Rodolfo Andrade de Gouveia Vilela - Collaborative Development for the Prevention of Occupational Accidents and Diseases: Change Laboratory in Workers Health

There is a growing need across the social sciences to explore new methodologies and methods of interventionist research. The methodology of formative interventions, implemented in the form of Change Laboratories, represents perhaps the most visible program of contemporary intervention research (Penuel et al. 2016, p. 489). Scaratti and his coauthors (2017, p. 62) point out that Change Laboratories offer an example of how a robust theory can enhance and shape an intervention methodology in order to develop the building of dynamic possibility knowledge. Greeno concludes that further analyses of Change Laboratory interventions would indeed provide a significant advance in the fields understanding of learning and development (Greeno 2016, p. 637).

The Change Laboratory is a formative intervention method based on cultural-historical activity theory and the theory of expansive learning (Engestrm et al. 2014; Sannino et al. 2016; Sannino and Engestrm 2017; Virkkunen and Newnham 2013). Committed to serving struggles for equity, social justice, and sustainability, the Change Laboratory was developed and first implemented in 1995 in Finland. Grounded in materialist dialectics and the Vygotskian theoretical tradition, its uptake has been demanding and only quite recently it has reached the point of accelerated international adoption. By now Change Laboratories have been used in some 30 countries in educational institutions, workplaces, and communities, to generate bottom-up solutions to challenging problems and complex transformations.

The Change Laboratory offers four important contributions to social sciences. First, it bridges bold practical change efforts with a rigorous activitytheoretical framework ( the theorypractice contribution ; Sannino and Engestrm 2017). Second, it makes accessible and analyzable the emergence and formation of the participants transformative agency, understood as grappling with contradictions and conflicts of motives by means of double stimulation ( the agency contribution ; Sannino et al. 2016). Third, the Change Laboratory reveals the potential and conditions of learning by ascending from the abstract to the concrete, understood as construction and expansive use of novel theoretical concepts ( the expansive learning contribution ; Sannino et al. 2016). Fourth, the Change Laboratory offers a novel methodology and toolkit of methods of data analysis for gaining insight into complex processes of transformation ( the research instrument contribution ; Engestrm and Sannino 2019).

Aimed at expansive learning, Change Laboratory interventions put into use the key principles of double stimulation (Sannino 2015) and ascending from the abstract to the concrete (Engestrm and Sannino 2016), typically with a carefully planned sequence of mirror materials, tasks and learning actions. This does not mean that the interventionists plan is smoothly implemented. To the contrary, participants in formative interventions commonly take over the process at some point and generate deviations from the interventionists intentions. These deviations reveal gaps between the interventionists object and the participants objects gaps that need to be negotiated. The deviations, gaps, and negotiations are important instances of emerging transformative agency among the participants (Engestrm and Sannino 2012; Engestrm et al. 2013).

The actual sessions of a Change Laboratory intervention need to be seen in the context of a broader formative research design. This may be represented with the help of Fig..

Fig. 1

General design of formative intervention research

In Fig. , research moves bidirectionally, from bottom up and from top down. The analysis of focal data is the meeting point where theory and data come together and collide, as indicated by means of the lightning images in the figure. The collision is a source of new theoretical and methodological developments.