Using Double Stimulation to Understand How Significant Change Can Happen in Families with Young Children

01.04.2021

Moscow State University of Psychology and Education invites you to the 5^th meeting of the Moscow CHAT Reading Group “ReadingLive”, that will take place on April, 19. Please note that due to the request of the invited experts, the time of the webinar differs from the time of previous meetings: the webinar will take place at 12 pm (at noon, Moscow time) in Zoom.

Invited expert:

Nick Hopwood, Education Researcher and Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Discussant:

Annalisa Sannino, Professor at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Finland.

Presentation title: “Using double stimulation to understand how significant positive and lasting change can happen in families with young children”.

In this ReadingLive discussion we will take a paper as a basis to explore ideas of agency in cultural-historical theory. The paper invites discussion of agency as contingent of cultural tools, in its connection with volitional action, as well as provoking some important methodological questions about how we might empirically trace, and promote, agency. The abstract of the article is as follows:

This article examines how transformative agency arises in families where parents are struggling with aspects of caring for young children. The mechanisms of how volitional action develops into transformative agency in everyday settings are not well understood. A fine-grained analysis of change is presented in the case of a parent who resolved difficulties relating to her daughter’s feeding. This case is situated within a broader dataset relating to diverse Australian parenting support services. Through double stimulation, parents used multiple auxiliary tools to construct new motives, enabling them to expand understandings and develop new possibilities for action. Evidence of transformative agency was apparent in longer trajectories in which the conditions of parenting were transformed. Relationships between expansive learning, double stimulation, and transformative agency are conceptualized dialectically, offering fresh insights into the dynamics of transformative agency ‘in the wild’.