Personal learning and development in diverse classrooms

Research into personal learning and development through educational processes in increasingly diverse classroom communities has become particularly relevant in the Austrian education system in light of social diversity.The current education reform pilot "New Secondary School" (Neue Mittelschule, "NMS") is a response to the issue of social discrimination as well as the negative impacts of streaming lower secondary students at the age of 10, most predominantly the restriction of access to higher education. The "NMS" reform project suspends selection and external differentiation in the last year of elementary school (grade 4) and is focused on the development of a school for all 10 to 14 year olds at the middle school level. The explicit goal is to raise academic achievement to ensure access to higher education for a greater number of students. The suspension of external differentiation and streaming in the current system requires the development of achievement-oriented instructional development through internal differentiation focused on achievement of national curricular goals. The research focus on personal learning and development through educational processes in diverse classroom communities takes this system intervention with its strong education policy signal as an opportunity to study the opportunities and limitations of this radical system change which moves from external to internal differentiation. The project objectives include: developing and applying a model with international relevance for revealing universal learning phenomena in specific education contexts, collecting a rich body of data for research into learning and personal development in and through educational processes, extrapolating, analyzing and hermeneutically interpreting the learning phenomena in the body of data, gaining universally relevant understandings of the personal learning processes of individual learners in a country-specific context, identifying common denominators of effective instructional modes which foster learning, with specific consideration of the diverse learning community context, contributing to current understandings regarding personalized learning and teaching in diverse learning communities in the international education research community and formulating implications for teacher education and on-going professional development for teachers. The empirical approach of the research project is intended to place research as close as possible to the actors in the research field (schools and classrooms), with a focus on individual learners as the addressees of the school reform. A team of researchers will study the personal learning and development of two learners at 24 NMS sites, resulting in 24 case studies involving 48 learners representing a broad spectrum of academic achievement . The schools and teachers participate voluntarily and teachers select the learners to be studied. The personal learning and development of the two learners will be studied over a period of the 2009-2010 school year (t1: mid of October 2009, t2: mid of January, t3: end of May), with data collection taking place during two-day site visits in October, January and May. Data collection will take place through a mix of methodology forming the research design model, including observation; interviews with learners, teachers, administrators and parents; and guided discussions with focus groups of five learners in the same classroom community as the two learners. Document analysis of samples of learning products selected by the two learners is also included. Hermeneutic phenomenology will be integrated in data collection as well as in the analysis to fully grasp the essence of day-to-day lived experiences of learners at each research site. Experiential anecdotes revealing day-to-day school life and educational processes will also be collected and thematically analyzed in the research team. The case studies will then be meta-analyzed through cross-casing.

The research project has succeeded in questioning underlying assumptions concerning learning at school, for instance, that learning is the direct result of teaching. Major findings of the project work, however, call for a reappraisal of the relation between teaching and learning. Teaching needs to be understood as a responsive, interdependent and relational encounter that is mindful of learning as well as constituted by the experiences both teachers and students make. The phenomenological orientation of the project provides rare insights into the hidden space between teaching and learning and reveals discrepancies between what teachers think that occurs and what students experience. What happens lernseits of teaching, in the space between the instruction of teachers and the learning of students, seems like a black box inaccessible to research approaches focusing on results and seeking causalities. This research into learning as experience attempts to bridge research gaps resulting from predominantly result-oriented perspectives in currently dominating educational research to the learning experience itself, since learning in statu nascendi is rarely considered. First insights from studies on various phenomena of learning show that experiences of ascriptions have a huge impact in that they shape student and teacher perceptions of capability; ascribing characteristics to students and their learning is unavoidable in daily practice but needs a high sensitivity and reflexivity by both the individual teacher and the institution so as not to develop into labeling and stigmatizing. Insights into the experiences of silence and being silenced at school call for more attention to the unspoken and not verbally articulated. Further insights reveal that temporal, spatial and relational aspects play a substantial role if schooling is understood as a responsive encounter between teaching and learning. Moreover, the phenomenological studies so far have shown that corporeal articulations of learning as experience such as blushing, glowing, frowning, tone, posture and gesture point to high potential if teaching is proactively mindful of learning and responsive. The insights into learning processes in diverse classroom communities gained from this project have led to changing perspectives in teacher education, which can be characterized by a move from the teacher perspective (delivering information) towards the learner perspective (enabling learning processes). The successful integration of phenomenological vignette research in teacher education but also in many regional and national symposia and workshops related to the reform pilot across Austria, has reached teacher leaders and school principals at nearly 700 pilot schools as well as policy makers and administrators at the Austrian Ministry of Education. This newly developed research approach now plays a key role not only in reform-oriented qualification programs for practitioners and teacher leaders as well as contribute to a new area of teacher education and learning research.