Educating teachers to follow a strong model of teacher professionalism, meaning teachers’ skills to evaluate their own work and to seek ways to improve it, is a globally-shared goal in teacher education (Taber 2013) .  I am a primary school teacher and I have worked as a teacher-researcher since 2006. During the time I have been conducting research projects in my own classrooms, I have faced and tried to solve problems related to questions of a strong model of teacher professionalism: whose voice should be heard in improving classroom practices and how can teachers learn about of their own work in a way that it is possible whilst undertaking their other duties. When solving these problems, I realized that traditional research methodologies and methods did not respond well to these questions, nor they did not work well in the classroom setting. Those problems forced me to address methodological questions and also forced me to develop new methods in researching my own teaching. That development work has inspired me to describe how pedagogical action research is a specific form of teacher research built around five approaches (Niemi 2018).

Even though I describe this methodology as pedagogical action research, it relates closely to didactics. I am aware that in some contexts, pedagogy and didactics have been used synonymously (Nordkvelle 2003) and in the literature they have had overlapping definitions (Hamilton 1999), but I see them rather like Pertti Kansanen (1999): they are siblings that cannot exist without one another. I also agree with Pentti Kansanen (2009), who claimed that most current research on teaching and teacher education is American and its terminology follows the standards used by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and that is why people use the concept of pedagogy rather than didactics.

The other reason for using the concept of pedagogy instead of didactics relates to my own personal educational background. In the 1990s, when I was being educated in Finland and in other Nordic countries, didactics was emphasised by three aspects: what should be taught, how to teach and learn and what purpose something should be taught and learnt (i.e. Kansanen & Meri1999; Kansanen 2003; Klette 2007). In other words, for me, didactics has generally meant the relationship between the participants (the teacher and the pupils), often described according to the didactic triangle of Johann Friedrich Herbart (see i.e. Kansanen & Meri 1999). When these didactical questions were connected to wider questions in society, didactics turned to pedagogy (Kansanen 1999; Kansanen & Meri 1999). As Pertti Kansanen and Matti Meri (1999 ) put it “It is pedagogy as a whole that guides the instructional process according to the aims and goals stated in the curriculum.” The third reason for choosing the pedagogy concept relates to action research, because in action research a researcher should connect research questions to the broader context and questions in society (Kemmis 2006). Therefore, I have chosen to use the concept of pedagogy in describing this methodology. 

In Finland, didactics and didactic research has still a strong position. That can be seen in teacher education: student teachers study subject didactics in every subject and in teaching practice, and are guided by mentors (primary school teachers) who work in teacher training school but also with supervisors who come from the faculty of education and who are specialists in subject didactics. Because subject didactics and didactical research still have a significant role in teacher education and in our educational system my research question in this paper is: How can pedagogical action research be used as a methodology in capturing pupils’ perceptions of didactic relations?

This study is pedagogical action research that seeks to gain information about pupils’ perspectives of classroom practices from a didactic relations point of view. It is participatory by nature; its goal is to work with pupils and see them as co-researchers (Niemi et al., 2010; Niemi et al., 2015a, 2015b, 2018; Niemi, Kumpulainen, Lipponen & Hilppö, 2015). In this study, I used visual artefacts (PowerPoint presentations, picture books and iMovies) and self-interviews as tools to listen to the pupils’ perspectives. The creation of visual artefacts was used as a thinking skill tool, and they were valued for extracting constructs and facilitating talk. In this study, the purpose of the visual artefacts was to facilitate pupils’ perspectives that I wanted to capture through self-interviews. Self-interviews can also be considered as a validation tool because the meanings behind the pupils’ choices in photo-elicitation sometimes carry a quite different meaning from the one expected at the outset (e.g. Croghan et al., 2008; Niemi et al., 2015). Because of two previous data collections in this same classroom, I have a strong pre-understanding of my pupils’ perspectives. The most appreciated practices relate on their positive experiences of competence, social relatedness to others and sense of autonomy, whilst highly structured tasks and problems in social relatedness and feeling competence cause negative experiences (Niemi, Kumpulainen & Lipponen 2018). Thus, in this study I focused on the pupils’ expressions and how these expressions related to didactic relations. This can be seen as a form of discourse analysis (e.g. Wodak & Meyer 2009) in which I try to analyse and understand the relation between pupils’ meaningful experiences and teachers’ didactical relationship. In the results section, I also describe how this understanding relates to the approaches to pupils’ agency and practical theories.

The data creation process itself was an easy task for the pupils and it supported pupils’ agency, because they were able to choose the number of pictures and the application they wanted to use. In this way, this study launches new ideas about how digital methods can be used to examine pupils’ perspectives, or children in general. The method worked in launching pupils’ perspectives of didactic relation defined by Kansanen & Meri (1999) and Kansanen (2003): what to study, how to study and what purpose to study for. The method, however, failed in revealing pupils’ perspectives of pedagogical relation between the pupils and the teachers. The other problem of the method related to the shortness of the self-interviews The data creation process itself was an easy task for the pupils and it supported pupils’ agency, because they were able to choose the number of pictures and the application they wanted to use. In this way, this study launches new ideas about how digital methods can be used to examine pupils’ perspectives, or children in general. The method worked in launching pupils’ perspectives of didactic relation defined by Kansanen & Meri (1999) and Kansanen (2003): what to study, how to study and what purpose to study for. The method, however, failed in revealing pupils’ perspectives of pedagogical relation between the pupils and the teachers. The other problem of the method related to the shortness of the self-interviews In conclusions I close by discussing how pedagogical action research is connected to Herbart’s didactic triangle. Then I discuss how the data collection related to the approach to narrativity and to the approach to curriculum development. In this presentation I also bring up ethical issues related to this study (approach to ethics) and I conclude how the whole process supported both the approach to pupils’ agency and the approach to practical theories (Niemi 2018).

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