How to compare practice architectures without losing analytical sensitivity?
Submitted by:
Christian Smidt Alenkjær
Abstract:
In my PhD Towards Inquiry-Based Literary History Teaching in Danish Upper Secondary Education I will explore a new way of understanding the subject knowledge of literary history teaching in L1. This new way combines inquiry-based literature teaching, the manuscripts of Hans Christian Andersen and their digital accessibility. The project is a qualitative and multiple case study. Using Design-Based Research (Hansen et al. 2019) as a method, a learning material based on inquiry-based literature teaching and the digitized manuscripts will be designed to bring this new kind of subject knowledge into play in the classroom. In two cases the learning material will be tested in classrooms. These two cases will be compared to two other cases where teaching will focus on the same Andersen works, but not use the developed learning material. Through a comparison between the cases the project will explore whether the learning material brought a new kind of subject knowledge into play. The project will use the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al. 2014) to see if the learning material transformed the practices architectures as intended and thereby made a new kind of subject knowledge possible.
The data gathering has shown that the practice architectures of each classroom practice of the four cases are radically different: They are made of a lot of different variables. This poses two questions for my analysis phase (my points of discussion): How to compare different practice architectures without losing analytical sensitivity? And what data to focus on (and what to leave out) in analysis without losing nuance?
Keywords: Design-Based research, the theory of practice architectures, case study analysis and comparison
References:
Hansen, T.I., Elf, N., Gissel, S.T., & Steffensen, T. (2019). Designing and testing a new concept for inquiry-based literature teaching: Design principles, development and adaptation of a large-scale intervention study in Denmark. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 19, 1-32.
Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer.