Situated learning plays a key role in internships and other practice-based learning settings in teacher education. The dominant assumption for a long time has been that the development of teaching competency is advanced most through practical teaching experience and post-lesson conferences between mentor and student teachers. It is through the reflection of teaching and classroom processes that student teachers are believed to develop their professional knowledge. The assistance of such reflection draws on mentor teachers’ teaching expertise. Mentor teachers, however, rarely explicate practical and theory-based knowledge underlying their practice and student teachers are not inclined to search for their mentor teacher’s underlying knowledge. As a consequence, the knowledge underlying effective teaching often remains implicit. The symposium brings together three novel approaches to assist teacher learning, which aim to make knowledge of teaching explicit. To bridge the gap between mentor and student teachers’ instructional concepts, the method of videobased tagging as a pre-requisite to initiate and structure professional dialogue is suggested and researched by van den Bogert, Crasborn, Bruggen and Eindhoven in The Netherlands. The second study by Staub, Waldis, Schatzmann and Futter investigates effects of an intervention with mentor teachers in Switzerland, suggesting the enactment of pre-lesson conferences and/or the use of a core concepts for lesson planning and reflection. A third study involving Germany and Switzerland by Kreis, Schnebel, Wyss, Wagner and Deiringer researches student teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and experiences related to collaborative lesson planning with peers. The shared assumption is that all three approaches enhance explicit communication on teaching and encourage professional dialogues that contribute to teacher learning in significant ways. Eliciting mentor and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge using teacher-tagged classroom situations Bogert van den, Crasborn, Bruggen van & Jochems) Objectives The present study has a twofold objective. First, elicitation of mentor and pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of videotaped classroom situations to clarify similarities and differences between practical knowledge of experienced and novice teachers. Second, exploration of ‘collaborative tagging’ as a new method to access mentors and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. Theoretical framework Teachers’ practical knowledge underlies overt teaching behavior, and is personal, unique, often tacit, and intertwined with teaching actions (Meijer, Verloop, & Beijaard, 2002). The ability to notice and interpret what is happening in a classroom is a basic aspect of teachers’ practical knowledge (Goodwin, 1994). Experienced teachers are more proficient in this essential perceptional process than novice teachers (Berliner, 2001; Sabers, Cushing, & Berliner, 1991). Consequently, proficient teachers may facilitate the professional development of novices. However, mentor teachers rarely explicate practical knowledge underlying their teaching practice (Edwards & Protheroe, 2004), and most pre-service teachers are not inclined to search for their mentor teacher’s practical knowledge (Penny, Harley, & Jessop, 1996). Hence, in this study we explored ‘collaborative tagging’ (Mika, 2005): a method where many people independently attach keywords called tags to e.g. videos, for categorization and fast future retrieval. Collaborative tagging has gained popularity since 2004 (Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005), indicating the willingness and ease with which this activity is undertaken. In other studies (Cattuto, Benz, Hotho, & Stumme, 2008; Mika, 2005) network analysis of the co-occurrence of tags revealed the semantic relationships between the tags; a bottom-up taxonomy, or a so called folksonomy (Vander Wal, 2004). In this study, collaborative tagging was applied to explore the structure of teachers’ knowledge and compare conscious aspects of mentor and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. The main research questions were: • Which concepts do mentor- and pre-service teachers use to tag videotaped classroom situations? • To what extent do the generated tags and the relations between them differ between mentor- and pre-service teachers? • To what extent is collaborative tagging is helpful in gaining access to conscious aspects of mentors and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge? Method Participants were 100 mentor-teachers and 100 pre-service teachers. The participants each ‘tagged” five video-fragments of different classroom situations. Data were analyzed with UCINET software as proposed by Mika (2005). Co-occurrences of tags were computed. Familiar measures of social network analysis (e.g. clustering coefficients, and (local) betweenness centrality) were used to describe each folksonomy, and to compare pre-service and mentor teachers’ networks of tags. Results and significance The study established that tagging is a promising new method to elicit teachers’ practical knowledge. The resulting folksonomies clarified similarities and differences between mentors’ and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. Results indicate that experienced teachers use more detailed and specific tags than pre-service teachers. This method makes a significant contribution to the methodology of the study of teachers’ practical knowledge. Folksonomies not only elicit individual teachers’ practical knowledge but enable researchers to discern common element’s in teachers’ practical knowledge. Moreover, in teacher education, folksonomies are helpful to initiate and structure professional dialogue between pre-service and mentor teachers.
Exploring Practical Knowledge investigates professional practices from a hermeneutic perspective. The book presents, discusses and applies notions such as practical knowledge, practical wisdom, tacit knowledge, and normativity to the professional lifeworld. These contributions focus on both specific practices and more general questions concerning theories and investigations of practice. This volume comes as the result of a cooperation of three research centres: The two Centres for Practical Knowledge in Bodø, Norway and in Södertörn, Sweden, as well as the Research Group Value-Oriented Professionalisation at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It offers empirical studies of professionals as well as discussing the underlying theories, approaches and methods of exploring practical knowledge – including the limits to any articulation of these aspects of professional action. In contrast to the objectivist paradigm that otherwise dominates professional studies, each chapter presents central perspectives and possibilities drawing from humanistic and interdisciplinary research traditions. The book explores professions in a style accessible to scholars and practitioners alike. It is interesting for those studying practices within these professions and for vocational studies in education, social work, health care, police work, journalism, etc.
