Formative interventions in leadership development in early childhood education: The potential of double stimulation

Introduction

This article is drawn from an ongoing programme of research and development in Australia that is attempting to develop sustainable, high-impact interventions to enhance the work of leaders in early childhood education (ECE). It begins by outlining the contemporary socio-historical context for this work in Australia and the nature of the wider project. Next, the methodology of Developmental Work Research (DWR) is outlined, followed by discussion of the concept of ‘double stimulation’ and how this concept is operationalised during the workshops with the participating leaders. An example of changed leadership practice is drawn from the work of Heather, the Director of a childcare centre in outer Melbourne. The article concludes by arguing that the practice of double stimulation potentially has important implications for fostering sustainable leadership practices in ECE.

The contemporary socio-historical context for leadership development in ECE in Australia

An emphasis on leadership in ECE is a feature of ECE policy in Australia at present (Thomas and Nuttall, 2014). This focus is part of a wider programme of sector reform (see Council of Australian Governments (COAG), 2009) and acknowledges the impact of effective leadership on enhancing quality ECE provision. A range of quality indicators have been identified as influenced by leadership practices, including programme outcomes for children, staff retention and rates of ongoing professional development (Siraj-Blatchford and Manni, 2007). These sector reforms are also playing out in the context of slow but steady professionalisation of the ECE workforce internationally (Dalli and Urban, 2010), which includes recognition of staff qualifications as a contributor to quality outcomes for children (Huntsman, 2008). These moves are turning attention to the need for ongoing capacity-building across the ECE workforce and service-based teams in particular. Localised leadership capacity-building is a key strategy in supporting such team development, since it locates the primary responsibility for ongoing workforce capacity-building within individual ECE services.

This devolutionary strategy is evident in Australia’s National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and School Aged Care (COAG, 2009), which originally proposed regulation for the designation of a ‘pedagogical leader’ in every ECE centre and service. The primary task of this person was to foster the development of other staff in order to enhance ECE programme quality:

● The educator or coordinator identified as the ‘pedagogical leader’ should:

● have current knowledge of child development and effective approaches to teaching and learning;

● have a knowledge of planning, assessing and documenting children learning and the importance of sharing information with families;

● oversee and lead other educators to implement the Early Years Learning Framework including pedagogy and curriculum decision making;

● plan and deliver the preschool program for children in the years prior to school;

● work with other educators in observing, supporting and extending children’s learning and lead discussions on reflective practice;

● support educators in the process of assessment for learning;

● lead and share information, knowledge and expertise on practice, policy developments and community changes that may impact on curriculum;

● be a professional role model for high quality education and care for children;

● build the capacity of all educators by supporting and mentoring others to take on leadership roles in areas of expertise or of potential interest. (COAG, 2009: 30–31)

The regulation that eventually arose from this policy was considerably reduced in terms of responsibilities when compared with the 2009 policy. Nevertheless, a modified and re-titled role of ‘Educational Leader’ (EL) is now in place across Australia under Regulation 118 of the Education and Care Services National Regulations (Ministerial Council for Education Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEECDYA), 2011), which states,

The approved provider of an education and care service must designate, in writing, a suitably qualified and experienced educator, co-ordinator or other individual as educational leader at the service to lead the development and implementation of educational programs in the service. (p. 133)

In the context of these contemporary policy moves, our ongoing research programme has two aims. First, we are seeking to track the ways in which these newly designated ELs are enacting and adapting their leadership practices. Second, we aim to describe and theorise interventions in leadership practice with the potential to have a long-term positive impact on the development of ELs in ECE. To meet these aims, we have adopted DWR (Engeström, 2005; Nuttall, 2013) as our core methodology for simultaneous research and intervention. Implementation of DWR with one group of ELs in Queensland and three groups in Victoria, Australia, has generated over 100 transcripts interviews with individuals and pairs of ELs and ethnographic records of over 20 DWR workshops from 2011 to 2014, which we have analysed according to substantive concepts established in the educational leadership literature, including time (Nuttall and Thomas, 2015) and relationships, and through the concepts of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT).

