Yet in reviewing the range of CHAT-based research, it is appears that most studies employ more exploratory and less interventionist methodologies. Indeed, in considering specific methodological approaches of CHAT research for this study, it emerged that most contemporary researchers tended to employ CHAT as a broad heuristic to
investigate situated practice, or as an explanatory tool to understand expansive potential within and between activity systems. Such studies are most characteristically framed around multi-site, qualitative case study approaches. Rather than directly engage in the form of ‘radical localism’ implied by developmental work research, much CHAT-based research tends to have an exploratory or discursive focus. However, given there has been limited research on the actual form that CHAT research is adopting, it is difficult to definitively confirm this assertion. For instance, Roth (2004) and Roth and Lee (2007) have explored the use of CHAT in research at a meta-level, though only through the quantitative lens of citation frequencies. Yamagata-Lynch and Smaldino (2007) contend that many studies in North American education research using CHAT tend to use it primarily as a descriptive tool, rather than in the interventionist form anticipated by Engeström.
Given this lack of empirical confirmation, a review was undertaken of recently published CHAT-based research. This was in order to confirm the primary
methodologies of research using an explicitly CHAT-based conceptual framework. This was also necessary to explore potential alternative methodologies emerging beyond the discursive or heuristic use of CHAT. The research considered was from peer-reviewed, English-speaking journals published in the last decade and studies were selected on the basis that they foregrounded the use of CHAT as the conceptual basis for their research. No authors were included more than once so as not to weight the review toward a particular chosen methodology and this meta-level review consciously excluded the
research work of Engeström and his immediate colleagues (given its characteristic adherence to the developmental work researchmethodology).
The number of studies selected was largely opportunistic – being based on a broad search of research databases and identifying those studies that were of sufficient scale to allow methodological issues to emerge. Using these criteria, this meta-level review involved the systematic analysis of the methodological approaches used in 24 identified CHAT-based studies. An inherent limitation of this review was that it only observed the direct material published by the authors in these research papers and did not encounter the broader projects or related data on which they were reporting. This analysis produced a series of significant outcomes. Firstly, the methodological divergence amongst studies broadly developed under the conceptual frame of CHAT was
pronounced. It was also apparent that the relationship between CHAT and the chosen methodology for research was often implicit or largely ambiguous in the vast majority of these studies. Indeed, it was conspicuous that the majority of studies undertook limited exploration or rationalising of the relationship between chosen methodologies and the transformative motive implicit in CHAT that emerges from its drawing together of informed agency, action and context (Edwards, 2000). This observation also seems to affirm criticisms that CHAT researchers often inadequately express the methodological assumptions on which their research is based, perhaps reflecting the epistemic struggle to separate the individual and social mind in research practice (Daniels, 2008).
In considering the actual methodologies used in these 24 analysed CHAT-based studies (again recognising this analysis was limited to the stated methodologies published in the papers themselves), the following broad observations were made:
22 of the 24 studies explicitly employ case study methodologies, with 14 studies adopting a multi-site focus, and the remaining ten a single research site
15 studies derive empirical data from either participant interviews (e.g. Russell & Schneiderheinze, 2005; Trowler & Knight, 2000), participant surveys (e.g. Hopwood & Stocks, 2008) or a combination of interviews, observation and/or participant reflection (e.g. Crossouard & Pryor, 2008; Hardman, 2005)
three studies specifically engage forms of discourse-content analysis (e.g. Brine & Franken, 2006; Foot, 2001), two make use of a largely atomised action research methodology (e.g. Wilson, 2004) and only two directly embrace the either orthodox
developmental work research methodology (Meyers, 2007) or an emergent version of this methodology (Ellis et al., 2010)
a further two studies use the analytical potential of activity systems analysis to collaboratively evaluate practices (Yamagata-Lynch & Smaldino, 2007) or assess the efficacy of professional development (Yamagata-Lynch, 2003)
These outcomes are significant in that they demonstrate several important realities about the relationship between CHAT and associated methodologies. Firstly, there is an apparent dissonance between CHAT-based methodological approaches in mainstream application and the more determinedly interventionist and pre-structured motive of developmental work research. Secondly, the majority of the research adopts a broader frame of inquiry beyond Engeström’s vision of ‘radical localism’ (Engeström, 1999a). Most use more generalised investigations of multi-sites, collective practices or shared pedagogical orientations. Finally, what this meta-level review also revealed was the dominantly heuristic use of CHAT. This suggests that CHAT operates primarily as a discursive framework of analysis in dominant research application. This capitalises on the explanatory and inductive potential of CHAT, rather than its use as an
interventionist tool. Hopwood and McAlpine (2007) lucidly explain this heuristic motive as using CHAT as a:
vehicle to understand relationships between (i) individuals, what they do and what motivates them, (ii) the communities and contexts in which they are embedded, including the norms which regulate interactions and the way different roles and tasks are assigned, and (iii) the tools people use to help achieve their objectives. (p. 3)
The predominant heuristic motive identified in this meta-analysis would seem to represent a legitimate, yet incongruous, motive given the interventionist drive of CHAT-based research. This collective methodological response contrasts sharply with the explicit hegemonic orientation of CHAT as a tool of intervention in localised activity as asserted by developmental work research. This outcome could suggest that the developmental work researchmethodology might work to limit, rather than expand, the utility of CHAT as a framework for research inquiry. To further confirm this thesis, a more detailed analysis of the methodologies used in these reviewed studies was undertaken. This revealed a range of explicit and implicit motivators for the embrace of
