著者

山住 勝広

出版者

日本カリキュラム学会

雑誌

カリキュラム研究 (ISSN:0918354X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.24, no.1, pp.041-053, 2015 (Released:2017-01-17)

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How can academic subject matter be integrated with children’s agentive learning? This is a persistent problem in curriculum and lesson studies. In traditional schooling, the core activity is classroom-based teaching that is intended simply to transfer the contents of the textbook to children. The dominant classroom discourse in this case is focused on low-level academic tasks. This kind of discrete teaching limits the knowledge available to both the teacher and student to that which the teacher can control and thus minimizes the level of ambiguity, uncertainty, and cognitive demand in their academic relationships. The transfer of agency from teacher to student is also minimal in discrete teaching. To move beyond this narrow idea of schooling and create learning activities that foster greater agency among students, and to determine whether an educational innovation helps children become agents of their learning activity, this article examines art-integrated science and social studies learning activities called inquiry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Lab School, which is part of the university’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Inquiry encourages students to accept responsibility for their own learning, namely, to have a learner’s sense of agency. In order to analyze the process of implementing such an innovative and experimental pedagogical practice at the Lab School, this article draws on cultural-historical activity theory. Activity theory offers a conceptual framework that views the object-oriented collective activity system as the basic unit of analysis of human practices and development. It also focuses on ideas and tools for transforming activity and expanding the agency of participants. Based on the activity theory framework, this article explores how instructional practice can break through segregated activities and facilitate joint learning between teachers and students to foster greater children’s agency; achieving this entails analyzing ethnographic research data on inquiry-based learning activities from the Lab School. The following two questions highlight key issues related to exercising children’s agency over inquiry-based learning in pedagogical classroom practice: 1) What kind of learning activity in which students participate as they learn can provide children with opportunities to expand their agency for the practice of inquiry and scientific concept formation? 2) How can children’s engagement in creating multiple representations of their experiences and learning be meaningfully integrated into an inquiry practice such as exercising one’s agency over concept learning?(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)