Project Overview

The Learning in and for Interagency Working Project (LIW) is one of twelve research projects that comprise Phase 3 of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme.  The LIW Project is being conducted in the policy climate that produced Every Child Matters and 2004’s Children Act: initiatives that address the needs of young people and families identified as being at risk of social exclusion.  They call for ‘joined up’ responses from professionals and stress the need for new, qualitatively different forms of multiagency practice, in which providers operate across traditional service and team boundaries.   In this context the LIW Project is concerned with examining and supporting the learning of professionals who are engaged in the creation of new forms of multiagency practice.

Our research is driven by activity theory and is informed by three particular concerns: the identification of new professional practices emerging within multiagency settings; the creation of new knowledge rooted in reflective, systemic analysis, which can be levered into more effective multiagency working; the location of emergent multiagency practice within an understanding of the historically changing character of service provision and user engagement.

In the project we have employed the following key ideas:

Expansive learning (read more.........)
Models and principles of Activity Theory (read more.........)
Professional work and new types of learning (read more.........)
Double Stimulation Methodology (read more.........)
Intervention and changes in practice (read more.........)