Ayaka Nakano

This study focuses on school-community partnerships and analyses the process whereby teachers and volunteers collaborate in order to build educational practices. In this study, a school manager and volunteers who participate in partnership activities try to create new educational practices as a means of learning traffic rules. They herein manage to utilize "programming cars" in the context of class so as to learn traffic safety. This collaboration generates an "experimental sphere" that enables participants to engage in trial and error. The diversity of participants' ages or specialties then becomes a trigger in the process of formulating these practices, which deepens the interpretation of the practices or goals. The collaborations within this activity therefore enable schools and communities to achieve developed practices that would not happen without each element. This means that such partnership activities can provide an "experimental sphere" that incorporates diversity, as well as promoting innovation in educational practices that can be made applicable to regular classes in schools.

<p>The purpose of this study was to verify the possibility of setting multi-boundaries and to reconsider the meaning of intergenerational learning. The focus was on a school-community partnership organization called S Junior High School Support (S-Sapo). The data for the study are from fieldwork conducted in the organization from April 2016 to June 2020. The analysis is based on field notes and semi-structured interviews with volunteers who participated in the activity, either inside or outside of the school district. Two volunteers from different generations were selected as the subjects of the analysis. The selected senior volunteer showed substantial generativity, while the younger volunteer sought to absorb knowledge from the older generation. Through the collaborative practice encouraged by S-sapo, the younger subject adopted practical behaviors generated from the senior subject's job experiences by crossing syntactic boundaries. This phenomenon is called knowledge transfer and is generated from differences in the level of knowledge of the participants. The younger subject also succeeded in adopting perspectives that support these practical behaviors, reinterpreting the senior's perspective, and then applying it to practical contexts by crossing semantic boundaries. This phenomenon of adoption is generated by interactions among contexts. Crossing these boundaries enabled the younger subject to imagine her future from a present perspective. Such illumination of a future path can be regarded as intergenerational learning. By borrowing other people's perspectives in the process of an intergenerational exchange, one is able to envision steps for the future, even if they are somewhat vague. Thus, the intergenerational exchange works as social scaffolding for members of the younger generation.</p>