3. Nico Stehr: Die Zerbrechlichkeit moderner Gesellschaften. Die Stagnation der Macht und die Chancen des Individuums

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

RELATIONS BETWEEN TEACHING AND RESEARCH IN PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND MATHEMATICS AT RESEARCH-INTENSIVE UNIVERSITIES

We examine the relationship between research and teaching practices as they are enacted by university professors in a research-intensive university. First we propose a theoretical model for the study of this relationship based on Chevallard’s anthropological theory. This model is used to design and analyze an interview study with physical geographers and mathematicians at the University of Copenhagen. We found significant differences in how the respondents from the two disciplines assessed the relationship between research and teaching. Above all, while geography research practices are often and smoothly integrated into geography teaching even at the undergraduate level, teaching in mathematics may at best be ‘similar’ to mathematical research practice, at least at the undergraduate level. Finally, we discuss the educational implications of these findings.     

Teachers’ professional growth through engagement with lesson study

Lesson study is highly regarded as a model for professional learning, yet remains under-theorised. This article examines the professional learning experiences of teachers and numeracy coaches from three schools in a local network of schools, participating in a lesson study project over two research cycles in 2012. It maps the interconnections between their experiences and their beliefs and practices, using Clarke and Hollingsworth’s (Teach Educ 18(8):947–967, 2002) Interconnected Model of Professional Growth. Analysis of interview data and video-recordings of planning meetings, research lessons, and post-lesson discussions reveals the development of teachers’ collaborative planning skills, increased attention to students’ mathematical thinking, use of orchestrated whole-class discussion based on anticipated student solutions and focused questioning, and the enhancement of collaborative practices for teacher inquiry. Our findings illuminate the interplay between the External Domain, the Personal Domain, the Domain of Practice, and the Domain of Consequence, in the teaching and learning change environment, and the mediating processes of enactment and reflection. Changes in the domains across the period of the lesson study provide evidence of teachers’ professional growth, with the iterative processes of enactment and reflection being critical in mediating this professional growth.     

Study and research courses as an epistemological model for didactics

The aim of this paper is explain how the notion of “study and research course”, a recent construct in the anthropological theory of didactics, provides a general tool to model mathematical knowledge from a didactical perspective. We do this from two points of view. First, the notion itself arose as a tool for didactic design, particularly in mathematics teaching involving modelling type subjects, and we introduce a new diagrammatic representation in order to present and analyse a selection of such designs. Secondly, we demonstrate how the same representational tool can be used to analyse other didactic processes as study and research courses. In both cases, our examination of cases reveals that designers and teachers are often more explicit about their intention to enable students to do “research” (e.g. exploring a challenging problem) than to enable students to engage in autonomous “study”; moreover, the role for students is mostly confined to search for answers to questions raised, essentially, by the teacher. These observations point to directions which deserve more attention in design research related to the notion of study and research course.