Intro to assignment 3

Research about the process of student or teacher learning in the context of a situated classroom is described as profoundly people centred and often sits within a human and social situation, rather than an easily controlled scientific experiment that measures specific outcomes (Hargreaves in Hammersley, 2007). Planning for and interpreting the teaching context can be complex because in any social situation there maybe multiple realities (Blaikie, 1993) and because the process of teaching can depend on so many variables (Bassey in Hammersley, 2007). Interpretivism as a paradigm and qualitative data collection methods have been chosen for this study as they are often favoured by educational researchers to account for such complexities in classroom research and practice (REF). Building further upon interpretivism, is the social construction of knowledge that is characterised through the involvement, active engagement, inquiry problem solving and collaboration with others (Kroll and Laboskey, 1996; Abdal-Haqq, 1998). Teacher collaboration will be a major focus of this study to give rise to findings from the social construction of new pedagogical experiences, teaching knowledge and resources for the classroom, therefore it will need a methodological framework and methods that foster active engagement and processes that can profile the collective experiences of those involved (Boyland, 2019), as well as provide opportunities to capture the learning that will be socially constructed and scaffolded (Sheppard, 2000). As an interpretative, situated and social constructivist study, it means the outcomes of this research may not be wholly generalisable because the complexities of human knowledge is not like that (Crotty, 1998), but readers of the research from the educational profession should be able to relate to and recognise the voices of the actors and the outcomes as plausibility to the classroom setting.