We share and discuss the results of a study of our own experience in a didactic research project where intense collaboration between researchers and teachers was foreseen. The research practice with teachers turned out to be very different from what we had in mind while writing the project application. In order to see what happened, we have studied the qualitative data collected during the project work in schools, together with project artefacts - like our project agenda, project application, e-mail correspondence, meeting reports - from the point of view of the interaction between researchers and teachers and the factors that influenced it. By organizing the selected data in layers and looking at the structure as a whole, we get a perspective on the complexity of the collaboration between researchers and teachers in this didactic research project. By separately looking at the different layers, we identify levels and contexts in which obstacles had to be faced. Some of the encountered obstacles, with origin external to the collaboration, raise concerns about the condition in which teachers have to work in schools today. Looking back to our project application, we find out that, despite our experience in other didactic projects and as teacher educators, the project setup was based on a rather naïve picture of the collaboration between researchers and teachers and of the concrete practice of teachers in schools.
In the study of our research practice we have been inspired by the work of Bruno Latour and Tommaso Venturini (focus on artefacts and visualizing complexity) and its application to the study of research practice (project ‘Research in Motion’).
The idea to set up the didactic research project in the first place originated from the outcry of teachers concerning a secondary school subject, called ‘Integral Tasks’. This school subject is an integration of Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Food & Nutrition and Self-Expression and is taught by a team of teachers covering, together, the needed expertise.
Self-Expression teachers approached an arts education researcher. They pointed out that, despite the school subject Integral Tasks already existed for more than ten years, teachers and schools were still struggling with its concrete realization. Integral Tasks represented, in general, an unwanted teaching task, with older teachers escaping from it when possible, leading to unstable teaching teams often involving young unexperienced teachers. However, some teachers approaching the researcher were older and showed engagement with the school subject Integral Tasks, with which they had been experimenting since the very beginning. While pointing out to difficulties and obstacles in their practice, these teachers wanted to improve the school subject and not leave it. The researcher saw the possibility for a didactic practice-oriented research project centered on the school subject Integral Tasks and involving these engaged teachers in the didactic research.
A project application, involving three schools as research partners, was written and eventually selected for funding. The project aimed at improving the situation with the school subject Integral Tasks by setting up a didactic learning community. In this community, Integral Tasks teachers of the three schools together with didactic researchers would develop a framework for the design of Integrals Tasks learning activities. Implicit assumption of this setting was that teachers would be involved in the development of the didactic framework on equal footing with the researchers. Teachers would actively be engaged in the whole research process and not only in the data-taking phase as objects of observation in their school practice. In the same way, the project setup had foreseen participative observations where didactic researchers would work side by side with teachers in the school practice of Integral Tasks.
