Abstracts - Earli

contradictions on different timescales served to undermine collaborative research activity even asit emerged. However, though the innovative club was not sustained, elements from the innovationas well as from related research projects did enter into school practice in diluted form. Thisprocess appears to have been facilitated by involvement of research team members in actionsorganized by the activity of schooling. This case study contributes to an emerging body of researchon the role of time in human activity, and particularly educational research. It also contributes tothe literature on the sustainability of educational innovations and has implications for the practiceof educational research in terms of methods and design as well as for the construction universityschoolresearch collaborations.Teachers’ encounters with pupils’ agency: Potentials and tensions in a narrative playworldinteractionAnna Pauliina Rainio, University of Helsinki, FinlandAlthough teacher commitment is seen as crucial in the promotion of educational change (i.e.,Gitlin & Margonis, 1995), less attention has been paid to pupils’ role and involvement in schoolinterventions. The aim of this paper is to examine the development of children’s agency in ateacher-led intervention in an elementary school. The paper focuses on adults’ actions, which bothenable and hinder children’s initiatives in the activity. The analysis is based on video datacollected in an ethnographic case study of The Brothers Lionheart Playworld Project. In theproject pupils and teachers took on the role of characters from a piece of literature and acted insidethe frames of an improvised plot (Lindqvist, 1995). The activity in question was bothimprovisational and open-ended in nature. The findings suggest that in order to create spaces forchildren’s agency in classrooms the adults must be willing to change their own roles in the processand step into a dialogical relationship with children. The findings also show that there is potentialin narrative learning approaches for altering the traditional positions between teachers and pupils.This is, however, a challenging task in the school institution in which the power relations betweenteachers and pupils are relatively predetermined (i.e. Pollard, Thiessen & Filer, 1997). Both adultsand pupils face tensions in managing the “double-task” of narrative activity, simultaneously actingas characters in the story and maintaining their teacher-pupil roles. These tensions however alsocreate the main developmental potential of the intervention. The paper develops conceptualizationsof the micro-processes of interaction between children and adults as they are moving in, or better,creating together, the zone of proximal development for their involvement in implementing theplayworld.Cultivating agency for sustaining innovation in contradictory practices: Only a utopia?Annalisa Sannino, University of Salerno, ItalyThis paper is an empirical contribution to the conceptualization of agency as a socially distributedphenomenon that interacts with the contradictory nature of developing innovative practices. Thepaper explores the reasons why an initially successful innovative practice was not sustained. Theinnovative practice is a computer-mediated activity system internationally known as ‘FifthDimension’ (5D). 5D was promoted as a research intervention within a project of collaborationbetween a university and a local elementary school for developing the work of teachers. The paperaims at answering the following research questions: How is individual and collective agencymanifested in the course of this research intervention? How might researchers facilitate andempower sustainable developmental efforts among the individuals and collectives involved in anintervention? The analysis focuses on the participation of four key groups of actors in the project:the teachers, the internship students, the internship supervisor, and the researchers. The analysis– 501 –