Adolescents Gaining Power: A Change Laboratory in a School Setting

This dissertation explores how adolescents generate and gain power within a school setting. The study utilises cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and specifically CHAT conceptualisations of power, agency, and school alienation. The study emphasises the object of activity as the central force driving the development of activities. The focus is on the significance of such an object for adolescents to gain power over their learning and overcome school alienation.

Adolescents’ well-being and engagement in education are widely discussed worldwide. This study is concerned with these challenges in education, including major issues related to school attendance, lack of enthusiasm for learning, and the prevalence of mental health problems among youth in the Finnish context.
The Finnish National Core Curriculum emphasises student involvement, yet recent studies indicate that students have limited opportunities to influence key aspects of their education, particularly what they are asked to learn in school. Viewed through the lens of CHAT, school alienation emerges as a logical consequence of prevailing educational practices. Despite being central actors in school, students often lack meaningful opportunities to engage with and influence the core object of school, namely, school knowledge. Consequently, students often are not in the position of exerting power necessary to take ownership of their learning.

This study employs the Change Laboratory (CL) formative intervention, notably including adolescent students as primary participants. The CL is used to explore power dynamics in a school, particularly the traditional power imbalances between adults and students. The CL sessions took place during regular school hours and in the school space. The students could freely choose, design, and implement project topics, contents, and means without the constraints of the regular curriculum and the pressures of testing and grading. This dissertation examines explicitly a Documentary Project titled “Everyone Should Be Accepted as They Are,” which addresses issues of bullying and acceptance.

This research follows the tradition of formative intervention studies. It involves a comprehensive analysis of the entire intervention, including detailed data analysis to uncover its epistemic and interactional processes. This study encompasses four empirical analyses, first conducted independently and then combined with one another.

The findings show that power can be viewed as a process that follows the steps specified in an augmented model of transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS). This process represents a collective journey that begins with identifying a significant object toward which power is directed. While identifying such an object may present challenges and require time, it is a foundational step. Yet, mere identification is insufficient. Power is rooted in genuine needs and conflicting motives. It is a stepwise process triggered by these conflicts and through which these conflicts might be resolved with the help of the second stimuli. In other words, power is generated and gained through actions and requires instruments. Gaining power is not an individual endeavour but a collective effort. The process of gaining power entails reaching out to the others and crossing one’s own boundaries, to build partnerships and coalitions oriented toward a same object.

This study contributes to CHAT by examining power dynamics within a school and developing analytical tools for examining such dynamics. The results have practical implications by outlining steps for adolescents to gain power over their learning. The concept of object-oriented power is crucial as it pertains to the meaningfulness of education and promotes significant learning opportunities aligned with students’ own interests. This approach enables students to face personal and societal challenges and transforms schools into centers of inquiry, potentially counteracting alienation from school and supporting students’ driving of positive change.