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Concept maps are popularly used within academic development spaces, especially to teach new concepts at beginner levels for undergraduate students. Their popularity is partly based on the fact that they employ visual tools such as charts, diagrams, pictures, tables, etc., to simplify concepts that students would otherwise consider dense. This paper reports on the findings of an extended orientation project conducted between February and June of 2022 with a small cohort of 15 first-year students registered in an entrepreneurship course at a vocational higher education institution in South Africa. The research question guiding this study is: How can concept maps inspire entrepreneurial thinking for first-year ECP students at a vocational institution in South Africa? Using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), I analysed the two iterations of the students' concept maps together with selected data from the focus group interviews. Key findings reported include the students' fuzzy knowledge of what entrepreneurship as a discipline entails, the planned career trajectories for most of the participating students, as well as indecisiveness as to whether the students will be pursuing entrepreneurship after graduation. In the language of CHAT, the above findings are described as presenting tensions between the subject, tool and object. This layer of analysis calls for an urgent re-think of how the students are recruited and orientated into the programme and how the curriculum is delivered at the first-year level.

Entrepreneurial activity is currently a primary concern of many developed economies that struggle with changes in their industrial structures. Many of the traditionally strong industries are encountering strong global competition and declining markets, and national competitiveness is often said to be built on new entrepreneurial firms that are able to grow in global markets. The facilitating national systems for these firms are covered in the emerging start-up ecosystem discussion. This chapter aims to contribute to this discussion by incorporating an analysis of the variety of actors and activities needed in start-up industries that rely on competence bloc theory. Furthermore, inspired by cultural-historical activity theory, the study specifies the contextual-, temporal- and renewal-related determinants of the activity of start-up ecosystems. As a result, a framework for examining start-up ecosystems as platforms for high-growth entrepreneurship is proposed in terms of its core constituencies that influence the emergence and non-emergence of high-growth firms.

The chapter makes an attempt at hybridization between three relatively separate fields of inquiry: (a) theories and studies of collective intentionality and distributed agency, (b) theories and studies of social capital in organizations, and (c) cultural–historical activity theory. Employees’ collective capacity to create organizational transformations and innovations is becoming a crucially important asset that gives a new, dynamic content to notions of social and collaborative capital. In philosophy, sociology, anthropology and cognitive science, such capacity is conceptualized as distributed agency or collective intentionality. The task of the chapter is to examine the possibility that current changes in work organizations may bring about historically new features of collective intentionality and distributed agency. The understanding of these new features is important if we are to give viable content to the emerging notion of collaborative capital. After a conceptual overview, the chapter will first analyze a fictional example of distributed agency, then findings from the author's fieldwork in health care settings. In conclusion, the chapter will propose the notions of ‘object-oriented interagency’ and ‘collaborative intentionality capital’ as characterizations of important aspects of agency and intentionality currently taking shape in work organizations.

To provide a video reflection model based on interactivity for teachers to facilitate disciplinary literacy and a culturally responsive pedagogy during video reflection. The model presents multiplicity of voices within the context of classroom activity crossing boundaries to expand teachers beyond their zone of proximal development for enhanced pedagogical practices.

Expansive learning as model of learning originates from the Cultural Historic Activity Theory framework. It enables viewing learner–teacher–technology interactions embedded within classroom walls that embrace diverse socio-cultural-historical practices. Given its connectedness to a responsive teaching-learning approach the model is adapted with the tenets of interactivity to help teachers with a professional learning tool to include, promote, and expedite pedagogical practices that reflect learner background through video reflection.

The video reflective model using four central question and five principles of the expansive learning matrix examines the various interactivities during a science class period to embrace and enhance a disciplinary literacy approach to teaching. The chapter provides details of opportunities on how the teacher uses this model to adopt a disciplinary literacy and responsive pedagogy approach. It provides directions on how to improve learner–technology interactivity and assist teachers to orchestrate other classroom technologies along with videos as teaching and learning artifacts.

Knowledge construction occurs in spaces that are hard to identify, that is to say that it is difficult to measure when, why, and how knowledge construction happens. By identifying, drawing connections, and making interconnections of the various activities and interactivities from their classroom worlds to lived practices through the tenets in our proposed reflective model the teacher will initiate, facilitate, and eventuate expansive learning and teaching processes. Thereby videos can highlight teacher’s motivations and contradictions when paired with this model and promote the examination of one’s practices to cross-boundaries that embrace the dynamics of learning and knowledge construction as and when it occurs.