This work has allowed us to identify the challenges these professionals understand themselves to be facing on adopting the EL role, their explanations for these challenges, the constructs of leadership practice they have attempted to employ and possibilities for alternative practices. The experiences of the research participants have been proven to be consistent with those facing workforce capacity-building in ECE internationally, including high rates of staff turnover (Whitebook and Sakai, 2004), diversity of qualifications (or few qualifications) (Sammons, 2010) and limited opportunities for career advancement due to flat managerial structures. A further consistent finding in analysis of the interviews conducted prior to the DWR intervention has been ELs’ reliance on individualised models of development. This is seen particularly in the commitment of ELs to defer attempts at staff development until all the educators in their centre are philosophically and professionally ‘on the same page’. As one Queensland EL told us,

We try and get to the stage where we want to get into the educational stuff and start teaching and leading and moving everyone forward, and we end up back in square one again because we’ve got a new staff member come in …

Another Queensland EL said,

I guess another challenge for this year definitely would be the whole part-time, casual [situation] – like, how do you bring everyone together to move forward, I guess, because if we have a staff meeting there’s always three or four people that can’t attend, so there’s always people sort of missing out.

There is a fundamental tension here. The underlying desire of these ELs is for a sense of collective cohesion, yet they are focused on adapting the perspectives of individual staff. This tension is not surprising. Although ECE relies on implementing collective labour processes, the early childhood field has a long history of respecting and addressing the needs of individuals, whether children, parents or educators. In recent decades, this has converged with principles of neoliberal public policy that now pervade Australia workplaces (Perry, 2007), enacted through technologies such as professional development plans, professional standards and codes of conduct, and individual performance appraisals. Although the use of such technologies is now commonplace as part of the management role of leaders in ECE, there is little evidence that such modes of governing work have made a serious contribution to the development of practice in ECE. In workplace environments such as ECE that have high staff turnover, and where resources for individual coaching and mentoring are extremely limited, leadership efforts to improve quality that focus on individuals seem misguided at best and counter-productive to attempts to foster agreed forms of practice that can sustain quality outcomes for children at worst. What, then, might be a different way of thinking about leadership practices in ECE? What methodologies might displace the focus on individual subjectivities and practices to promote the collective cohesion these ELs so strongly desire?

In the next section of this article, we focus on DWR methodology and, in particular, the concept of ‘double stimulation’, before returning to its implications for leadership development in the article’s final sections. Our aim here is to explore whether double stimulation, as conceptualised within DWR, is useful in supporting ELs to change and develop their leadership practices in response to current policy moves and the accumulated cultural and historical features of the field, including an emphasis on individualised assumptions about development.

DWR as a formative intervention in work practice

Our research is situated within the growing tradition of DWR (Engeström, 2005; Nuttall, 2013). DWR is underpinned by key concepts drawn from the work of Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky and his collaborator A. N. Leontiev. The concept of mediation via cultural tools is central to Vygotsky’s articulation of the development of human activity. For Vygotsky, cultural tools are dynamically implicated in our capacity to achieve the goals of daily life since they encapsulate agreed cultural meanings that, in turn, mediate the relationship between humans and their participation in the world. Humans and their collective efforts develop simultaneously over time as cultural practices encountered in the external world are internalised (intra-mentally) and subsequently externalised as practice (inter-mentally). The capacity of humans to adapt these cultural tools in response to circumstances, in turn creating shifts on the intra-mental plane, means humans can consciously change themselves from the outside (Daniels, 2001). Leontiev expanded on this notion of mediation by cultural tools to argue that collective labour processes depend upon multiple forms of mediation. These mediating variables include not just cultural tools but also agreed rules and norms, and implicit and explicit divisions of labour.