This study investigates subject teachers’ practical knowledge and teaching behaviour regarding integrated language teaching in the context of vocational education. The emphasis was on the nature of teachers’ subject-specific language awareness and how they enact this awareness in their teaching practice. For this purpose, teachers in vocational education were interviewed and observed while teaching. The results reveal that teachers differ in their subject-specific language awareness. Some teachers are unaware of the relation between language and learning, while others are aware of this relation and feel responsible towards their students’ language proficiency. Teachers who feel this responsibility stimulate students’ active language use and use more advanced interaction strategies to promote students’ higher cognitive thinking. The results of this study indicate that raising subject teachers’ language awareness needs to be part of activities for teacher professional development.
LINK
Digital transformation has been recognized for its potential to contribute to sustainability goals. It requires companies to develop their Data Analytic Capability (DAC), defined as their ability to collect, manage and analyze data effectively. Despite the governmental efforts to promote digitalization, there seems to be a knowledge gap on how to proceed, with 37% of Dutch SMEs reporting a lack of knowledge, and 33% reporting a lack of support in developing DAC. Participants in the interviews that we organized preparing this proposal indicated a need for guidance on how to develop DAC within their organization given their unique context (e.g. age and experience of the workforce, presence of legacy systems, high daily workload, lack of knowledge of digitalization). While a lot of attention has been given to the technological aspects of DAC, the people, process, and organizational culture aspects are as important, requiring a comprehensive approach and thus a bundling of knowledge from different expertise. Therefore, the objective of this KIEM proposal is to identify organizational enablers and inhibitors of DAC through a series of interviews and case studies, and use these to formulate a preliminary roadmap to DAC. From a structure perspective, the objective of the KIEM proposal will be to explore and solidify the partnership between Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas), Avans University of Applied Sciences (Avans), Logistics Community Brabant (LCB), van Berkel Logistics BV, Smink Group BV, and iValueImprovement BV. This partnership will be used to develop the preliminary roadmap and pre-test it using action methodology. The action research protocol and preliminary roadmap thereby developed in this KIEM project will form the basis for a subsequent RAAK proposal.
In the last decade, the automotive industry has seen significant advancements in technology (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles) that presents the opportunity to improve traffic safety, efficiency, and comfort. However, the lack of drivers’ knowledge (such as risks, benefits, capabilities, limitations, and components) and confusion (i.e., multiple systems that have similar but not identical functions with different names) concerning the vehicle technology still prevails and thus, limiting the safety potential. The usual sources (such as the owner’s manual, instructions from a sales representative, online forums, and post-purchase training) do not provide adequate and sustainable knowledge to drivers concerning ADAS. Additionally, existing driving training and examinations focus mainly on unassisted driving and are practically unchanged for 30 years. Therefore, where and how drivers should obtain the necessary skills and knowledge for safely and effectively using ADAS? The proposed KIEM project AMIGO aims to create a training framework for learner drivers by combining classroom, online/virtual, and on-the-road training modules for imparting adequate knowledge and skills (such as risk assessment, handling in safety-critical and take-over transitions, and self-evaluation). AMIGO will also develop an assessment procedure to evaluate the impact of ADAS training on drivers’ skills and knowledge by defining key performance indicators (KPIs) using in-vehicle data, eye-tracking data, and subjective measures. For practical reasons, AMIGO will focus on either lane-keeping assistance (LKA) or adaptive cruise control (ACC) for framework development and testing, depending on the system availability. The insights obtained from this project will serve as a foundation for a subsequent research project, which will expand the AMIGO framework to other ADAS systems (e.g., mandatory ADAS systems in new cars from 2020 onwards) and specific driver target groups, such as the elderly and novice.
The HAS professorship Future Food Systems is performing applied research with students and external partners to transform our food system towards a more sustainable state. In this research it is not only a question of what is needed to achieve this, but also how and with whom. The governance of our food system needs rethinking to get the transformative momentum going in a democratic and constructive manner. Building on the professorship’s research agenda and involvement in the transdisciplinary NWA research project, the postdoc will explore collective ownership and inclusive participation as two key governance concepts for food system transformation. This will be done in a participatory manner, by learning from and with innovative bottom-up initiatives and practitioners from the field. By doing so, the postdoc will gain valuable practical insights that can aid to new approaches and (policy) interventions which foster a sustainable and just food system in the Netherlands and beyond. A strong connection between research and education is created via the active research involvement of students from different study programs, supervised by the postdoc (Dr. B. van Helvoirt). The acquired knowledge is embedded in education by the postdoc by incorporating it into HAS study program curricula and courses. In addition, it will contribute to the further professional development of qualitative research skills among HAS students and staff. Through scientific, policy and popular publications, participation in (inter)national conferences and meetings with experts and practitioners, the exposure and network of the postdoc and HAS in the field of food systems and governance will be expanded. This will allow for the setting up of a continuous research effort on this topic within the professorship via follow-up research with knowledge institutes, civic society groups and partners from the professional field.
