Expanding the context of pedagogical activity to the surrounding communities

Connecting learning across school and out-of-school contexts is a growing concern in educational research and practice. In this paper, I present and discuss two pedagogical principles for expanding the context of pedagogical activity by connecting it to the students’ lives and communities. The pedagogical principles discussed in this paper are a) connecting pedagogical activity to activity systems and expert communities outside school and b) harnessing students’ productive deviations from a given pedagogical design. The argument foregrounds the distinction between the extension and expansion of the context of pedagogical activity. The context of pedagogical activity is expanded when the interaction with the outside world qualitatively changes the activity. I draw upon a sociocultural and holistic conceptualization of pedagogy that considers pedagogy as cultural intervention in human development that occurs in encounters between students’ and teachers’ activities, situated in the cultural, historical, and institutional contexts of school and beyond. In the concluding section, I discuss a sketch for a new pedagogy based on the pedagogical principles elaborated in this paper.Connecting learning across school and out-of-school contexts is a growing concern in educational research and practice. In this paper, I present and discuss two pedagogical principles for expanding the context of pedagogical activity by connecting it to the students’ lives and communities. The pedagogical principles discussed in this paper are a) connecting pedagogical activity to activity systems and expert communities outside school and b) harnessing students’ productive deviations from a given pedagogical design. The argument foregrounds the distinction between the extension and expansion of the context of pedagogical activity. The context of pedagogical activity is expanded when the interaction with the outside world qualitatively changes the activity. I draw upon a sociocultural and holistic conceptualization of pedagogy that considers pedagogy as cultural intervention in human development that occurs in encounters between students’ and teachers’ activities, situated in the cultural, historical, and institutional contexts of school and beyond. In the concluding section, I discuss a sketch for a new pedagogy based on the pedagogical principles elaborated in this paper.Peer reviewe