An increasing number of adolescents experience schooling as distant and meaningless. According to Pauliina Rantavuori’s research, this is not a problem of individual students but a phenomenon related to the structural features of schooling.
“I wanted to understand what students themselves consider important and what happens when they are allowed to act, lead, and shape their own learning,” Rantavuori explains.
In her dissertation, Rantavuori studied how adolescent students can generate and gain power through long-term, object-oriented collective activity — a phenomenon that has received little research attention.
The study focuses on the concepts of power, agency, and school alienation. According to Rantavuori, the object of activity — what the activity is directed toward — is the key to meaningful participation and ownership of learning.
“When students cannot influence the central object of schooling — the knowledge being learned — a contradiction arises that may lead to alienation from school,” she notes.
In the Change Laboratory, students worked on meaningful questions
In the study, lower secondary school students designed and implemented year-long projects on topics meaningful to them as part of a Change Laboratory intervention, carried out during the school day without the constraints of curriculum or assessment.
The Change Laboratory provided students with opportunities to work on questions important to them in collaboration with researchers, school staff, and external partners.
In her research, Rantavuori developed the concept of object-oriented power based on cultural-historical activity theory. This concept describes how young people generate and gain power through meaningful activity.
In the empirical analyses, Rantavuori examined students’ initiatives and decisions, expressions of power, collaboration across school boundaries, and the role of adults in supporting or constraining empowerment.
Power and agency intertwine
Rantavuori’s findings show that power and gaining power can be understood as a collective process that emerges through activity, interaction, and sustained effort.
She explains that power and agency are intertwined: both arise in a process where the actor encounters a contradiction and develops means to resolve it. The concept of object-oriented power connects these perspectives and offers a new way to examine how learners can grow into active agents in developing their own learning and their communities.
“Through the Change Laboratory, I learned that school can be a place where students identify and address both personal and societal challenges. When they are given opportunities to participate in the shared design and decision-making around learning, it can become meaningful and empowering,” Rantavuori says.
The study provides tools for examining power dynamics in schools
Rantavuori’s doctoral dissertation contributes new knowledge to the field of activity theory and provides tools for examining power dynamics within school communities.
The results indicate that strengthening young people’s participation is crucial in preventing alienation from school.
“Alienation arises when students experience schooling as meaningless and feel they have no possibility to influence it,” Rantavuori states.
She emphasizes that object-oriented power opens up opportunities for meaningful learning and for developing schools as communities where young people act as active drivers of change.
“The school of the future will increasingly require collaboration between students, teachers, and the communities surrounding schools. The collective creation of knowledge and solutions is essential for young people to find meaning in their actions and to develop the capabilities needed to face the complex challenges of our time,” Rantavuori concludes.
Currently, Pauliina Rantavuori works as a University Lecturer in Special Education at Tampere University.
Public defence on Friday, 21 November
The doctoral dissertation Adolescents Gaining Power: A Change Laboratory in a School Setting by Master of Education Pauliina Rantavuori, in the field of Education, will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, on Friday, 21 November 2025, at 12 noon, on the City Centre Campus, Pinni B Building, Lecture Hall B1096 (Kanslerinrinne 1, Tampere).
The opponent will be Associate Professor Chiara Sità from the University of Verona, and the custos will be Professor Annalisa Sannino from Tampere University.
Read the dissertation online.
Follow the public defence online.