Conference Agenda

Teacher quality and quality teaching are crucial when we talk about quality matters in education. It has been exemplified by policy developments in many countries, including Australia and the US, through the adoption of standards-based reforms relating to teachers and teaching (Lewis et al., 2019). A variety of university-based teacher training and professional development initiatives are emerging worldwide in response to the policy vision. While the attempt at standardization can never be fully realized in practice, as they can never use the easy-to-measure characteristics to assess complex, ever-changing classrooms with unavoidable uncertainty (Biesta, 2014). This explains a turn toward practice-based teacher education (Zeichner, 2012) and a shift from passive and intermittent professional development to that which is “active, consistent, based on the teaching environment, supported by peers in a professional learning community” (Stewart, 2014, p. 28).

Educational Design Research (EDR) is a genre of research that fits the substantive aspects outlined above, for its being situated in real educational contexts, focusing on the design and testing of interventions, using mixed methods, involving multiple iterations, stemming from a partnership between researchers and practitioners, yielding design principles; and concerned with an impact on practice (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012). With these characteristics, EDR can involve teachers and researchers collaborating throughout the process of studying teaching and learning in a specific subject area, to improve both teaching practices and theoretical understandings through cycles of testing and refining (McKenney & Reeves, 2019). Accordingly, we can assume that EDR can be a form of teacher professional learning during this process (Juuti, et al., 2017). It has been proven in some studies (e.g., Dunn et al., 2019; Lim, 2022) but there is no paper that reviews the studies on this topic.

It is not easy to improve teacher quality and teaching quality. According to the review, using EDR as a viable alternative can change teachers and their practices over a long-term, deliberately designed process. As a counterbalance to the performance-based professional development in the past that is evidence-based, manageable, and sustainable, this research advocates more integrated, job-embedded professional learning, demonstrating “the power of protest” as seen in teacher education discourse. In this study, we suggest design heuristics or learning principles for EDR or other EDR-like professional learning initiatives that can be used by policymakers, teacher educators, and school leaders. A further contribution of this research is to examine the existing knowledge base of EDR and build up knowledge of EDR as a form of teacher professional learning. This can inform future research to systematically explore teachers’ learning in the context of EDR or to notice teachers' learning as a vital aspect alongside their EDR studies.

Modern curriculum making can be perceived as a social practice undertaken in different sites across the education system (Priestley et al., 2021). Research has shown that teachers are defined as key actors in education reform, and they are expected to participate in curriculum work and to act as agents of change (Priestley et al., 2012). Thus, participatory approaches to macro curriculum making and involvement of teachers in reform work is becoming increasingly common internationally (Almeida & Viana, 2023; Soini et al., 2021). Yet, a well-known issue in participatory approaches is that they can give the illusion of symmetrical relationships. The process can create the appearance of equal influence among the participating actors, when the reality is that government institutions have more power, which gives them more influence over the outcome (Vaillancourt, 2009). Thus, such processes can conceal hierarchies and power structures that are inherent in them. The current study focuses on a central part of macro curriculum making, namely government-appointed curriculum committees consisting of teachers and subject experts who work alongside government officials in the development of a new curriculum. The article zooms in on a recent curriculum making process in Norway. In 2020, Norway introduced a new national curriculum, called the Knowledge Promotion Reform 2020 (LK20), where co-construction and partnerships with the education sector were important policy elements of the development process. From the literature, we know that national curriculum development processes are highly governed and controlled by central authorities (Humes, 2022; Levin, 2008; Westbury et al., 2016), and teachers’ role in such processes is not always clear. We also know that even when teachers are involved in macro curriculum making, they do not necessarily have any significant influence over the outcome of the process (Finnanger & Prøitz, forthcoming; Theodorou et al., 2017). Thus, the aim of the study is to investigate how documents present the teachers’ mandate, and to explore how these findings resonate with the teachers’ understanding of the mandate and their perceived contribution to the final national curriculum. The research questions that have guided the investigation are:

How is teachers’ mandate as national curriculum makers described in documents? How does this resonate with teachers’ understanding of the mandate and their perception of contribution to the final national curriculum?

Theoretically, the study is guided by the understanding that curriculum making is a social practice. Modern curriculum theorists argue that curriculum making is a complex, interactive, non-linear, social practice that occurs and flows across various contexts (Alvunger et al., 2021; Priestley et al., 2021). It is a dynamic and transactional process of interpretation, mediation, negotiation, and translation, involving different actors, activities and sites across the education system (Alvunger et al., 2021). Central to this heuristic is that curriculum making happens in sites, and that it is the type of activity and not the involved actors, that determines the site. This way of conceptualizing curriculum making infers that actors can move between sites. The process is shaped by the beliefs, values, and professional knowledge of the involved actors, as well as by their room to manoeuvre and the interplay between actors, contested spaces, contextual factors, and power relations (Alvunger et al., 2021).

Have AI tools found their way into schools using the freely accessible ChatGPT tool as an example? How eagerly do students use the new tools for their school work? How uncertain are teachers about their role as initiators and facilitators of the learning process?

AI tools have not only existed since February 2023, when the ChatGPT tool was made available to the public. Zhang & Begum Aslang (2021) and Feng & Law (2021) summarized several years researching the use of AI applications in schools and universities and their implications for education. Zhang & Begum (2021) report having reviewed 40 empirical studies on AI in education published between 1993 and 2020. Feng & Law (2021) reviewed more than 1800 articles on artificial intelligence in education from 2010 and 2019.

However, since the release of the ChatGPT tool, the topic has reached a wider audience and gained a new emotional intensity. People of different professions, ages, and educational backgrounds have felt compelled to engage with it more intensively. Artificial intelligence has become part of our everyday lives. It has changed them, and it will most likely continue to change them. VanLehn (2011) was able to show that personalised, digital 1:1 support and fine-grained feedback lead to similar learning outcomes as human support. The change that has already begun has aroused emotions such as curiosity, enthusiasm for the new possibilities, but also fears about whether and how to keep up with the change. In many cases, schools have also responded with concerns about the role of the teacher and the learning effectiveness of school homework in the future. The uncertainty seems justified. After all, the ChatGPT chatbot is a technology that can process natural human language and generate a response, and it can be used for tasks such as content generation in both native and foreign languages, explanation, translation, and much more. Even if the tasks are not part of everyday school life, it is assumed here that the AI tools are used in a school context at home. This has an influence on the institutionalised educational processes, which are not independent of the processes that take place outside. The question of how their benefits affect learning outcomes remains under-researched (de Witt, 2023).

In this contribution I will first present the theoretical background. Then I will present the first results of the survey I conducted for my PhD thesis. The aim of the survey is to take a closer look at the use of ChatGPT among students.