Book of Abstracts

ISCAR 2017 Book of Abstracts Taking a 360° view of the landscape of cultural-historical activity theory: The state of our scholarship in practice ISCAR 5th International Congress August 28th - September 1st 2017 Quebec, Canada February 9, 2018 1 Table of Contents A welcome from the President of the Congress ................................... 3 A welcome from the President of ISCAR .............................................. 4 Keynote speakers .................................................................................. 5 Abstracts ............................................................................................... 6 Index .................................................................................................. 498 2 Fernand Gervais A welcome from the President of the Congress Following up the ISCAR conferences held in Seville (2005), San Diego (2008), Rome (2011) and Sydney (2014), the theme of the 2017 conference emphasizes a vast and thorough reflection about our research traditions and scholarship domain. The 2017 conference will offer researchers the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas on Qualitative research and new trends in Cultural-historical activity research as well as on Foundations and Practices in context. These few days will allow you to listen to a broad range of subjects related to cultural- historical activity and have discussions with international scholars and researchers from different fields. ISCAR is proud to provide both new and established researchers with an environment conducive to the exchange of ideas, a context that on the one hand supports graduate students in developing their research programs and communicating with experts, and on the other, encourages senior scholars to share their expertise. ISCAR 2017 offers a wide array of presentations, workshops and symposiums and will provide a unique multicultural experience and multidisciplinary platform for discussion of relevant topics related to cultural-historical activity research. Our illustrious keynote speakers, Kris Gutiérrez, Yrjö Engeström and David Bakhurst will set the table for fructuous exchanges of ideas and experiences throughout the five days we will spend together. We sincerely hope you will take the most out of the 2017 conference and enjoy your stay in Quebec City. We have done our best to offer you a great conference. Finally, I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the people involved in the making of this conference especially Thérèse Laferrière who has been the mastermind and the tireless “chef d’orchestre” of the whole conference organization. As many of you can testify, she has devoted herself completely to this venture, we are all grateful for everything she has done for ISCAR over the last three years. I wish everyone a successful and enjoyable conference. Fernand Gervais, ISCAR 2017 President 3 Malcolm Reed A welcome from the President of ISCAR I remember just over a year ago in late Spring, 2016, standing on the edge of the old fortified city of Quebec, looking out over the elbow the mighty St Lawrence river makes, across the docks and the industrial buildings of the previous centuries, and thanking our lucky stars that ISCAR 2017 is coming to this wonderful place. It is with such anticipation that I welcome our meeting together to experience this pleasure and gratitude. It isn’t simply the place, but the people, in particular Fernand Gervais, and especially Thérèse Laferrière, who has worked tirelessly to make this Congress real and who deserves (apart from a well-earned break when we finish) a thousand thousand thank-yous. And our thanks to the Organising Committee and all the staff at Université Laval who have put their hands and minds to helping. Nous vous remercions énormément. ISCAR as an organization is going through changes. It is right and proper that we do so, because development of being is absolutely central to any philosophy and psychology that practises in the tradition of Vygotsky. The membership is not as numerous as in the past and our revenue has grown smaller as a consequence. Whereas, historically, opportunities to come together under the umbrellas of cultural-historical, sociocultural and activity theory perspectives (let us not be diverted by internal critique of the differences here) were, in the main, the preserve of ISCAR and its forerunners, nowadays there are more frequent and diverse occasions. In one sense, this testifies to the international and enduring importance and persuasion of the theoretical concerns we practise in common; in another sense, we need to hold on to and cherish something of our original singularity. So it is important that the theme of this Congress is ecological both in its wide-eyed attention to our landscape of ideas and in its sharp reflection on our communities of practice. We need to be mindful of the state of our own territory and its peoples, understand our particularities and nuances, our presences and potentiality, our activities and inertias, our maturity and our adolescence. Like any landscape we have cultivated, we need also to learn what and whom we have depleted or used to extinction, and count that cost and commit to reparation and rediscovery. These are necessary personal and political acts. These are what Vygotsky believed are constitutive and creative of a zoon politikon in a book he never lived to write. We are those people. And Quebec City, Canada in 2017 is the perfect place and the time. Malcolm Reed, President of ISCAR 4 Keynote speakers David Bakhurst Yrjö Engeström Kris Gutiérrez 5 3.1 Farther reaches of theoretical and methodological explorations Imaginaries and subjectivities of teachers of color in Urban STEM classrooms Jennifer Adams (University of Calgary, Canada) Responding to the theme of looking at learning and identity across activity settings of everyday life, this talk will examine the professional lived experiences of three female teachers of color as they navigate their subjectivities of learning to teach and racialized bodies in classrooms. As teachers within their first three years of teaching in three different and diverse urban schools, they are learning what it means to teach while they are developing their identities as teachers in diverse classrooms, and in particular what it means to teach students of color and they ways that they either take up, resist and/or transform discourses around students of African and Latinx decent and STEM. In order to understand their experiences of becoming teachers, it is important first to unpack the discursive fields in which they exist, for example, discourse around race, STEM teaching and learning and resources in science teaching and learning contexts and how their subjectivities shift and respond to these discourses. Drawing from two years of data from a group of science teachers who met bi-weekly as a collaborative teacher inquiry group, three participants emerged as case studies because of their identities as Afrodiasporic teachers coupled with their enactments of teaching. Data sources from the meetings included digital audio recordings, field notes and artifacts teachers brought in and chose to share with the group. Individual interviews and one-on-one informal dialogues also informed this study. The analysis shows that within the different schooling contexts, teachers enacted their activity as teachers in different ways in relation to how they viewed themselves vis-à-vis their students. Their goals for creating STEM learning experiences were shaped and enacted around STEM futures that they imagined for their students and to counter the prevailing deficit discourses around students of color and STEM. Format: Paper presented in a Symposium (261) 6 3.3 Interventionist methodologies: bridging theory and practice Students’ agentic learning process: beginning the transformation of university teacher education practices Megan Adams (Monash University) & Liang Li (Monash University) Teacher education draws attention to enhancing the quality of education offered through an emphasis on innovative practice. This project challenges current university practice of preset unit content delivered through instructional teaching and moves towards recognising and valuing student teacher agency in university unit development. Research supports the need for fewer teacher educators-directed learning to more interactive student teacher led learning, shifting the focus to work with students in more productive ways. In the current study, student teachers were invited to co construct their own learning through a consultation process where their choices and opinions were sought prior to unit development and delivery. During delivery of the unit, an open dialogue was entered into on social media where students were encouraged to provide feedback on their experience. A cultural-historical interpretative methodology was used to frame the project. Digital video observations of the pre-service teachers focus group co constructing unit content and assessment with a teacher educator and the social media conversations during the delivery of the unit were analysed. The concepts of relational agency (Edwards, 2004) and subjectivity (González Rey, 2015) were used to analyse the face to face and social media conversations. The target group consisted of seven fourth year undergraduate students enrolled in the unit. This paper unpacks dimensions of student teachers’ experience as co constructors in unit development, in order to determine how they perceive their own agentic learning.

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