Teaching Resources in Early School Grades: A Comparative Approach to the Teacher's Interpretative Space in Three Subject Areas
Ligozat, Florence ; Leutenegger, Francia
In: Interchange, 2015, vol. 46, no. 4, p. 345-367
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- As a research field for studying the conditions of knowledge diffusion in teaching and learning, French-speaking Didactiques strongly rely upon the concept of knowledge transposition for characterizing the relationships between the knowledge built and used in "out of school” activities, the knowledge to be taught in the curriculum texts, and the knowledge effectively taught in the classroom. This paper explores the knowledge content and the learning epistemologies resulting from the transposition process by comparing teaching resources provided for the early grades (age 5-6) of primary school classrooms in western (French-speaking) Switzerland. We examined teaching resources from three subject areas: French language, mathematics, and science. The purposes of this study were two-fold: (i) to identify the early formation of subject areas in activities done with young students; and (ii) to uncover the implicit learning theories underpinning the patterns of teacher-student actions, according to the resources' designers. We found that a comparative approach to analysing teaching resources from different subject areas enabled us to trace the continuities and discontinuities in the teacher's interpretative space, defined by the textual description of the curriculum.