Sammendrag
In educational policy, the importance of societal challenges that require interdisciplinary approaches in the classroom is emphasized. We provide insights from a co-design project where teachers and researchers explored emerging learning designs supported by immersive technologies. Teachers face considerable practical pedagogical uncertainties in how to design for cross-disciplinary learning, but teacher-researcher collaboration could provide powerful contexts for developing educational practices (Goldman, Hmelo-Silver & Kyza 2022). We are particularly interested in examining the role of prototypes in co-design processes and their functions as shared objects for developing pedagogy. We take a sociocultural approach, focusing on prototypes as objects of activity and mediational means for developing pedagogy (Säljö, 2010). In co-design work prototypes become means for engaging with and understanding the world, and they are emergent and entangled with the everyday life of the classroom. According to Pink, et al. (2022) prototypes are situated and contextualized by their creation and use and they are inserted into activities that are already in motion. They invite exploration, experimentation and evaluation in and through practice. We have been inspired by design ethnography and have anchored emerging design suggestions in practitioners’ local concerns (Pink, et al. 2022). Traces of the co-design process were analyzed across the datacorpus collected throughout our 15-month project. Data consisted of videorecords, pictures, documents and informal interviews. Three interdisciplinary prototypes of learning activities were developed to be framed around different approaches to ‘the body’ as a conceptual learning goal in relation societal challenges related to health and wellbeing. Through detailed analysis of prototyping, we found that they became useful for exploring a complex problem without a clear solution. Prototyping became a way of understanding the problem, conceptualizing it and for introducing technologies and practices that might provide solutions. Prototypes became a way of framing the emerging learning design, so that it could be talked into being and fitted to local contexts. Thus, prototyping became a continuous process of developing and trying new pedagogical ideas and concepts. Prototypes also have an existence after the project finished, morphing into new ideas and following new pathways through the actions of the participants. Thus, prototyping contributed to opening new futures rather than offering simple solutions. There is a long tradition for democratic and participatory approaches to developing pedagogy in the Nordic countries emphasizing the autonomy of teachers as participants in co-design of learning and teaching. This research contrasts with more technocratic approaches to making change in schools, by focusing on how prototypes become emergent tools for exploring and testing new concepts for interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
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