Should research-based school development be accomplished through spreading and implementation of traditional educational research knowledge or by building a trustworthy knowledge base from teachers’ personal craft knowledge? From the 1990s there has been a renewed interest for teacher research and to find ways of transforming teachers’ craft knowledge into professional, accessible and sharable knowledge. Such transformation would probably also create a hot bed for bridging the gap to more traditional research results (Korthagen, 2007). 

In this symposium we want to explore the possibilities for so called ‘Learning studies’ (Marton & Pang, 2006) to accomplish the transformation of teachers’ craft knowledge to a professional knowledge base. ‘Learning study’ is an arrangement for improving student and teacher learning while at the same time carrying out research. It is developed in co-operation between researchers in Hongkong and Gothenburg and has been described as a hybrid between, on the one hand, the Japanese ‘lesson study’-tradition (Youshida, 1999) and, on the other, design experiments (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer & Schauble, 2003.) The idea has been to create a more rigorous research model out of the lesson study model by 1) collaboration with researchers 2) systematic assessments of the results and 3) connection to learning theory. Evaluations of learning studies have shown a strong impact on teachers’ professional thinking as well as impressive learning results. 

In the symposium we will describe and discuss learning studies as a  model for teacher research.  We will explore its possibilities to contribute to the development of teachers’ professional knowledge base. The transformation of teachers’ craft knowledge to professional knowledge includes making it public, accumulated, verified and improved (Hiebert, Gallimore and Stigler, 2002).  How can learning studies contribute to that? Are they systematic enough? Are the results of any use beyond the concrete case? In what way can new learning studies build on previous studies?

The focus is on describing and analyzing learning studies as subject didactic teacher research. Which are the research objects? What kind of knowledge is produced? What kind of documentation is needed? How can the iterative cyclic research model be discussed in terms of generalization?