This chapter considers ways in which lesson study may be introduced and sustained within the school–university partnerships that already exist within an initial teacher education (ITE) course. In particular, the authors describe the challenges and opportunities associated with ITE lesson study partnerships and ways in which lesson study can deepen and even transform the nature of the school–university partnership. The authors draw on third-generation Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 2001) to highlight pre-service teachers’ roles as ‘boundary crossers’ between the activity system of the university ITE course and the activity system of the school department in which they are placed. The authors argue that pre-service teachers, despite their inexperience as teachers, have an important opportunity to introduce the practices of lesson study that they are learning about into the schools in which they are placed. They are also able to promote approaches to lesson planning and observation that support the values of the course and thus, through mentor development, strengthen the school–university partnership more widely than the specific lesson studies carried out. The authors outline three models for productive ITE lesson study partnerships, and argue that even a relatively small number of lesson study events throughout the school year can establish the beginnings of a transformation in the school culture away from a performative focus on evaluating the teacher and towards a more productive focus on school students’ learning. This, in turn, deepens the partnership between university and school by aligning both parties more closely around a shared focus on studying learning.

There is an identified need in higher education research for methods which have the capacity to generate conceptual insights grounded in concrete local practice but with wider applicability in understanding and facilitating research-based change. This chapter outlines an intermediate approach to qualitative data analysis which can support theoretical knowledge advancement from practice-based research, which I call the difference-within-similarity approach. It involves a particular way of conducting dialogues with our data: of interanimating similarities and differences within our qualitative datasets. The approach outlined involves first identifying a similarity, then systematically examining differences within that similarity to generate theoretical explanations. Drawing on sociocultural theorising, particularly dialogic theory and cultural–historical activity theory, the approach is based on the idea that new meanings arise from a comparison of multiple perspectives on the ‘same’ phenomenon. The tensions between such perspectives are seen as a key driver for change in educational practice. Therefore, articulating and examining such tensions in our data gives an opportunity to simulate the possibility of change in our analysis and, hence, develop insights which can inform change beyond local settings. Important here is that the differences examined are bound together by an analytically productive similarity. Through multiple research examples, the chapter identifies and illustrates a range of ways of articulating productive analytical similarities for comparison in our data: through theory/literature, through forward and backwards processing of data itself and through a process termed ‘weaving’.

The field experience placement is an integral part of teacher education programmes. It is ostensibly meant to provide a place for teacher candidates to enact pedagogical theory gained during coursework under the supervision of an experienced host teacher. In reality, the field placement is a source of considerable tension for teacher candidates, as they struggle to reconcile their prior assumptions about teaching and learning and their prior identities as students with the demands of school culture that requires teachers and students to act in particular ways. The field experience is emotional work that has a considerable impact on the development of new teachers’ identities. In this chapter I will focus on how two new teachers learn during the field experience placement, with a particular emphasis on the roles of emotion and the development of professional identity in learning to teach. Cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT) will provide a useful lens to interpret some of the challenges of learning to teach during the field placement.

To provide an understanding of how video recording can be used to mediate university level teacher development for language learning in diverse classrooms.

This study draws on cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 1999) and the subsequent professional development literature to conceptualize video as a tool for self-reflection and critique to further learning. This chapter outlines how video analysis can be used in inservice teacher education to investigate the micro- and macro-interactions with English learners.

We found that utilizing various forms of analysis on a single video from the classroom can help teachers build connections between the micro and macro processes and implications of language in classrooms with English learners. Additionally, by studying videos of classroom activities, teachers learn how linguistic theories and particular instructional and assessment tools can be implemented in their own classrooms.

Videos can be a powerful tool for teacher educators and professional development experts because they allow for the analysis and reflection of a variety of analytic levels. Additionally, this study provides evidence that videos can be used to anchor otherwise discrete university coursework and bring cohesion and collaboration throughout the curriculum.

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of teachers' “entitled attitude” that manifested itself as resistance to change in the midst of a curricular reform in the Indian school context. For teachers long socialized into a teacher-centered culture, the change expected was nothing less than a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense. However, conclusions drawn from studies involving cursory surveys and teacher observation pinned the problem to teachers' “entitled attitude,” an unwillingness to exert themselves beyond the minimum level required by school policies. This view reflects a lack of acknowledgement of teachers as persons with values and the capacity to think and feel as potential agents of community practices such as schooling. My study investigates the wider sociocultural historical and political basis of teachers' putative “entitled attitude” informed by Lev Vygotsky's dialectical approach. It accesses the interrelated history of a teacher at a number of levels using the teacher's life history to create the narrative. This “genetic” analysis helps illuminate what the curricular change means to teachers inside out. The findings are used to unravel the nature of support that would help teachers realize their agency and sway them from using entitlement as a compensatory mechanism to deflect change.