Paths of research-training “useful” to teachers Between the Education Benchmarks 2020 and evidence-based research perspectives

Abstract

Evidence-based research is hereby proposed as “functional” to teaching practice. Two inquiries within a cooperative framework (Perla, 2010) carried out with scientific subject secondary school teachers are here described. The investigation aims at highlighting implicit educational variables and improving professional teaching practice. Practical approaches combine ethnomethodology and phenomenology, thus enhancing teachers’ perspective. The first analysis, called Performascienza, stems from teachers’ scientific imagination and representation of scientists and their related activity (Morgese e Vinci, 2010); the second analysis underlines practical routines in scientific popularization (Vinci, 2011). The methodology used in both cases involves the analysis of
teaching practices through explicitation interviews (Vermersch, 1994) and video-research (Tochon, 2007). Data encoding was performed by using specific software, NVivo8. An ongoing project on teaching training aimed at analysing ordinary teaching practices through the so called reflexive triangulation (Perla, 2011) is also described. The results of this investigation show that a deeper partnership between School and University is needed: by fostering research and training practices, expertise in teaching can be enhanced.