Session Information
03 SES 08 A, Towards Subject Integration
Paper Session
Time:
2009-09-30
08:30-10:00
Room:
JUR, HS 13
Chair:
Nienke M. Nieveen
Contribution
Research on innovation and educational reform gives evidence that collaboration is needed to make new curricula successful. However, we know little about what makes collaboration work, which role each partner plays, how a common perspective among teachers, researchers and others evolves or how partners deal with conflicts. We also ask whether the stakeholders of innovation or reform base their decisions on power, on subject matter expertise or on value positions and whether each of them can forward her or his arguments.
The theoretical background to answer these questions starts from reflections on curricular innovation, stretches over discourse theory and ethical considerations and ends in the idea of collaboration as a social learning process in which different communities engage in a joint project. The notion of community is central to our approach. It involves similarity and differences: On the one hand side communities own a body of values, experience and knowledge its members share. On the other hand side, communities have a beginning and an end that mark its boundaries. Another feature of communities is the identity of those belonging to them. For example, a teacher student acquires his identity by sharing the norms and practice of other physics teachers. Following Etienne Wenger’s ideas of a “community of practice” we believe that sharing of knowledge and experiences from different communities is a process of boundary crossing and an active participation in new practices. Members of both communities change their norms or abandon traditional experiences reified in laws, curricula or research standards. From this perspective, educational innovation becomes a process of mutual exchange, joint meaning construction, and the search for common values rather than the adoption of new ideas imposed by an outside agency. Different from Wenger we think that educational communities are more than functional units in a social learning process. Individual educators place educational practice in a moral and social framework of judgement and behaviour.
Method
In our paper we explore issues of boundary crossing and innovation by analyzing the experiences in selected reform projects. Our inquiry is based on mostly qualitative data collected in “CROSSNET”, a transnational EU-project in which 11 partners from various countries conduct case studies about innovative practices in affiliated schools, use a common theoretical framework and ask for the benefits of crossing boundaries among different bodies of knowledge, institutional norms or instructional routines. By categorizing verbal data we look for the underlying values the respective communities hold about their work and how the members’ beliefs influence the way they construe the commonplaces of curriculum: the nature of science education and its evolution as educational, the idea of good subject teaching, the role of students in learning, and the voices in the milieu that contribute to a reform project.
Expected Outcomes
We see the relevance of our inquiry in a new approach to open the black box of innovation and to legitimate educational change. Our data indicate that the collaboration of communities participating in a reform project differs from collaboration among individual members. If collaboration is successful, for instance among teachers of different subject areas, we observe interdisciplinary groups evolving that develop norms, practices and bodies of knowledge beyond subject teaching and individual teachers changing traditional beliefs or teaching styles. In both cases the “social capital” of former experiences loses its value and is replaced or altered by norms and practices of other communities. While these changes often cause fear, new communities of practice help to develop new identities and thus allow, for instance, traditional subject teachers to follow interdisciplinary approaches in their classroom.
References
MacIntyre, A. (1984, 2nd edn.): After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press. Olson, J. (1992): Understanding Teaching. Milton Keynes, Open University Press. Wenger, E. (1998): Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
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