Social practices in teacher knowledge creation and innovation adoption: a large-scale study in an online instructional design community for inquiry learning

María Jesús Rodríguez-Triana,Tobias Ley,Denis Gillet,Luis P Prieto,Ton De Jong

doi:10.1007/s11412-020-09331-5

Abstract

Social practices are assumed to play an important role in the evolution of new teaching and learning methods. Teachers internalize knowledge developed in their communities through interactions with peers and experts while solving problems or co-creating materials. However, these social practices and their influence on teachers’ adoption of new pedagogical practices are notoriously hard to study, given their implicit and informal nature. In this paper, we apply the Knowledge Appropriation Model (KAM) to trace how different social practices relate to the implementation of pedagogical innovations in the classroom, through the analysis of more than 40,000 learning designs created within Graasp, an online authoring tool to support inquiry-based learning, used by more than 35,000 teachers. Our results show how different practices of knowledge appropriation, maturation and scaffolding seem to be related, to a varying degree, to teachers’ increased classroom implementation of learning designs. Our study also provides insights into how we can use traces from digital co-creation platforms to better understand the social dimension of professional learning, knowledge creation and the adoption of new practices.

Highlights

Despite the benefits that educational innovations may entail, their adoption in the classroom is known to be challenging, as this requires teachers to embrace new teaching and learning practices (Webb and Cox 2004)
Innovation adoption in the Go-Lab initiative While there are different degrees of adoption, in this paper we focus on the potential usage of full Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) in the classroom, since ILSs reify the overall objective of the GoLab initiative: the inquirybased learning (IBL) pedagogical approach combined with apps, labs, and multimedia resources that contribute to scaffolding students in the inquiry learning process
While social practices are considered crucial in teacher ongoing professional learning, their implicit and informal nature make studying them rather challenging

Summary

Introduction

Despite the benefits that educational innovations may entail, their adoption in the classroom is known to be challenging, as this requires teachers to embrace new teaching and learning practices (Webb and Cox 2004). The use of digital co-creation platforms to develop materials is widespread in teacher education (e.g., Vuorikari et al 2011) These communities are characterized by the fact that individual learning (e.g., about IBL pedagogy) is embedded within collective knowledge advancement that is driven by a shared commitment to the further development of the domain (Wenger 1998). As professionals get access to, make sense of, adapt, and internalize this knowledge that has been developed in the community, they contribute at the same time to building the collective knowledge base These online communities have often been analyzed under the framework of knowledge-building communities (Pata et al 2016; Teo et al 2017), or online knowledge communities (Jeong et al 2017). While this knowledge-oriented perspective has traditionally been important in the CSCL community (e.g. Suthers 2006; Jones et al 2006; Fischer et al 2007), it has been targeted by few empirical studies, especially in large-scale environments (Jeong et al 2014; Wise and Schwarz 2017; Rosé et al 2020)

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Discussion

Conclusion