Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PEEK (Mobilisation and transformation of personal educational knowledge for teaching: An ethnographic account on teacher knowledge)
Reporting period: 2017-03-01 to 2019-02-28
How do teachers develop their educational knowledge for teaching? The Marie Curie project PEEK (PErsonal Educational Knowledge for teaching) addressed this question both theoretically and in empirical research. Over the project period, the objective of PEEK was to explore how experienced teachers skilfully manage classroom situations, and how they address situations that remained difficult for them even though they are drawing on their extensive teaching experience. PEEK research provides insights into the professional development of teachers because the project explores the knowledge teachers draw on when they teach in everyday life classroom situations, and tracks how teachers revisit their experiences of these situations to engage in their professional development and adapt to the challenges they perceived. PEEK compiles insights into genuine practices of professional development of teachers, and thus provides important insights into the maintenance of educational services in European welfare states by pointing out themes which expert teachers themselves address in their routines of professional development.
Work performed addressed two objectives for the MSCA project time span: Firstly, the identification of situated orientation patterns used in teaching and the modelling of dynamical knowledge mobilisation within a classroom context. Secondly, the presentation of reflective orientation patterns adopted for teaching, and knowledge transformation to fit a classroom context. The two project objectives were approached in five work packages to develop an account on knowledge transformation while looking both at practical educational knowledge in teaching, and personal educational knowledge used in the reflection on teaching. Work package 1 (WP1) focused on the conceptual development a framework for empirical fieldwork, WP2 comprised fieldwork phase A in a secondary school, WP3 was dedicated to a first analysis phase of data from fieldwork phase A, WP 4 engaged in fieldwork phase B in higher education and drew on the previous fieldwork phase and the initial analysis, and WP5 incorporated a second analysis phase and further conceptual development grounded in fieldwork. All publications connected to this project have been acknowledged to have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No H2020-MSCA-IF-2015-701750. All publications are available as open access through academia.edu https://dpu-dk.academia.edu/ClemensWieser(opens in new window) either as preprint or as final published version. The project time span was not fully used due to an appointment as Associate Professor of Educational Theory at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Progress beyond the state of the art was achieved in conceptual modelling of knowledge transformation: The PEEK knowledge model is based on the assumption that teachers perform skilfully when classroom situations allow them to draw on their personal educational knowledge which orients situated attention in unforeseen events. However, some events are difficult to manage with previously established orientations sets because a situation comprises a set of characteristics that creates a novel context of teaching. This novel context creates experiences that teachers problematise in order to comprehend the characteristics of such a novel context, and transform their established knowledge in order to react to this context in the next episode of practice. The conceptual elaboration of professional knowledge transformation in PEEK points out that teachers manage situations in subsidiary and focal attention, and appraise situations based on these two forms of attention. Their appraisal leads to experiences of involved educational practice in class. Such experiences are taken up again in reflective educational practice, where teachers problematise their experiences in order to transform their knowledge for teaching – in Foucault terms their ontological homeland – and establish an elaborated set of orientations for teaching. This elaborated set of orientations enables teachers to attend to problems which they experienced in previous episodes of practice, and solve these problems in order to scaffold their learning in their classroom.