ABS323 - A proposal for research on children's own projects - Board 6

Projects have been recently suggested as a new addition to the theoretical vocabulary of cultural-historical activity theory (e.g., Blunden, 2012). The central idea behind the notion is that ’a project’, as an aggregate concept of human action, resonates both with the theoretical foundations of CHAT as well as with how people use it in everyday parlance. While the affordances and constraints of the concept have been explored, these explorations have thus far centered around adult activities or projects taking place in formal education (e.g., Kratsov  Kratsova, 2012). In other words, the power of the concept has not been put to play in research on children, their everyday life across contexts and learning.

This poster proposes a research plan to investigate the way in which the concept of a project could be used to understand children’s everyday lives and learning. Through a two-phase co-participatory research design, the aim is to focus on child-initiated and child-lead activities, or projects, sustained over time which focuses on a particular idea or the production of a certain material artifact. By studying these projects, this study hopes to explore the conceptual terrain between actions and activities with the notion of ’projects’. Furthermore, though a dialogue with research done under the broad family of the learning sciences the study also hopes to contribute with new insights on motivation and self-regulated learning processes and answers to recent CHAT based critiques (e.g., Martin  McLellan, 2008; Nissen  Solgaard Sørensen, 2016).