It is acknowledged that agency is a mediating element in educational change (Kumpulainen, Kajamaa, & Rajala, 2018). Agency is key to address active learning and change at the diverse school levels and especially among teachers (Juutilainen, Metsäpelto, & Poikkeus, 2018; Tao & Gao, 2017). Double stimulation constitutes a key process for agency development, and is a key issue in contemporary studies, commentaries and interpretations of Vygotsky's work (Sannino, 2016) to understand how individuals agentively transform their circumstances (Sannino, 2015). It includes a conflict of motives which constitutes a clash between opposite aspirations or tendencies which occur in situations involving uncertainty. Together with the problematic situation, a conflict of motives represents the starting point with which individuals intentionally enact their behaviour and influence the world around them.
The development of agency can be more readily promoted when organisations such as schools are faced with an important problem, and there is the need to find innovative and shared solutions so that practitioners move from individual behaviours and resistance to cooperation and commitment to carry out change (Sannino, Engeström, & Lemos, 2016). Double stimulation is key within the interventionist legacy of Cultural Historical Activity Theory. Formative interventions, especially the Change Laboratory, are designed to trigger cycles of expansive learning (Sannino et al., 2016). In Change Laboratory workshops 15-20 practitioners facilitated by a researcher meet for roughly 10 two-hour meetings to deal with a challenge pertaining their organisation. This step can result in an expansive transformation when they reconceptualise the motive and the object of their activity.
The Change Laboratory is suited for activity systems facing a major challenge; it is characterised by a highly mediating setting with writing surfaces used according to different levels of abstraction and to an historical perspective. Other features are: a dialectical movement between distanced intellectual analysis and close emotional involvement; video-taped materials gathered in the field, to provide mirrors for stimulating constructive discussion (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). Many authors advocated for double stimulation as one of the epistemic principles characterising the Change Laboratory (Engeström, 2011; Engeström & Sannino, 2010; Haapasaari & Kerosuo, 2015). Provided that “in the Change Laboratory, the principle of double stimulation is applied on several levels” (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013, p. 48), this paper seeks to operationalise a multi-level analysis of double stimulation and to apply it within a Change Laboratory.

The research question of this paper is “To what extent can a multilevel analysis help better describe the dynamics of double stimulation during Change Laboratory workshops?”.
This hypothesis was measured by examining the case of a group of teachers of a Italian technical secondary school, who were engaged in a Change Laboratory during 2016 to deal with the dramatic fall of new student enrolments that had occurred during the previous 10 years in the surveying course.
(Conclusions) The analysis reveals that : (a) the macro level helps to globally understand the Change Laboratory method, the innovation and results that transpired at the organisational and didact level; (b) the meso level can be matched with the expansive learning actions, and helps understand the place of the intervention in the cycle of expansive learning, this is the phase rich of artefacts made agentively by the participants; c) the micro level helps trace the development of the conflict in motives and the second stimulus at the conversation level. It is thus possible to better understand how collective agency and innovation develops in organisations when they are confronted with an important problem, and something new must be experimented with. We suggest differentiating between first and second stimulus used in the singular at the macro level, as well as the first and second stimuli used in the plural in the meso level.

We conducted an analysis of the literature of Change Laboratory, and based on this analysis we identified three possible levels: • Macro level at the level of the full intervention. The Change Laboratory is almost taken as a “black box” as if there was an input (the first stimulus) and an output (the second stimulus). The first stimulus is the identification of the problematic situation (and its shared awareness among the participants). The second stimulus is the artefact or prototype that is elaborated throughout the workshops as solution. An example for this analysis are Sannino and Engeström (2017) and Sannino et al. (2016). • Meso level at the level of tasks and/or workshop. This level is identified by Virkkunen & Newnham (2013) who contend that, compared with experiments based on one subject, double stimulation in “long standing collaborative activities is a more complex and time-consuming process that involves chains of double stimulation” (p. 48). At this level double stimulation is thus a step-by-step process where the researcher sets tasks that promote expansive learning actions (p. 80). First stimuli are: a) mirror materials, that is evidence about potentially problematic or contradictory situations in the activity, b) a question posed to the participants to start the task. Second stimuli are: (a) an analytic tool or method that the participants can use when dealing with the problematic material – for example the triangle of activity or the cycle of expansive learning (Engeström, 2015); (b) an artefact (documents, banners, presentations) made by the participants during the discussion. This level could therefore be easily traceable in the materials used by the researcher or produced by the participants during the workshops. • Micro level at the level of interactions. Double stimulation is studied through diversified analysis of the transcripts. Sannino and Engeström (2017) and Morselli (2019), for example, counted the number of times that the solution (the second stimulus at the macro level) was mentioned in each workshop, thus tracing its development throughout the Change Laboratory. A second analysis is the identification of conflict of motives (a basic feature of double stimulation) at the level of interactions. Sannino & Engeström (2017) reported examples of conflict of motives with excerpts, but this analysis can be pushed forward by counting the instances of conflict of motives for each workshop. This approach therefore traces how conflict of motives develop throughout a Change Laboratory. A third analysis is the development of collective transformative agency as done by Haapasaari, Engeström, and Kerosuo (2014).

The multi-level analysis of double stimulation was applied to a Change Laboratory conducted with 14 teachers in 2016 in an Italian secondary institute. The analysis at the macro level identifies the first stimulus as the dramatic drop of student enrolments in the surveying course. The second stimulus was an interdisciplinary project in Grade 5 involving diverse subjects that were designed to advertise the course during the open days and course presentation. The analysis at the meso level reports, for each workshop, the task the participants had to deal with and the related mirror materials (first stimuli), and the outcomes of the discussions in terms of artefacts such as banners (second stimuli). During the first workshops, for example, the participants analysed the present situation. They found that the situation was due to both external and internal reasons (see Morselli, 2019). Among the internal reasons there was the lack of collegiality between teachers and the perception by the community outside the school that the surveying course they offered was ineffective. During the historical analysis they found that they had criticised and resisted the school reform of 2008, including ignoring prompts they received to innovate their course. The analysis at the micro level throughout the 11 workshops which contained 6967 speaking turns, shows that the conflict of motives is present in each workshop, but oscillates from 5% (first workshop, questioning) to nearly 0% (eighth workshop, reflecting on the process) of the speaking turns. This observation suggests the role of conflict of motives functions as the “energising element” of double stimulation. The analysis of the occurrence of the second stimulus (the interdisciplinary project) shows how this word was used four times starting from the second workshop, up to 35 times in the sixth workshop when the second stimulus was put forward by the participants.

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