This proposal aims to contribute to a broad methodological issue in teacher-researcher collaboration, namely how to accomplish co-production of research findings. The proposal contains a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part is outlined under this and the next heading and consists of a rendering of the possibilities of co-production of findings as dependent on the existence of a shared disciplinary interest between researchers and teachers. The empirical part, outlined under the last heading, consists of a narrative of joint didactic analysis in the collaborative research project RiskEdu. The narrative is intended to work as illustration of what work within a shared disciplinary interest may look like.

RiskEdu is a collaborative research project with the specific aim of generating didactic models, principles, and concrete teaching materials, concerning how to include issues of risk and risk assessment in upper secondary science in order to support students’ ability to deliberate and take decision on socio-scientific issues (Wojcik et al., 2018). The team consists of two practicing teachers together covering the four science subjects in the Swedish upper secondary curriculum, two subject experts (on radiation risks and risk assessment and management), and three science education (subject didactics) researchers. The methodological tenets of the project stem primarily from didactic modeling (Wickman, Hamza, & Lundegård, 2018), but show close kinship also to other collaborative research programs such as design-based research (The Design-Based Research Collective, 2003), action research (Almqvist, Hamza, & Olin, 2017), and cooperative engineering (Joffredo-Le Brun, Morellato, Sensevy, & Quilio, 2018). Two basic tenets central to the discussion in this paper are mutual recognition (Olin, Almqvist, & Hamza, 2017) and the leveling out of power and epistemic relationships (Joffredo-Le Brun et al., 2018). In line with results from other collaborations, our experience is that these tenets are necessarily realized bit by bit, by building a common ground for talk and action which, at the same time, acknowledges unique differences between and particular roles of each participant (Hamza, Palm, Palmqvist, Piqueras, & Wickman, 2018; Joffredo-Le Brun et al., 2018; Olin & Ingerman, 2016).

However, here I suggest that recognition and equal power and epistemic relationships may also be understood, and possibly partly managed, through a shared disciplinary interest, which in this case is didactics. The discipline of didactics is concerned with knowledge which, in the end, supports teachers’ management of the didactic relation in the didactic triangle (Kansanen & Meri, 1999). In that sense, didactics has a unique disciplinary interest which relates to the particular purposes, techniques, and conditions of the teaching profession and, therefore, which it does not share with any other discipline. In that sense, the situation may be compared to other professional disciplines, such as medicine (Wickman, 2015). The central idea of a disciplinary interest as a guide to inquiry and collaborative research is that participants agree that their work aims at knowledge relevant and intelligible to the discipline and its purposes, irrespective of whether they are researcher, teachers (or, by analogy,  physicians), or experts in other fields. Of course, work for finding common ground and shared practices and language will always be needed for a group of collaborating practitioners and researchers to work functionally (Olin, Sensevy, & Lenzen, 2018). Yet, a disciplinary interest which is shared “by default”, so to speak, because participants already know what the discipline is and does, should reasonably precede such work and, possibly, make parts of such local work easier.

Next, I present one possible way of reaching such shared disciplinary interest in teacher-researcher collaborations, namely by engaging in similar activities in the collaborative research as in teacher professional practice.

Didactic modeling is a research program specifically aiming at producing functional didactic knowledge (Wickman et al., 2018). This is done through the generation of didactic models. Such generation includes three basic phases: extraction, mangling, and exemplification. In the extraction phase, new models are produced through analyses of teaching practice, through theoretical analyses, or by adapting models emanating from other fields. In the mangling phase, extracted models are tried out and modified in and through practice. Through that work, finally, exemplars of instances in which the models have played a part are concomitantly produced and documented. The three phases in the didactic-modeling process are intimately connected to the classic rendering of teachers’ work as consisting of two interrelated activities, didactic analysis and didactic design (Wickman et al., 2018). In short, didactic analysis is the more theoretical part of deliberating around and deciding on different components of one’s teaching (such as purposes, content, methods, and their known or perceived consequences), whereas didactic design is the concrete work of using these components to plan and enact teaching, or produce teaching material. At the same time, didactic analysis is used both in order to extract new and mangle existing didactic models. And in order for the models to be mangled (and exemplified), they need to be put to use for the purpose of didactic design. In the RiskEdu-project, we generate didactic models (as exemplified below) but also more concrete principles for didactic design as well as actual teaching plans and teaching materials. In that process, each member engages (ideally) in didactic analysis and didactic design, i.e., in the disciplinary interest of didactics. Figure 1 illustrates the situation. It shows how the two basic activities of teacher work also constitute the basic activities of the research done in didactic modeling, the difference being that in didactic modeling there is a structured and deliberate flow also from analysis and design to the models, principles, exemplars, and concrete materials. In the presentation, figure 1 will be employed to illustrate the dynamics of the joint didactic analyses conducted by the members of the team. [Figure 1] Figure 1. A static representation of the relation between didactic analysis and didactic design, i.e., the basic activities of teachers’ work as well as of didactic modeling. Solid lines indicate flows common to both teaching and didactic modeling, whereas dotted arrows indicate flows specific to didactic modeling.

My example of joint didactic analysis comes from the team’s work on developing a model of the risk concept for use in science teaching through socio-scientific issues (Schenk et al, in review). In short, the story is this: One of the subject experts conducted an analysis of how the risk concept is treated in the “technical” (i.e., not science education) literature, leading to an initial model including central elements of risk. Importantly for the argument here, already this initial analysis was didactic in the sense described above, i.e., it specifically sought to extract elements which seemed relevant to science teaching from the expert’s point of view. The initial model was discussed in the whole team, and was further analyzed by one of the science education researchers, leading to both addition of an element and to changes in the relations between elements. In the next step, the two teachers together with another science education researcher tried out the model theoretically based on their respective experiences of teaching and research, with a focus on how it might influence planning and enactment of teaching. This led to new suggestions for change as well as theoretically produced “exemplars” of possible uses of the model. Further discussion in the team led to a final representation of the model. In sum, with this presentation I want to open up for consideration of the potential importance if teacher-researcher collaboration is rendered more explicitly as occurring with the shared disciplinary interest of didactics. Moreover, I suggest that this may be afforded by letting the collaborative research be guided by those same activities which teachers engage in on a daily basis, which is a basic assumption of the didactic modeling program. In our project, this approach has enabled joint didactic analyses between teachers, subject experts, and subject didactics researchers.

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