Session Information
27 SES 11 B, Didactics and Teacher Professional Developement
Paper Session
Contribution
The research presented in the paper is part of a large research project built on a comparative didactics approach (cf. Almqvist & Quennerstedt 2015; Ligozat et al 2015) with the overall ambition to search for and analyze different teaching traditions in order to optimize the possibility to find effective and fruitful teaching approaches. One of the aims in the project is to use and develop didactic knowledge and concepts in cooperation with teachers (cf. Sensevy et al 2013, Wickman 2015). In this paper we will present and discuss a way for researchers to participate in teachers’ development of teaching.
Teaching is a complex, transactional process affected by numerous contingencies both within and outside the classroom. Thus, it is necessarily underdetermined by any theories about teaching and learning. Just like medicine or engineering, didactic knowledge therefore needs to be developed in interaction between more general, ”theoretical” models of teaching, and the actual practices which these theories are intended to support (Wickman, 2015). This realization is consistent with current views of teacher professional development as needing to involve teachers in collaborative and inquiry-based projects grounded in problems identified by the teachers themselves (McNicholl, 2013; Sensevy et al 2013; van Driel, Meirink, van Veen, & Zwart, 2012).
The idea of didactic modelling or inquiry goes beyond these notions by emphasizing not only teacher learning and the development of local practice but also the successive modification and refinement of the theories themselves (Lijnse & Klaassen, 2004; Wickman, 2012). From that point of view, researchers in didactics and practicing teachers are seen as different but equally crucial actors in the joint construction and successive development of disciplinary knowledge about teaching.
Neither teacher professional learning nor didactic research primarily proceeds by substituting old ideas with new ones. Instead knowledge, personal as well as institutional, is transformed bit-by-bit through noticing of and reflection upon consequences for both practice and theory (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002; Wickman, 2012). Through this kind of joint and reciprocal work, generating personal as well as institutionalized knowledge which is thoroughly and continuously mangled through actual practice (Pickering, 1995), teachers as a collective may develop a common basis for their choices of content and methods for teaching (Wickman, 2015).
However, the ambition to find ways for researchers too contribute to educational development is not new. A research field with long experience of and knowledge about development work where researchers and teachers collaborate is the action research field. Action research is a broad field both in a geographical as well as theoretical sense (Somekh & Zeichner, 2009), including different purposes, conditions, philosophical starting-points and forms for inquiry. Nevertheless, there are also characterizing features in all variations of action research. According to Reason and Bradbury (2001), action research always has an emergent developmental form; it deals with practical issues, supports human development, is founded on knowledge-in-action and aims at participation and democracy (p. 2). The role of teachers in educational research has been an essential topic for decades especially in critical theoretical approaches such as Participatory Action Research (PAR).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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