Notes for assignment 3

 Scientific or more positivist approaches have been the accepted way to measure the success of an intervention such as a pre and post test - difference.

However this research is concerned with the how and the process of teaching rather than a measure of performance and therefore needs to be situated in the process of practice and the nuanced details of how teachers learn from the classroom experience to develop and refine their teaching knowledge in an unfamiliar topic. 

Research such as this is participatory and action based. Action research - teachers as researchers of their own practice and unpredictable in nature- multiple realities and contextual to each classroom situation and set of learners. This steers the need to explore several classroom experiences to be able to triangulate findings and identify what consistent successes or failures come about through developing and piloting unfamiliar content. 

Action research as a methodological framework is ideal in that it offers iterative cycles to explore and refine practice, it puts teachers as researchers of their own practice. However in this instance the researcher is not a teacher in a primary school context so cannot bring their situated understanding to that particular teaching context. The knowledge of the setting for which this research needs to be conducted and applied is important to this research so will need a different methodological approach to be able to combine contextual knowledge of the primary school teaching context using teachers as active participants or co-researchers to explore the ideas with situated understanding and experience to draw upon, as well as the contextual understanding beyond the specific classroom where the intervention is being piloted.

Education design research (or other names it has) is a similar methodology to action research that takes from the tradition of action research with iterative cycles to develop and design an intervention, only it works as a collaboration between teachers with knowledge of the setting working alongside researchers to develop understanding, this promotes a joint meaning making of how the intervention works in practice. This is an ideal framework to facilitate a socially constructed approach to creating new knowledge. Design research is primarily focused on the development and design of tangible outputs from testing and developing them directly in the context of practice, which will help to shape lesson plans, teaching resources and pedagogical materials that could be used in other classroom contexts, this also helps to produce materials that could be used in a teacher training capacity to help deliver this unfamiliar topic in the future. However, design based research doesn’t specifically focus on the development of pedagogical knowledge for the application of teaching and how to plan, deliver and interact with learners in practice, it instead has a focus on the materials and resources within that practice. One part of teacher training and teacher knowledge is developing pedagogical content knowledge, which is not just about applying the materials but developing practice based knowledge of how best the subject can be communicated with learners and how learners respond to the teaching of the topic, not just the materials that support it. This research aims to understand how teachers can plan and deliver the topic to help learners understand. This focus goes back to the concept of action research where teachers are the researchers of their own practice. DBR doesn’t fully account for this.

A similar model for creating tangible outputs, but also address the professional development of teachers is lesson study. This too adopts an iterative approach to lesson development but specifically focuses on refining teaching expertise and the professional development of teaching specific subjects- Japanese origin use.

This research wants to explore both the development and design of a new curriculum intervention and its resources, but also the development of teachers pedagogical knowledge for classroom practice so will take from both the traditions of DBR to facilitate a co-production approach and lesson study to explore the professional knowledge of teachers in practice.