Trust at the boundary: Cultural-historical activity theory and intervention research in initial teacher education

Initial Teacher Education (ITE) partnerships are widely recognised as essential to improving teacher preparation, yet they remain constrained by accountability regimes, structural divides between universities and schools, and legacies of tokenistic consultation. This paper reports on an Australian Change Laboratory (CL) intervention that brought school and university educators together to redesign a literacy and numeracy curriculum unit. Using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the study examines how systemic contradictions became resources for expansive learning and how trust was produced through collective activity. Data included CL transcripts, participant interviews, co-authored artefacts, researcher observation notes, and mirror data used to surface contradictions. Findings show that participants identified tensions around curriculum authority, assessment, and accountability, reframing them as collective rather than individual problems. Trust emerged not as a prerequisite for collaboration but as an epistemic artefact generated through joint activity and embedded in co-designed unit outlines, moderation protocols, and dialogic practices. These artefacts helped stabilise new routines and redistribute aspects of curriculum authority across institutional boundaries. The paper argues that sustainable ITE partnerships require relational infrastructures that support trust, shared authority, and collaborative curriculum work, and demonstrates the value of CL as a methodology for enabling and sustaining these conditions over time in practice.