Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Classroom: Daily Learners as a Teacher Inquiry Model

• In Event: Transformative Practices in Teacher Education: Lessons from the U.S. and China

Abstract

Traditionally, teacher professional development (TPD) has been seen as translating theoretical knowledge into practice, positioning teachers as passive consumers. However, self-reflection and peer dialogues are crucial for their professional growth (Gu, 2018), and UNESCO also argues that teachers are reflective practitioners and knowledge producers (UNESCO, 2021), with “practical knowledge” (Elbaz, 1983) gaining recognition since the 1980s (Chen & Wei, 2025). TPD is now understood as an active process of knowledge inquiry and creation.

Daily Learners is a collection of reflective journals by 12 teachers from Jiangsu Province, China. Under the leadership of ZHANG Jurong, a master teacher in the region, they engaged in a bottom-up daily reflective writing initiative in the last 3 years. The topics discussed in Daily Learners cover all aspects of school life. Curriculum and pedagogy are the initial and sustained focus, with 4,098 reflective journals from Feb 2022 to June 2025, totaling approximately one million words, producing abundance of practical knowledge and serving as a teacher inquiry model. This study focuses on the following questions: (1) What key local concepts emerge in Daily Learners? (2) How are these local concepts related? (3) What influences their practical knowledge? And (4) How does their practical knowledge interact with theoretical knowledge?

This study adopted two approaches. First, we conducted textometric analysis through Python, dividing the texts into five groups based on the timeline and calculated the frequency change over time. Second, we conducted abductive analysis (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) on these texts with a group of 12 researchers. On the one hand, we developed a set of etic codes based on Wang Cesan’s dialectical theory of curriculum and pedagogy (Wang, 2005), which emphasizes the unity, reliance and interaction of each dichotomy such as “teaching and learning”, “subject-based and active-based”, “knowledge and competency” and etc. On the other hand, each researcher engaged with one teacher’s writing in depth and carried out paragraph-by-paragraph inductive initial coding. We then compiled and compared the initial coding results to produce a set of inductive/emic focus codes that captures the key themes emerging from the texts. Finally, we coded the entire dataset with both sets of codes and interpreted the coding results alongside our textometric analysis.

The preliminary findings indicate that: (1) The key local concepts in Daily Learners, including “objective,” “assessment,” “knowledge,” “design,” “task,” “process,” “problem,” “activity,” and “competency,” emerged frequently, with shifting significance over time. (2) These concepts formed an “Alliance of teaching-learning-assessment,” which emphasizes structuring instructional activities and tasks based on learning objectives and disciplinary knowledge as well as conducting targeted assessments. (3) Curriculum reform policies, collective teacher wisdom, and scholarly insights shape their practical knowledge. (4) While aligning with Wang’s dialectical theory, stated as “addressing theoretical issues in each scenery of practice” in Daily Learners, they also advance practice-driven ideas like “teach each lesson with clarity.”

This study repositions teachers as the primary agents of professional development, highlighting the value of the practical knowledge they produce, with important implications for both teacher professional development and the production of educational theoretical knowledge.

Authors

• Jun Teng, Beijing Normal University

• Ruoshi Li, Beijing Normal University

• Jurong Zhang, National Compulsory Education Teaching Reform Pilot Zone Wujiang Office, Jiangsu Province, China

• Min Yu, Wayne State University

• Christopher B. Crowley, Wayne State University

• Xin Xiang, Harvard University

• Chenhui Gao, Beijing Normal University