What is to be Learned? Teachers’ Collective Inquiry into the Object of Learning

ABSTRACT

Within the phenomenographic research tradition, the object of learning depicts the capability that is to be learned by the learner. It has been argued that the object of learning cannot be fully known in advance since what is to be learned depends on the learners as well as on the content taught. The object of learning and its nature needs to be explored. In this paper, we analyze how a group of teachers collaboratively investigated an object of learning when they planned, enacted, analysed, and revised a mathematical task. We describe distinctions made by the group in the inquiry into teaching and learning, and how delimitations and distinctions made transformed the teaching and meaning of the object of learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Object of learning
• learning objectives
• internal and external horizon
• division
• mathematics education

Acknowledgments

We especially thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments, which contributed to a stronger article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Angelika Kullberg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7698-4590

Notes on contributors

Angelika Kullberg is Senior Lecturer at the department of Pedagogical, curricular and professional studies at the University of Gothenburg. Her research is foremost focused on the teaching and learning of mathematics in classrooms.

Pernilla Mårtensson is Senior Lecturer at the School of Education and Communication, University of Jönköping. Her research interest is teachers’ professional knowledge in mathematics.

Ulla Runesson is Professor at School of Education and Communication, University of Jönköping, Sweden and visiting professor at Wits School of Education, University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Notes

¹By capability, we refer not to general capabilities, but instead content-specific skills or ways of knowing.

²For several reasons, the fourth lesson did not follow the intended plan and is therefore excluded in our analysis.

³The positioning system for numbers was handled in another part of the lesson and was not in the task.

⁴Division can be seen as “partitioning,” for example, 100÷50 as 100 divided in 50 piles, or as “measurement”, how many times does 50 go into 100 (cf., Greer, 1992).

⁵When the team explored the external horizon of the object of learning during phase 3, they realized that simpler items were needed to reduce the impact of the calculation aspect. This finding resulted in a change regarding the numbers in the task (Figure 4).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish National Research Council [grant number VR2009-4686].