DWR as an approach to workplace development is enacted through a series of workshops, known as ‘change laboratories’ (Engeström, 2007), facilitated by a team of researchers. Across a series of workshop sessions, the researchers, in collaboration with the participants, work to clarify and elaborate the goals of workplace activity through analysis and adaptation of key aspects of that activity. Research data take a variety of forms but often include pre-project interviews with participants, video records and field notes of change labs, and relevant workplace artefacts (policies, timetables, manuals, codes of practice, etc.). Central to this process is the concept of ‘contradiction’ as it was taken up by Leontiev. Whereas Vygotsky understood contradictions as arising within individuals in response to changed circumstances, for Leontiev, the collective labour process, rather than individual learning and development, is the unit of analysis wherein contradictions arise. These contradictions appear as tensions within systems of workplace activity. During the change labs, the researchers ‘mirror’ elements of the data back to the participants to stimulate discussion of systemic tensions that are confounding the participants’ attempts to achieve the collective object of activity that motivates their work. The act of bringing these contradictions into conscious view provides the raw material for the participants and researchers to work together to construct new workplace practices that more fully meet the objects of activity – and, ultimately, the desired outcomes – within their shared labour processes (see also Edwards (2010) for a description of how change labs are facilitated as a research and intervention methodology). As Miettinen (2013) argues, this can be a profoundly creative form of intervention. Unlike many approaches to the development of workplace activity, there is no expectation that the researchers will provide the answers to workplace problems; rather, the intervention aims to foster the agency of the participants in analysing past and present practice and in imagining and enacting future practice.

The concept of double stimulation

The focus of this article is the way in which double stimulation is enacted during the DWR process to identify and resolve real-world leadership problems in ECE workplaces. Double stimulation is at the core of DWR methodology. As Sannino (2015) has shown, double stimulation is fundamental to both theory and method within Vygotskian-inspired psychology, but its definition is somewhat dispersed across primary and secondary sources within the literature. Virkkunen and Ristimäki, citing Vygotsky, provide the following definition:

When studying the mediation of actions, Vygotsky (1978, pp. 72–75) applied the method of Double stimulation. In it a person is given a problem that exceeds his or her current competence (first stimulus). While the person is trying to solve the problem, another stimulus is brought into the situation. The researcher observes whether the person takes the creative leap of inventing a way of using the provided second stimulus as an instrument in solving the problem. ‘We might say that when difficulties arise, neutral stimuli take on the function of a sign and from that point on the operation’s structure assumes an essentially different character’ (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 74). (Virkkunen and Ristimäki, 2012: p. 274; emphasis in original)

In change labs, participants who are experiencing a problem of practice that is frustrating their efforts (the first stimulus) take on board a second stimulus (a mediating artefact) that allows them to resolve the problem. However, as Daniels (2010) explains, ‘The crucial element in a Vygotskian dual stimulation event is the co-occurrence of both the problem and tools with which to engage with that problem’ (p. 382; emphasis added). Engeström (2001; Engeström and Sannino, 2010) has given the title of ‘expansive learning’ to the process of resolution of problems through the development of new practices, denoting the way in which these resolutions not only deepen understanding of workplace motive objects but also lead to change at the level of workplace systems. Such system-level development can be conceptualised within the Vygotskian tradition as movement within a collective zone of proximal development.

The second stimulus offered to participants in the change lab is a conceptual model designed to support them to analyse the activity system itself and its interactions with neighbouring systems (see Figure 1). By mapping past and present practices through the concepts of objects, tools, rules, community, subject, object and division of labour, contradictions within and between workplace norms and artefacts are systematically identified and brought to conscious awareness. For example, a kindergarten and a nearby school operate as separate systems of activity, but the cultural norms of one system can have important implications for the other system and, indeed, for the children and families who move between these systems. Such systems can contain primary contradictions (e.g. a kindergarten can have a rule that ‘parents are always welcome’ but also have a rule that ‘parents must wait outside the locked gate to collect their children’). Likewise, the kindergarten can have a rule that ‘parents are valued educators of their children’, but when parents attend the kindergarten to assist, they find themselves relegated to cutting the fruit for the children’s snacks, within the division of labour operating within the kindergarten (a secondary contradiction).

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Figure 1.

Two interacting activity systems (from Engeström, 1999).

Like most workplaces, early childhood services are dense with such contradictions, many of which have accumulated over long periods of time. Such sedimented forms of practice (Engeström, 1993) eventually cease to be consciously examined and become practices that are best described as ‘How we do things around here’. It is the work of leaders in ECE to identify, develop and redevelop the explicit and implicit norms of practice in early childhood workplace systems that impact children, families and colleagues. As a consequence of our analyses so far, we are particularly interested to identify how such developments can be stimulated at both the individual and collective levels, rather than primarily at the level of individual practice. As noted earlier, in contemporary Australia, these leaders are called on to do this work in a context of rapid policy change, frequent staff turnover, insufficient time and limited preparation for the role. Before turning to further examples of contradictions and their resolution within one project, we provide a brief description of the project’s participants and the approach to data generation and analysis adopted within this programme of research.

The research project

The vignette of Heather’s practice reported in this article is drawn from one project within the wider programme of research. This project was conducted from 2011 to 2014 on behalf of a municipal authority (one of the many cities that make up greater Melbourne) in Victoria, Australia. Eleven participants, all women and each a Director of a large long-day childcare centre, took part in the project. These Directors ranged from recently appointed (a few months) through to highly experienced leaders with up to 20 years in designated leadership roles in childcare and/or kindergarten (preschool). Each Director was interviewed before and after the series of six change labs, as well as having access to individual coaching sessions between labs. These coaching sessions, along with the interviews and workshops, were audiotaped and transcribed. In keeping with the ethics protocols for the project, Heather’s name is a pseudonym, and the workshop and interview transcripts have been de-identified.

The resulting large data set (transcriptions of six 2-hour workshops and over 50 interviews and coaching sessions of at least 1 hour each) was progressively analysed during and after the fieldwork period. Analysis of the workshop and coaching data was necessary not only to refine and reflect on the project methodology but also to identify mirror data for use in subsequent change labs. Data analysis was approached from three separate angles: initial reduction according to a priori concepts (resulting in categories such as ‘rules’, ‘tools’, ‘contradictions’); parallel data reduction in response to spontaneous or unexpected topics in the participants’ talk (resulting in categories such as ‘feelings’ and ‘resistance to change’); and the construction of composite narratives within and across items in the data set. This third strategy had not been planned in advance but was found to be both necessary and effective in interpreting the accounts of practice contributed by the Directors. These narratives allowed us to trace the engagement of the participating Directors with persistent problems of leadership practice over extended periods of time. At the same time, they allowed us to honour the persistence of the Directors themselves in clarifying and pursuing the objects of activity in their leadership. The narrative reported here focuses on Heather, the Director of a busy childcare centre offering both regular bookings and casual drop-in bookings. This account is a composite, constructed not only out of interviews and coaching sessions but also out of workshop sessions where Heather described the practice problem of ‘the toddler lunchtime’ and sought input from fellow Directors. This account has therefore been collectively generated by Heather, her colleagues and the research team.

Heather’s application of double stimulation

The following composite narrative traces Heather’s use of double stimulation to resolve a persistent contradiction occurring around the lunchtime routine in the toddler classroom. In this scenario, the first stimulus was a primary contradiction between one rule – ‘lunch must be relaxed and peaceful’ – and another rule – ‘lunch must be cleared away within thirty minutes’ – which was frustrating the educators:

