Judith Barak

Understanding of energy in biology and vitalistic conceptions

The concept of energy is considered difficult to teach and some of its possible misconceptions have been addressed in the literature. There are grounds for assuming that this concept is particularly problematic in the study of biology owing to the difficulty in grasping that principles which govern the non‐living world are capable of explaining the mystery of life. The present study addressed the possible connection between misconceptions regarding energy in biological systems and a vitalistic notion of biology. Specifically, 76 high school seniors and 28 biology teachers were assessed with regard to: their conception of biological phenomena (scientific vs. vitalistic); their understanding of the concept of energy in a biological context; and the correlation between the two conceptions. The results point to a strong correspondence between the ability to understand energy in biological phenomena and adherence to scientifically oriented conceptions of biology. They suggest that the conception of energy infl...

‘Without stones there is no arch’: a study of professional development of teacher educators as a team

In this work we study the meaning of professional development as a participative process within a community of practice. In this collaborative narrative self‐study we look at the development of ourselves as a professional group working together in an intensive program. The study is based on personal career stories, each told by its author, but once told becoming a chapter in the group’s story, to be further analyzed and interpreted by its members. This process revealed four themes that contribute to professional learning experiences constructed within the context of being in the team: group diversity, interwoven work, the novice stance and collaborative research. In this paper we discuss our emerging understanding of the significance of the collaborative engagement of teacher educators for the generation of a theory of practice and suggest situating this understanding within a broader ecological perspective using the metaphor of the ‘edge’, a fertile ground for sustainable change and development.

Negotiating a Team Identity through Collaborative Self-Study.

This study presents our emerging understanding of the meaning of collaborative self-study as one of the mechanisms that facilitates effective, productive collaboration. Stemming from our experience of collaborative professional life over eight years, we explore the crisis we confronted as a professional learning community, the tensions underlying the crisis, paths to resolving our crisis, and our decision to look more closely at how collaborative communities of practice impact both group and individual identities. The study follows a change in our identity as a team from a culture of “doing” our practice into a culture of studying our practice – a culture of collaborative self-study.

Back to Schooling: Challenging Implicit Routines and Change.

Engestrom and others have suggested that major barriers towards school change are rooted in the hidden, implicit aspects of daily school life that are taken for granted. These constitute the school’s taken‐for‐granted routines, which mold teachers’ affordances and constraints within the school, without their awareness. The present paper provides insight into the processes that afford the exposure of taken‐for‐granted school behavior and the emergence of alternative pedagogical context. It portrays the nature of a participative edge community that serves as a fertile ground for the initiation of such processes, and analyzes the change in the tools—boundary objects—that were instrumental in the emergence of teachers’ professional development. This process of schooling conveys the intertwining nature of school change and professional development as complementary processes that form an inseparable duality.

Contextual Pedagogy: Teachers' journey beyond interdisciplinarity

The paper describes a collaborative reflective inquiry of teachers and researchers that was aimed at bridging the gap between the school-internal and school external cultures. It suggests that the inquiry into current social problems has the potential to bridge between the social-political zeitgeist and the schools, through the exposure of possible different conceptions of knowledge and different approaches to the nature of learning. The paper addresses some milestones along this process that led to the development of a formal model of contextual pedagogy. This pedagogy claims that content, didactics and world views, are all molded into the learning situation and concurrently emerge from it. The unique nature of this pedagogy is described by the different understanding of concepts that are associated with the process of learning and knowledge construction such as: initiation (locus of control), orientation of the process, sources of legitimate knowledge, scope and boundaries of the inquiry issues, responsibility as well as ambiguity and uncertainty, as intrinsic to the process and the nature of the emerging knowledge.

Conversations in a Collaborative Space: From stories to concepts to dimensions

This article is a re-analysis of three self-studies conducted by three sub-groups of the Active Collaborative Education (ACE) team and originally presented at a conference in 2008. Revisiting and retelling these stories for the purpose of this article highlighted some of the concepts that form the warp and the woof of our interwoven collaborative way of professional life. The reanalysis identified three concepts: territory, the expert as novice, and de-idealization. These concepts then led us to identify the three dimensions of territory, knowledge, and values. We propose that, beyond the local context of our self-studies, these dimensions can help characterize collaborative space and serve as lenses to help understand its complexity. In this article we present these dimensions and outline some key questions regarding collaborative teams of teacher educators.

Becoming learners/teachers in nomadic space

This paper suggests a conjunction between the learning space of educational edge community (EEC) and the Deleuzeguattarian thought regarding the nature of teachers’ becoming. It attends to the emerging subjectivities of teachers/learners within an EEC, a nomadic, open, and smooth space of learning. It is suggested that autonomous learning processes that are enabled in nomadic spaces provide the freedom that is essential for the immanent growth of complexity that leads to creative becomings.

Storying curriculum making in a collaborative research and teaching landscape

Purpose – This chapter examines the complexity and contextuality of storying curriculum making in a collaborative landscape of teaching and research, as it moves from telling stories of collaborative curriculum making toward exploring curriculum within a collaborative landscape. This work is based on our lived experience of 9 years of collaborating as a team of teacher educators. Methodology and Findings – Three stories are at the focus of our study – the unfolding story of the collaborative writing of this chapter and two stories that relate to our curriculum planning in the more traditional sense, illustrating almost opposing sides of a collaboration continuum: A story of creating and preserving contrasted with a story of creating and changing. Together, these examples present a picture of the way we experience the making of curriculum in a collaborative landscape: building and teaching a program of learning for our students in tandem with team learning of our own. Value of paper – The collaborative landscape revealed in this chapter, with its tensions and opportunities, serves as basis for discussing the issue of territory as an overarching concept for the redefinition of questions regarding ownership, authorship and identities. These issues become crucial in a collaborative situation, in which one has to compromise on definition of clear cut working space.

Post-qualification Master’s level studies in Israel teacher colleges: a transmissive or a transformative model of professional development?

ABSTRACT Post-qualification Master’s level programs in Israeli teacher education colleges were launched in 2004 under the governance of two nationwide policy bodies – the Council for Higher Education and the Ministry of Education – each holding different ideologies regarding the nature of these studies: one in accordance with a ‘transmissive’ and the other a ‘transformative’ model of professional development. In transmissive models, teachers are viewed as passive recipients, consumers of academic knowledge to be applied in practice, while in transformative ones, they act as self-inquirers, creating their own knowledge and acquiring professional autonomy. The dual subordination of the colleges of education to the two governing bodies raises the question which of these ideologies shaped the nature of the Master’s programs in teacher education. Respondents were 820 practicing teachers who had graduated in the years 2005–2015. The research focused on their motivations to study, their perceptions regarding the added value of the programs, and the effect these programs had on their actual professional development. Findings indicated that the dual subordination of teacher colleges to the two governing bodies, which have conflicting messages, interfered with full adaptation of the transformative model of professional development.

Paving a Professional Road

While the first year in ACE focuses on helping our students tell and read narrative texts of their stories from the field (see Chapter 1), during the second year, the students engage in teaching and studying this experience through narrative selfstudy, thus, embarking on the road of professional development.