Learning, Assessment, and Boundary-Crossing in Teacher Education (LAB-Ted): The Norwegian Case

• In Event: Change Laboratory Interventions as Collaborative Inquiry in Norwegian, Finnish, and U.S. Teacher Education/Leadership Programs

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes
The principal aim of the LAB-TEd research project is to promote and study the simultaneous development of both high quality professionally-oriented research in Norwegian teacher education programmes and teachers’ professional practice in partner schools. Recent reforms of teacher education in Norway have emphasized the development of methodological competence for student teachers. All students undertaking primary/lower secondary teacher education now follow a five-year Masters’ degree culminating in a ‘practice-based and professionally-oriented’ Masters’ thesis. Subsidiary aims in LAB-TEd is to develop new models for supervision and to understand the challenges in creating assessment criteria for Master’s level academic work in the teacher education context. The purpose of this article is to describe how contradictions perceived by teacher educators, teacher mentors, principals and student teachers can serve as a starting point for development and research.
2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The research takes a Developmental Work Research (DWR) approach – otherwise known as a Change Laboratory formative intervention (Engeström, Virkkunen, Helle, Pihlaja, & Poikela, 1996) - that promotes positive change in practices using a participatory, collaborative design developed in the frame of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engeström & Engeström, 1986).
3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Over a four-year period, Change Laboratories (CLs) in two regions of Norway will both stimulate and study the process of change in developing the professionally-oriented and practice-based teacher education programmes mandated by the Norwegian reforms by drawing together multiple stakeholders in a multi-site, multi-level collaboration between two universities’ faculty, their school partners, and student teachers.
4. Data sources, evidence, object, or materials
The teacher educators collect data, such as video, audio recordings and other data (including documents, observations, interviews with participants, written plans) from the various sites of practice (university classrooms, schools, etc.). Selections of this ‘mirror data’ are used in participatory data analysis workshops (the CLs) to help practitioners recognise and work on the contradictions and barriers to change in the emerging new forms of activity and to envision new ways forward. For this article the data is composed of the participants’ reflection notes on contradictions as perceived in the past and the here and now situation for future development.
5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/points of view
The intended result of the project initialised in June 2019, is to create a teacher education that is professionally-oriented and practice based and to create knowledge about the usefulness of CHAT in stimulating change and development both in teacher education and in schools.
6. Science or scholarly significance of the study or work
The project will have a potentially significant impact on both local, institutional, regional and national research and education cultures in teacher education and schools, and also have potentially high international impact for policy research and for professional practice development more widely at a time when the reform of teacher education and enhanced demands on the knowledge competence of both teachers and teacher educators are receiving greater attention in many countries around the world.

Word count: 497 words

Authors

• May-Britt Postholm, Norwegian University of Sceince and Technology

• Rachel Jakhelln, UiT The Arctic University of Norway;

• Viv Ellis, Monash University