How do teachers learn? Cartographic Approaches on Teachers’ Corporeal, Ecological and Nomadic Learning

In the last years, the members of the research groups Esbrina and Elkarrikertuz, have developed several research projects that have placed especial emphasis in the contextual and experiential dimensions of learning. These projects made evident that personal and professional knowledge cannot be separated from the biographic, cultural, social, technological, and affective experiences of the learners. In this respect, learning is embodied in an ecological process. This environmental notion of learning led us to develop the research project: “How do Teachers Learn: Educational Implications and Challenges for Addressing Social Change – APREN-DO” (EDU2015-70912-C2-1-R).

In this project we invited teachers from infant, primary and secondary schools in Catalonia and Basque Country to get involved in workshops to generate visual cartographies of those scenarios, inside and outside school, where they learn. We also asked them to participate in conversations to think about what they value as source of knowledge and experience, to generate forms of understandings of their nomadic learning displacements, their tensions and personal and professional learning expectations.

Cartographies have been ‘useful’ for our research because were taken as a strategy to generate ‘knowledge’ and relate to the theory (concepts such as ‘becoming’, ‘nomadic learning’ ‘gestures’, ‘rhizomatic relations’, and so on).

At the end of this project, we would like to invite colleagues to reflect and share issues and questions emerging from this nomadic process of inquiry:

• How can we access ‘places’ beyond the pre- established frameworks for research on teachers’ learning?
• How to think on teachers’ learning beyond objectivity, modern onto-epistemologies, and representational logic in research?
• Which are the contributions of inventive methods to expanding and questioning the narrative of teachers’ biographical-learning trajectories?
• In which ways the cartographic process affects teachers’ learning gazes and researchers’ positionalities?
• How a nomadic approach could introduce disruptive ways of thinking about what research on teachers’ learning could be?
• How notions such as “becoming, displacement, strength, assemblage, entanglement, affects, gestures…” could expand the ways of narrating and help to raise new questions about teachers’ learning -and the very notion of ‘learning’ itself?
• Which are the potentialities of strategies coming from this nomadic approach of learning and researching to rethink teacher professional development?

More information and program