Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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22 A. Edwards
and the Gherardi and Nicolini descriptions take more account of the interpretations
brought to bear by the other experts than do Nardi et al., neither of these studies
examine collaboration across organizational boundaries on mobile runaway objects
of the kind demanded by work on the prevention of social exclusion.
The National Evaluation of the Children’s
Fund (NECF)
The data discussed in this chapter are drawn from NECF. The Children’s Fund
comprised 149 partnerships, one in each local authority, across England. These
partnerships set up boards, which consisted of senior representatives of local services
such as education, social services and health as well as members of voluntary
agencies. Their job was to commission the provision of local services such as
breakfast clubs or play schemes, which aimed at preventing social exclusion through
building protective factors around children and by encouraging inter- professional
collaboration. As one section of the evaluation, we looked in some detail at sixteen
of these boards as well as at four of the services commissioned in each of these
partnerships in order to reveal the structures and processes that made for good
outcomes for children.
The sixteen case studies were framed by CHAT and each ran over seven months
with later shorter visits to enable us to capture change. Three researchers visited
each partnership case study site for four days at four weekly intervals for seven
months. In the visits we worked down each partnership from the strategic board
in week one, to the service providers in the second visit, then to the children and
families in the third visit. On the fourth visit we returned to look at service provision
using insights from the children and families, on the fifth visit we returned to
work with the boards. We made no visits in the sixth month but returned in the
seventh month to give formal feedback and gather reactions to that feedback.
Evidence was collected primarily through interviews which were structured by
CHAT, recorded, transcribed in full and then analysed using CHAT frameworks.
We explored, for example, what people saw as the object of activity, what material
and conceptual tools they were bringing to bear on the object they identified
and how the work on the object was shared out. About 190 board members
were interviewed and some of these were interviewed two or three times. We also
interviewed about 150 practitioners using CHAT- based interviews; and worked
with 185 children and young people and 184 carers to explore their experiences
of what practitioners said they were doing.
In addition, we gathered evidence in structured workshops, which we described
as DWR- lite, as they were based on the principles of developmental work research
(Engeström, 2007) but were with different groups at each visit. For example,
during our second visits we fed back our ongoing analyses to board members in
workshops which were based on DWR. We offered their everyday understandings
as mirror data in ways that revealed contradictions in the interpretations of the
object of the activity of the board and used the analytic concepts of activity theory