Heather’s centre is divided into a series of rooms where the children are grouped according to age. In the toddler room, there is a qualified Room Leader and an Assistant working with approximately 15 children aged from around 18 months to almost three years of age. The toddlers have lunch around 11.30 am, mostly sitting at low tables, and a part-time ‘Float’ staff member (also qualified) comes in for half an hour at 12.30 pm to ‘clear away the lunch, stack the dishwasher, sweep, and generally tidy’. She then moves on to do the same in another classroom. The Room Leader has a very capable, relaxed ‘style’ with the toddlers, unhurried and gentle. The Float, by contrast, is very ‘bustling’ and often short-tempered at lunchtime. Although she is also fully qualified and is very gentle and capable with the toddlers, she has to get everything done in thirty minutes, often with the toddlers wanting to ‘help’. Over time, the contrast between the approaches of the two staff has grown to the level of serious tension. Each has made time to speak privately with Heather to complain about the other and to ask Heather to intervene. Initially, Heather encouraged each of them to be ‘more tolerant’ of each other’s approach and to perhaps consider changing their own ‘style’ to accommodate their colleague. These appeals had no effect and tension continued to grow. Heather then brought the two educators together and asked them to each put their concerns to the other, in the hope she could act as mediator and persuade them to find some ‘middle ground’ in their practices. This was also unsuccessful. Heather has been growing increasingly frustrated and beginning to think of major steps she will have to take, such as ‘performance managing’ one or both of these staff or changing the roster to separate their duties.

For Heather, this problem had become non-trivial; it had consumed a considerable amount of time and worry and was grounded in a fundamental difference in the practice solutions put forward by two staff members who were engaged in a shared object of activity. During the change labs with the Directors, Heather learned to conceptualise her centre system (the second stimulus) to bring to consciousness contradictions underpinning problems of practice (first stimuli). In Heather’s case, she came to realise that the tension between the two educators was not one of teaching style, attitude, communication or ‘performance’ but an underlying systemic problem within the rules that governed the lunch routine. In turn, this threw into relief a struggle within Heather’s ‘hierarchy of motives’ (Leontiev, 1975/1978: p. 123) with respect to her leadership. The concept of hierarchy of motives was Leontiev’s attempt to acknowledge that work is rarely motivated by a single motive object of activity and that the relationship between objects can itself be contradictory. As Kaptelinin (2005) explains, ‘In case of a conflict the hierarchy of motives indicate which motive should prevail’ (p. 14). In Heather’s case, should she use a relational response and try to maintain good relationships with and between staff or a managerialist response and tell the teachers how the lunchtime should operate, according to her own rules; or should she take a developmental response by bringing the contradictions inherent in current arrangements to conscious awareness for the two teachers; or, since these approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive, should she use some combination of the three? Heather decided to use her new knowledge of double stimulation to try a developmental approach in discussion with the two educators. Heather did not directly analyse the centre system with the educators, but in a subsequent workshop she described how she held her conceptual analysis in mind during the discussion, emphasising the need to constantly re-focus on the object of activity, as she encouraged the educators to re-think the lunch routine:

At a workshop late in the project, Heather reported that she had taken the two educators together ‘to a local park’ and sat down with them with a large sheet of paper. On the paper Heather drew a large circle. She asked the educators to identify what they wanted the toddlers’ lunch routine to ‘be like’. They quickly agreed they both wanted ‘a relaxed and hygienic lunch routine’. Heather then asked them what could be done differently to meet this shared object. As each of the educators made suggestions, Heather did not express judgement or try to mediate; instead, she simply acknowledged each contribution and responded with ‘Will that idea lead to a relaxed and hygienic lunch routine?’ After exploring a variety of suggestions, the educators agreed on a direct ‘swap’ within the established division of labour around the lunch routine: instead of coming in and cleaning up, the Float educator would read quiet after-lunch story books to the toddlers as a group, while the Room Leader took responsibility for cleaning up after lunch, with some of the toddlers joining in. If the lunch wasn’t completely cleared away after thirty minutes, it didn’t matter, as the Room Leader could continue the activity after the Float educator moved on to the next room. This was the solution the educators were trying when Heather shared this example at the workshop, and ‘so far’ the change appeared to be a success.

