The Ways to Create Problem Situations in Physics Teaching of High School

In middle school physics teaching, the design of appropriate problem situations is very important. It can stimulate students’ interest in the content of this lesson, enhance students’ motivation for learning, and promote the learning efficiency of students’ independent cooperative inquiry.

Being There No Matter What: Working in Publicly Provided Homecare Services

The aim of this article is to critically explore how formal and informal work practices interplay with gender in the shaping of homecare service’s work environments. An ethnomethodological view on doing gender is applied in combination with theories about challenges in relational work.The material is drawn from two projects represented by (i) a cooperative inquiry about Swedish homecare service’s work environments, with homecare service workers and first-line mangers (seven included in this article) and (ii) six semi-structured interviews with employees from a national work environment authority. The analytic procedure was qualitatively based using an abductive approach when looking for cohesive themes. Gendered organizational shortcomings that interplayed with the shaping of the work environments were lack of clear work descriptions, boundaries for work, resources for embodied work, and limited knowledge about risk assessment in relational work.

Our transformative journey to become action researchers

During my (Hafiz) childhood in Bangladesh, I experienced the negative impact of the educational system. My experiences initiated a process of conscientization leading to values-driven activism through the establishment of Education for Development and Sustainability (EDS), a child-friendly community of practice, with Trine and Alamin. In encounters with Erling and Sigrid, we became aware that our activities were in accordance with action research based on cooperative inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2008). From that point of departure, we developed our own collaborative living theory. In this paper, we explore the research question “How did we become action researchers and what is our driving force?” by using Stoller’s (1989) autobiographical narrative method to analyse selected, lived experiences. Sharing lived experiences and engaging in activism with each other and the EDS children became the base for our conscientization, radical empiricism and contemplating involvement in EDS. Value based activism can create empathic relations and emotions through shared engagement for social justice and the realization that we create a shared reality. Hence, conducting action research with children/youth is in our experience a key to sustainable development. However, to increase the transparency and validity of our research, we needed to explore how our experiences and actions have influenced our values, emotions and decisions to conduct research, our research topic and the research in itself. Therefore, we have engaged co-researchers and participants to critically question the research practice and made it open for discussion and comments in order to see alternative ways of interpreting situations and processes.

Dialogic Teaching during Cooperative Inquiry-Based Science: A Case Study of a Year 6 Classroom

Teachers play a critical role in promoting dialogic interaction in their students. The purpose of this case study was to investigate how one very effective teacher taught two, cooperative, inquiry-based science units to her Year 6 class. In particular, the case study focused on how she used different discourses to capture students’ curiosity in the inquiry-based tasks, provided hands-on activities to enable them to test out their hypotheses and develop explanations for what they found in order to help them become more scientifically literate and have a broader understanding of the role of science in the world in which they live. The results showed that the students engaged constructively with their peers on the inquiry group tasks; they used the correct scientific language to discuss phenomena, make claims, and compared findings. Furthermore, they became more adept at expressing their opinions and providing explanations and justifications for the ‘scientific’ positions they had adopted across the six inquiry-based science lessons; core cognitive practices that support learning. This case study highlights the importance of utilizing both authoritative and dialogic discourse to challenge and scaffold students’ thinking to support enhanced understandings and reasoned argumentation during inquiry-based science. This case study fills a gap in the literature on how teachers can utilize different communicative approaches during inquiry-based science units to promote student engagement and learning.

Feminist cooperative inquiry: Grassroots women define and deepen empowerment through dialogue

This paper is an account of feminist research influenced by Cooperative Inquiry (CI) described as Feminist Cooperative Inquiry. A team of grassroots women leaders-turned-co-researchers, from different marginalised social locations (on gender, caste, class, education, livelihood axes) in India, developed this methodology to collectively analyse their own empowering journeys to make meanings of empowerment. The diversity of co-researchers in this research led to making additions or deviations in the CI protocol. By bringing in nonliterate or low-literate women from marginalised groups as coresearchers, the research added political value by extending centre of collective knowledge building towards marginalised groups. The paper also discusses how the research processes further empowered the coresearchers for their own interpretations, abstractions and their selfdefined viewpoint in the domain of empowerment. Calling empowerment as primarily an ‘internal reflective process’ co-researchers defied oversimplified, quantifiable proxy indicators as any measure of empowerment.

The Experience of the Authentic Self: A Cooperative Inquiry

This article presents the process and findings of a cooperative inquiry exploring the experience of the authentic self—a prominent theoretical construct in humanistic psychology and diverse spiritual traditions. Despite theoretical prominence and emergent psychological research interest, there has been little qualitative research into the authentic self as it is experientially encountered and lived. The present study addresses this gap in the literature using an experiential and participatory research approach. Seven co-inquirers joined in nine cycles of action and reflection over the course of 6 months to inquire, “What is my (the) experience of my (the) authentic self?” In collaboration with the co-inquirers, the initiating coresearcher generated six themes using thematic analysis in response to this primary research question: (a) presence and flow, (b) somatic awareness and vitality, (c) expression of truth, (d) multidimensionality and integration, (e) values and impulses, and (f) dynamism and relationality. In addition, the transformative and practical outcomes of the inquiry are discussed. Finally, several implications of these outcomes and suggestions for future research are outlined.

Self-in-Field Action Research in Natural Spaces of Encounter: Inclusion, Learning, and Organizational Change

The goal of this paper is to examine the role of participatory action research (PAR) in improving relationships in “natural spaces of encounter” where members of conflicting groups meet and interact. It describes and analyzes a project, “the Academic Puzzle,” that fosters organization-wide change in relations between Jewish and Arab students at a College in Israel. The project consists of 16 programs, all initiatives by College faculty, administrators, or students. Many of these programs, though not all, use PAR methods such as cooperative inquiry, dialogue, action science, action evaluation, and photovoice. The paper focuses on four programs which were explicitly designed as PAR. Furthermore, it illustrates how the Puzzle project is guided by a “self-in-field” approach that helps link these individual initiatives into an “enclave” that offers an alternative to the dominant field in order to transform it.

The Smart Classroom as a Means to the Development of ESD Methodologies

Educational institutions are envisioned as principal agents for addressing the current sustainability challenge that society is facing. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is transformational and concerns learning content and outcomes, pedagogy and the learning environment in itself. ESD entails rethinking the learning environment (physical and virtual) in line with sustainable development, which implies classrooms’ transformation towards learner engagement, formative assessments and active methodologies. This paper responds to this need through exploring the relationship between Smart Classrooms and four widely used ESD methodologies (project or problem-based learning, case study, simulation and cooperative inquiry), identifying how the dimensions and categories of the characteristics of Smart Classrooms can contribute and lead to the implementation of ESD methodologies in real teaching practice in an effective way. The method used in this study consisted of a literature review of both theoretical frameworks separately, ESD and Smart Classrooms, and a subsequent expert analysis to identify the interrelation between both. The Smart Classroom shows a high level of adequacy for using problem and project-based learning, case study and cooperative inquiry methods because of its characteristics in terms of technology developments, environmental conditions and processes. Simulation is the ESD methodology with the lowest level of adequacy in a Smart Classroom, because it is primarily held online rather than through face-to-face teaching. Smart Education facilitates the putting in practice of ESD processes as it enables the creation of intelligent, sustainable, resource-efficient, personalised and adaptive learning environments. Further empirical research is needed to explore the influence that the Smart Classroom has in enabling ESD processes and practices, and to identify students’ and teachers’ needs at different education levels. Additionally, teacher training programmes focused on the correct use of Smart Classrooms and on the digital competence of teachers are critical to its successful implementation.