E.05. Democratic Processes in Expansive Learning: Concept Formation and Interventionist Studies across Four Generations of CHAT

This panel explores how Activity Theory can renew understandings of the relationship between learning and democracy in adult education. CHAT has reconceptualised learning as a collective, transformative, and object-oriented process through which people confront contradictions, negotiate shared meanings, and model new activities (Engeström & Sannino, 2021). In this perspective, democracy is not only a political arrangement, but an expansive learning process enacted in institutions, communities, and everyday practices.

Drawing on CHAT’s transformative framework, the panel discusses how democratic development emerges through the expansive learning of historically situated, socially mediated, and value-laden activities. Particular attention is given to the interventionist methodology of CHAT, applied in Change Laboratories and other formative interventions (Sannino et al., 2016). These approaches analyse and catalyse change in activity systems, whether single organisations, networks, or heterogeneous coalitions.

The panel foregrounds concept formation as the central analytical and practical process in formative interventions (Engeström, 2024). It builds on the evolution of mediation for CHAT: from artefacts (1st generation) to activity systems (2nd), boundary-crossing networks (3rd), and heterogeneous coalitions (4th). Concept formation expands from individual mediated actions to society-wide struggles over shared objects, contributing to reimagining and enacting democratic futures. In this light, democracy itself can be understood as a field of concept formation in the wild.

We welcome proposals grounded in the CHAT framework – conceptual, empirical, or interventionist – rather than studies retrospectively interpreted through activity theory. Contributions may address any adult, informal, and non-formal educational setting where democratic learning and collective agency are at stake.