It is tempting to think of this scenario as an example of successful ‘conflict resolution’ after several failed attempts, but this would be a misrepresentation of the important shifts in practice that had occurred. With respect to the contradiction within the toddler room, a sedimented division of labour, reified in the form of tools such as position descriptions, was confounding the educators’ desire for a relaxed and peaceful – but efficient and hygienic – lunch routine. Routines of eating and sleeping are the backbone of childcare practice and provide critical learning opportunities for very young children around the cultural rules of eating, sharing, conversing and self-regulation. Turbulent routines can lead to dysregulation of the environment as a whole; in this case, if the toddlers are not relaxed by the end of lunchtime, their sleep routines after lunch are more difficult to manage.

More importantly, for the purposes of this article at least, Heather’s approach points to the potential of double stimulation to reframe leadership practice with respect to collective labour processes in ECE. Double stimulation allowed Heather to, first, bring to consciousness a systemic tension (as opposed to characterising the situation as a ‘conflict’ due to ‘differing teaching styles’); second, she supported the educators to clarify the object of activity in their labour processes in this context (a relaxed, hygienic lunch routine); and, third, she invited them to think creatively about how they could change their practices to better meet their common object. This process required the educators to do three things: first, to acknowledge the contradictory nature of current practice; second, Heather required her colleagues to focus on what exactly they imagined a relaxed, hygienic lunch routine to be like and to de-privatise these imaginings (in order to generate a genuinely common object of activity); and, third, Heather called on them to exert their agency by overturning sedimented practices so that their new object of activity could be achieved. The solution to their primary (rule-rule) contradiction was found in adapting their division of labour (swapping roles) and ‘bending’ the rule that lunch had to be cleared away within 30 minutes. ‘Rule-bending’ has been found to be a key feature in these kinds of workplace resolutions (Edwards, 2010). Collectively, Heather and the two educators decided to ‘bend’ the rule that lunch had to be cleared away within 30 minutes; this then allowed them to imagine alternative practices that could be implemented by adapting other mediating features of the classroom system (in this case, the division of labour). The educators were now well on the way to establishing a new cultural norm for the centre: that relaxed, hygienic routines are more important than sticking rigidly to the established division of labour.

The potential of double stimulation to contribute to practices of sustainable relational leadership

A second important shift was in relation to Heather’s leadership practice. Having experienced the contradictions arising from competing motives in relation to the teachers’ practice, she was able to resolve the problem of practice in the toddler room in a way that was both relational and developmental. Anyone who has not worked in a childcare centre may see this example as rather trivial; anyone who has worked in a childcare centre will recognise that through double stimulation – by applying a conceptual representation of the workplace to a primary problem of practice – Heather was able to effect a major shift in the cultural norms of her centre. In the context of the focus on leadership in our research programme, this reading of Heather’s experience speaks to the need for new practices of leadership in ECE. In refocusing her efforts towards identification of a common object of activity and calling on her colleagues to think creatively about their practice, Heather was attempting to resolve an even deeper problem of practice that we have found to be widespread among participants in our research: the relationship between leaders’ expectation that educators will themselves take the initiative to respond to problems of practice (which our data show to be an explicit cultural norm in ECE) and the reality of leaders being positioned by their staff as ‘problem solvers’ (the implicit but actual division of labour consistently reported by the research participants).

Heather’s initial response to the contradiction presented by the toddler room educators was to focus on their individual beliefs and dispositions and attempt to bring these into alignment. This is unsurprising. Focusing on the development of individuals is both a cultural norm of ECE, thanks to its historical reliance on atomised, Euro-American theories of psychological development (Greenfield and Cocking, 1994/2014), and a feature of neoliberal ‘management’ technologies in early years education (Osgood, 2006). Both of these cultural traditions have dominated the period during which the Directors in this project have internalised their leadership roles. Furthermore, alternative conceptualisations of development – such as the notion of collective zones of proximal development – have not been made available to them. During the same period, the traditional structures that supported these collective conceptualisations, such as widespread union membership and participation, have been progressively eroded (Perry, 2007). In cultural-historical activity theory terms, however, the fundamental flaw with individually oriented strategies is that they each make people (the individual and collective subjects of workplace activity systems) into the objects of activity in leadership practice. This objectification misrecognises the nature of leadership with respect to staff development since it focuses leadership efforts away from conceptualising shared practices and towards appeals to individual beliefs, in the hope that changed beliefs will lead to changed practice. It is this tension that constituted a secondary contradiction within Heather’s leadership, arising from the hierarchy of motives she was attempting to negotiate in relation to her leadership.

