Kitson, Alison; (2020) Teachers as recontextualization agents: a study of expert teachers' knowledge and their role in the recontextualization process across different subjects. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the knowledge that shapes the practice of expert teachers in physics, geography and history. The principal intention of this research is to illuminate the impact that the different knowledge structures and aims of these subjects have on teachers’ decision making in their classrooms. I argue that far from being implementers of the curriculum in their classroom, the teachers in my study are actively engaged in recontextualising their discipline into school subjects, drawing on two levels of knowledge to do so. The first level consists of their knowledge of their subject, the students they teach and wider social and educational goals. These combine to shape the aims that underpin the second level of practical curricular and pedagogic knowledge. Together, these two levels of knowledge form the basis of the teachers’ planning and teaching decisions and are shaped by their subject in profound ways. Furthermore, I argue that the recontextualising process evident in the teachers’ lessons was also shaped by variations in the closeness of the relationship between subjects in schools and disciplines in universities. The evidence for these claims was generated primarily through interviews and detailed lesson observations of three expert classroom teachers. Whilst across the subjects there were similarities in their pedagogic approaches, the aims underpinning these approaches reflected differences across subjects in two principal ways. First, there was variation in the extent to which the teachers drew on a conceptual structure deriving from the discipline and sought to make its epistemology visible. Second, the way in which the students and wider social goals influenced teachers’ practice differed. Finally, as expert teachers in their subject, it was interesting to discern variation in how far they were able to make curricula in their classrooms that reflected Young and Muller’s (2010) ‘Future 3’ scenario.

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