Emergent Collectivity: teachers as interdependent e-designers of professional development in K-6 Science and Technology

Abstract

Communities (including online communities) appear to provide powerful contexts for the professional development of teachers. Yet, despite the apparent educational potency of groups, professional development research has almost exclusively focused on describing and explaining the learning of individuals. In a world where technology supports increasingly sophisticated collectivity within the workplace and beyond, there are compelling reasons for adopting a collective perspective on learning, for exploring the usefulness of new learning technologies in making such a perspective possible and for examining the worth of such an account. The authors take up the challenge of developing a preliminary position on group learning in this article. They describe and analyse aspects of the learning of a group of teachers in the first phase of a professional development project. This project, DESCANT – SciTech, is a large ARCfunded e-learning research and development collaboration between the University of Technology, Sydney and the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET). In so doing, they address the strategic challenge of how to gather data and report stories of group (not just individual) learning, and the conceptual one of how to explain and understand the growth of this professional group. In conclusion, they speculate as to the importance of this first step in developing a contemporary approach to professional (self-) renewal.