This second reading of Heather’s narrative sheds light on the potential of double stimulation as a conceptual tool for leaders in ECE. By focusing on expansion of a common object of activity (‘Will this suggestion lead to a more relaxed and hygienic lunch routine?’) and mobilising the collective thinking and action of the educators in the toddler room, Heather called on the professional expertise of her colleagues in a way that reminded them of their shared capacity to address the problem and that Heather did not need to be their first resort in the future. Rather than trying to get the two educators to behave a little more like each other, Heather brought a second stimulus – the concept of a multiply mediated workplace system – to bear on their actual practice. As Sannino (2015) has argued, the interaction between first and second stimuli creates an agentic ‘pincer movement’ that propels development forwards. In this case, this force supported Heather to tap into the distributed (but latent) professionalism of her staff to encourage them to act imaginatively and collectively in response to a problem of practice.

Conclusion

We argue that double stimulation, as conceptualised within DWR, is potentially a powerful strategy for developing leadership practice in ECE. First, it supports leaders to shift from conceptions of leadership based in individualised solutions (too often resulting in burnout) to thinking about leadership as work that influences the collective cultural norms of the entire field. Second, it creates spaces for imaginative and creative dialogue among professionals. Such dialogue is suppressed when collective responsibility for professional development is located in a single person. Third, it holds out the promise of leadership practice that is sustainable for the field.

Nevertheless, DWR has significant limitations and many of the concepts it relies upon have been extensively critiqued. From a practical point of view, it is expensive to implement and difficult to apply as an intervention methodology on a wide scale because of its reliance on first-hand facilitation by a team of researchers. Second, it has mainly been applied in workplace settings that rely heavily on routinised practices (such hospital settings and manufacturing) but less commonly in settings that require complex, moment-to-moment decision-making. In this context, concepts such as double stimulation and hierarchy of motives become more difficult to anchor, when compared with work with individual learners. Kaptelinin critiques, for example, the concept of hierarchy of motives in ‘poly-motivated’ situations such as Heather’s:

According to Leontiev (1975/1978), there can be two types of motives of an activity: sense-forming motives, which give the activity its meaning, and motive-stimuli. For instance, for an artist their creative self-expression can be a sense-making motive, and achieving recognition can be a motive-stimulus. Motive-stimuli can stimulate a person and elicit various emotional reactions (sometimes coming into conflict with the general meaning of an activity) but they are of secondary importance compared to the sense-forming motives. Therefore, in the case of a conflict, sense-making motives prevail over motive-stimuli … the concepts proposed by Leontiev (1975/1978) to deal with phenomena of poly-motivated activities cannot provide an adequate account of these phenomena. The main shortcoming of these concepts is a lack of explanatory and predictive power when it comes to both moment-to-moment and long-term developmental dynamics of activity. (Kaptelinin, 2005: p. 14)

This critique is further complicated by the lack of explicit attention DWR pays to issues such as power relations and the operation of hierarchies within and between workplace systems. These limitations confirm Engeström’s argument that DWR and its consequences are in need of critical commentary and that ‘micro cycles’ of transformation are only partial solutions that remain highly vulnerable to falling away (Engeström et al., 2013). Nevertheless, participants in our most recent DWR workshops have described their use of double stimulation as ‘liberating’ because it folds the work of imagination and problem solving back onto teams, rather than the leader having to have ready-made answers to problems of practice. Although we have been able to confirm the way shifts such as these can be developmental at the level of early childhood services, we continue to question and explore the extent to which such shifts can become sustainable at the level of the field as a whole.