding back ongoing analyses • Participants need to be aware of the demands • Donating tools and maybe a capacity for on-going analyses: leaving a legacy • Changing the system as we research in it? Recognising that we do that anyway in most interpretative research • Calls for a new form of research design – Edwards et al, BERJ 2007

33. Further points for reflection on AT/DWR • Defining an activity system – it is not simply an activity- but has a history and a future as a system • How does it deal with work activities that cut across practices? I think DWR can do that (Edwards et al. 2009)