Co-Creating Learning Designs in Professional Teacher Education: Knowledge Appropriation in the Teacher's Innovation Laboratory

Abstract

Adoption of technologies in secondary schools is still behind expectations. Investments are often made without a clear educational objective and teachers are not sufficiently involved in the process of creating new teaching and learning methods that would utilize this technology. We contribute to the emerging perspective of learning design by proposing a co-creation-based teacher development program that should lead to more effective pedagogical methods for technology-enhanced learning (TEL) and their adoption in the classroom. Using the Knowledge Appropriation Model, we first analyze social practices of how teachers and university researchers co-create materials and lesson plans for technology-enhanced math lessons in two cases involving N=42 teachers. Building on these results, we propose a professional teacher development program to institutionalize these practices and validate it in another group of N=21 teachers. Our results show that the program enhances knowledge creation, scaffolding and appropriation, and leads to higher expected adoption when meaningful learning designs for TEL are created in equal collaboration of experts from different disciplines. We discuss the necessity to perceive the technology as just one of the components of a fully developed pedagogical-didactical framework.

Classroom Innovation Becoming Sustainable: A Study of Technological Innovation Adoption by Estonian Primary School Teachers

“…These developments are observable as knowledge appropriation practices and constitute the prerequisites for successful innovation adoption and adaption. KAM presents three dynamic sets of social practices (Knowledge Maturation, Knowledge Scaffolding, and Knowledge Appropriation) that characterize knowledge management during innovation adoption [52]. Research suggests that different social practices play an important part in transforming knowledge between different levels of organization and beyond [53].…”

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“…Together the papers show the wide variation in contexts in which co-creation approaches can be used by the TEL community. The papers include both school [3,4] and university-based [5,6] contexts in which the students are the co-creators, as well as professional learning environments in which the teachers, developers or tool users are the co-creators [7,8,9,10,11]. The contexts are not limited to formal education settings, but also include settings in which non-formal or informal learning [11,12] is the focus.…”

“…The rationale given for adopting a co-creation approach is often the belief that such an approach will lead to a more relevant and directly applicable TEL tool or platform with a higher fit to practical requirements [3,6,7,8,10,11,12], but many of these special issue papers also highlight the expected impact of the co-creation on participants themselves in terms of increasing their TEL literacy and, hence, selfconfidence [8,9] leading to more positive views of TEL or STEM [4,9] and supporting knowledge exchange [7,12].…”

“…Several papers [7,9] clearly state how social knowledge creation theories (Knowledge Appropriation, Communities of Practice and Sensemaking & Meaning Making: [13,14,15]) underpin their approach. Of course, these two aspects (tool design and knowledge creation) are linked since it is at least partly the knowledge development in terms of the shared meaning as well as understanding that develop during co-creation activities that contribute to better tool design and is mirrored in it.…”

“…It also highlights the need for further work on scaling co-creation approaches, work that is addressed by at least three of the papers in this special issue. These papers look at using technology to help scale co-creation engagement [11] and embedding cocreation within formal education activities [9,12]. A method of scaling that is used in this special issue is that of a multi-layer approach.…”