Transforming Others? Education, Intervention, and the Problem of Otherness
Naoyuki Yamada
Education is concerned with change. Teachers hope that students will learn, develop, and become different from who they were before. Researchers engaged in formative interventions likewise seek to create conditions in which participants can transform their own activities. Yet this raises a fundamental question: what does it mean to become involved in the transformation of others without determining in advance what that transformation should become?
This seminar explores this question by bringing historical inquiry into dialogue with contemporary intervention research. I begin with my historical research on writing pedagogy in modern Japan, particularly the work of Enosuke Ashida (1873–1951), whose practices sought to encourage children to write from their own lives and experiences. This case reveals a persistent tension within education: education may invite learners to express themselves, while simultaneously shaping the very forms through which the self becomes expressible. I then reconsider this tension through my more recent research on formative intervention and the Change Laboratory. Here, researchers deliberately intervene in educational practices while seeking to enable participants themselves to analyse and transform their collective activity.
Bringing these two fields of inquiry together makes the position of the educator and researcher itself problematic. If education necessarily involves some orientation towards change, simply withdrawing from intervention cannot resolve the problem. The question, then, is not whether we should influence the transformation of others, but how we might participate in it without reducing otherness to a predetermined image of what the other should become. Rather than offering a definitive answer, the seminar asks how education might remain open to forms of transformation that educators and researchers cannot fully anticipate or control.
Naoyuki Yamada is Associate Professor of Education at Kansai University, Japan, and currently a Visiting Researcher at Lancaster University. His research lies at the intersection of the history and philosophy of education, writing pedagogy, and cultural-historical activity theory. His historical work has focused particularly on Enosuke Ashida and writing education in modern Japan, while his recent research explores the Change Laboratory and formative intervention as approaches to educational transformation. He is the author and co-author of several books on education, including a monograph on the educational thought of Enosuke Ashida (2020), and has contributed to a recently published volume on expansive schools and transformative agency (2026). A further volume on Arata Osada’s lectures in China is forthcoming. Beyond his academic research, he co-manages TRIADE, an electronic text platform for academic and higher education that explores new forms of scholarly publishing and knowledge sharing.
Everybody is welcome. The presentation is free to attend. For catering planning purposes, please register until 21st October 2026 with Dr Karsten Kenklies under: karsten.kenklies@strath.ac.uk