this ‘alternative’ heuristic imperative. These distilled motivations and the assumed rationale for these divergent approaches are described in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1: CHAT-based research motivations Motivations Assumed rationale
Suitability of developmental work research methodology (and the perceived value of broader analysis of activity beyond the workplace level)
The developmental work research methodology as represented by Engeström is a highly complex and staged re-mediation of a largely temporally and spatially bounded activity systems. The underpinning ‘ethnography of trouble’ (Engeström, 2000b) requires extensive analytical groundwork by skilled external expertise, defined staging and aggravation of contradictions with the activity system. However, the resonance of this situated research with other ‘similar’ activity systems is largely ambiguous. This is because its actual sustainability both in the local site and as a model for other sites remains largely unclear. Engeström (1999a) argues outcomes of such research are ‘novel activity-specific intermediate level theoretical concepts and methods–intellectual tools for reflective mastery of practice’ (p. 36). Yet, it is apparent that research that employs CHAT as a heuristic seeks to define the activity level in a less local and bounded form. Instead, it opts to research the nature of broader mediated networks of social practice. This sense is reflected by Hopwood and McAlpine (2007), who explain that using activity theory as a heuristic ‘helps us think of the individual in the context of different constellations of social communities, tools, tasks and rules...(and) understanding the tensions experienced by students as they navigate different systems and engage in different activities’ (p. 7).
Enhanced understanding of the relational interdependence between individual and social agency
in activity
A significant feature of divergent methods of CHAT-based inquiry is the more conspicuous engagement with what Billett (2006) has conceptualised as relational interdependencein the exploration of activity systems. This is expressed in an explicit focus on the collaborative exploration of the interdependence of reflexive social and individual agency in activity systems. In the CHAT-based research, there emerged a clear desire in activity theorising to understand the strong influence of the pre-mediated experiences of individual learning that takes place outside the frame of the social. This tension suggests a desire amongst some activity theorists to adopt a more relational ontology. This would appear to reflect some apparent reluctance to reductively engage individual agency where there are ‘inconsistencies and incoherencies in activity systems (that) are far more complex in origin and manifestation’ and therefore may defy deterministic prescription (Blackler, 1993).
51 Avoidance of potential
methodological and situational rigidity
re-mediation of local activity. This approach is based on what Engeström (2000b) has cast as the ‘ethnography of trouble’ and employs a highly structured process to incite the expansive potentialities of disturbances and ruptures of everyday actions (Engeström, 1999b). Further, as Blackler (1993) asserts, the inherent expectation of the Engeström developmental work research
model is that the function of such research is to alert participants to contradictions, in order to spark the process of expansive visibilization and its revelatory potential. Although this approach has produced significant empirical outcomes, it seems to remain largely novel in the broader CHAT-based research community. The ‘unorthodox’ methodologies of CHAT research explored in this meta-level review were generally characterised by forms of engagement that was less directive in tone. Arguably, this form of engagement may reflect the less hegemonic mission of most CHAT researchers, who appear to be more discursive in intent rather than strongly interventionist in motive. Arguably this is an outcome of the absence of a clear methodological paradigm that permits more collaborative forms of intervention in activity systems.
Expectation of exposing CHAT itself to critical re-
mediation
Paradoxically, although there is acknowledgement that CHAT itself necessarily must develop as an open, multi-voiced and constantly re-mediated collective activity (Engeström, 1999a), its primary methodological discourses seem to be subject to limited critical reflection and firm orthodoxies. The range of research methods emerging using CHAT as a conceptual framework, but not necessarily embracing the developmental work researchmodel, suggests there are contestable (or perhaps even contradictory) perspectives emerging. These contestable perspectives debate what constitutes the appropriate level of analysis of activity systems and the relationship of the ‘local’ and the ‘social’. The divergence between the local and social, most acutely demonstrated in methodological variance from research of workplace level activity to broader level of networked activity, clearly has an expansive potential itself for CHAT that could be usefully debated.
These broader findings on CHAT methodologies in research use are highly significant for this study. They imply that the methodological utility of Engeström’s developmental work research approach may be limited. Moreover, it may also not fully encounter the challenges of relational agency or broader domains of professional practice. Given the specific focus of this study on the developmental potential of student feedback in the professional domain of higher education (embodied in the third research question), this conclusion meant this CHAT-based research could be more effectively developed using a broader relational methodology. Such a methodology would also need to go beyond an exploratory heuristic. Given the nature of the context of the study, a largely imposed interventionist approach would not have proved effective. In essence, it would
essentially require a more collaborative methodological form. This created the challenge of determining a complementary CHAT-based methodology that was capable of
engaging the important relational interplay between individual academic agency and the social contexts of meaning around student feedback. This analysis led to the decision to use a CHAT-based, action research methodology. The next section provides a rationale for this decision to adopt this methodological orientation to complement the explanatory capacity of CHAT.