Teachers designing their lessons: the complex stage of selecting resources
Résumé
The number of available resources is increasing constantly. Teachers are both users and designers, and the activity of resource selection has become crucial. According to the documentational approach to didactics (Gueudet et al., 2012), we analyse teachers’ activity through their interactions with resources. This theoretical framework is based on an instrumental approach (Rabardel & Béguin, 2007) and on documentary engineering (Pédauque, 2006). We use the notions of documentation genesis and scheme to analyse how teachers develop their information literacy skills. The designing of learning resources is at the centre of documentation work. According to Vergnaud (2009), conceptualization comes from activity. For him, a scheme is an invariant organization of the activity undertaken to achieve a type of task. The aim of this contribution is to identify and characterize the scheme of selecting a resource, in the designing process.
This study is part of a French national programme research (ANR-ReVEA), in which researchers study teachers’ interactions with resources in different subjects: mathematics, physics-chemistry, technology and English. In this contribution, we present a case study of an English teacher. Our methodology is based on reflective investigation (Gueudet et al., 2012). After a first interview, the English teacher filmed herself as she was preparing a lesson plan on a new topic, and explained at the same time what she was doing. She did this again one year later for the same lesson.
According to our analysis, the scheme of selecting a resource is led by different types of knowledge (didactic, curricular, experience). The evaluation and selection processes also are closely linked with goal representation, information needs and evaluation. This is a significant part of the definition of documentation expertise.