This presentation will present preliminary findings from a study of collaboration between a researcher and primary teachers working together to develop a tentative didactic model through didactic modelling. Didactic modelling is here defined as it is described in Wickman, Hamza and Lundegård (2018; 2020) and Ingerman and Wickman (2015). The study is part of an ongoing doctoral project in science education in primary school. The research project consists of two parts and the focus of the research reported in this presentation is on the second part where the tentative model from the first part is further modified together with teachers.

Teachers make many didactic considerations in their teaching and need to have a solid professional base on which to ground their choices (Ingerman & Wickman, 2015). In order to manage, distinguish and reflect on a complex content, teachers therefore need different kinds of tools. For this purpose, various types of didactic models have been created (cf. Jank & Meyer, 2006; Sjöström, Eilks & Talanquer, 2020; Wickman, Hamza & Lundegård, 2018; 2020). A didactic model can be said to function as a didactic tool by providing teachers with concepts and conceptual schemes which increase teachers’ possibilities of making relevant distinctions and judgments concerning certain features of teaching (cf. Joffredo-Le Brun et al., 2018; Wickman, Hamza & Lundegård, 2018). Didactic models can be used to plan, sort, structure and analyze teaching in a systematic way - and they can also be useful for arguing and reasoning about different didactic choices. To work with didactic models is an essential part of the discipline of didactics (Arnold, 2012; Jank & Meyer, 2006). 

Didactic models are designed through so-called didactic modelling, where modelling includes both the production and application of didactic models (Wickman, Hamza & Lundegård, 2018; 2020). The production of a didactic model has three integrated phases called extraction, mangling and exemplifying and the process takes place in interaction between practice and theory and usually works in cycles (Wickman, Hamza & Lundegård, 2018; 2020). Through didactic modelling, models are, thus, created (the extraction phase), refined and modified (the mangling phase) and also supplemented with examples from how the models apply to teaching practice (the exemplifying phase). 

Didactic modelling may be one way of reducing the gap between research and teaching, because it includes teachers as a necessary voice in the development of a didactic model, in particular in connection to the mangling phase of didactic modelling (Ingerman & Wickman, 2015; Wickman, Hamza & Lundegård, 2020). An overall aim in the second part of the doctoral project is to further develop the extracted tentative model (Weiland, 2019) from the first part of the project – called “didactic score” – in collaboration with primary school teachers. This study thus concentrates primarily on the second phase of the modelling process, i.e., mangling. The intention is to study the collaborative teacher-researcher process. More specifically, my interest is the joint actions of teachers and researcher during the mangling process, when working together with a tentative model in order to make the model functional as a didactic tool for teachers in early grades.

The theoretical framework and central concepts in the study is mainly grounded in Dewey´s pragmatic philosophy. 

Didactic modelling has been chosen as a method and the study was planned after the modelling phases, with adaptation following the participation schools and teachers during the semesters. The study was conducted with a small group of primary school teachers in Sweden. Five teachers and students in two classes (grade 3) from two different schools participated in the project. The empirical material consists of conversations between teachers and researcher (e.g. notes, video- and audio recordings, pictures and sketches of the model) as well as data collected from lessons from two of the participating teachers’ classrooms (e.g. field notes, photos, video- and audio recordings). Didactic models cannot be applied directly into school practice - without the need for an exchange between teaching and research practices (cf. Ingerman & Wickman 2015; Hamza et al. 2018). The research project has been designed to ensure that the research practice takes a responsibility, for example of how the model can be transformed and concretized in the current teaching practice. The participating teachers need to see the benefit and usefulness of the model, and the research practice to understand the model's meaning in teaching practice. Data was analyzed using PEA, Practical Epistemology Analysis (Wickman & Östman, 2002).

The primary finding so far concerns the important role that imagination seemed to play for teachers’ possibilities of approaching and working with the new model. First, imagination played a role initially as the teachers drew and sketched as a way for them to become familiar with the didactic model. Second, imagination also played a role when moving from the particular to the abstract. For example, imagination became important when the teachers invented new combinations, in a way of blending experiences from the classroom practice with the illustration of the model, which also seemed to have consequences for the further discussions. Third, imagination seems to play a role when teachers used their experiences from teaching to create new ideas about how the model could be modified or used for other purposes than those originally intended, as communicated by the researcher. Fourth, likely, but also tentatively, imagination seemed to play a role for supporting teachers to identify and associate various examples from their own teaching and connect them to the model. At the presentation, more detailed analyses and refined results will be presented, along with a discussion on what bearing they may have for teacher-researcher collaboration during the mangling phase of didactic modelling. Moreover, the potential significance of the results also for other teacher-collaboration initiatives will be discussed.

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