Two aspects are emphasized by these students: the physicality or practicality of the
case and the openness for interpretation. This indicates that the video case as
stimulus 2 contributed to the variety of trajectories for knowledge integration found
in the students’exam papers and thus played a central role in the way the exam
design presented a teaching object that was both open and directional in terms of
stimulating the development of a certain variety of learning objects. Through the
variety of trajectories the teaching design was transformed in ways that were
possibly intended but not foreseen in detail by the designers of the exam. This
means that the student teachers’object constructions through transformative agency
added new aspects of insight to the intended object of the exam design. In the
interplay between the various stimuli of the digital exam we thus see transformative
agency in terms of an interpretive space that opens towards practical dimensions as
well as a variety of trajectories. This space could easily remain black-boxed without
a scientific examination that identify and unpack the processes within.
49.6 Case 2: Introducing R&D
The second case focuses on the increasingly required research orientation in teacher
education. In this case, it pertains to integration of systematic observation and
analysis of practice in a campus course focusing on discipline specific knowledge.
While case 1 showed a situation where the teaching design and learning design are
separated in time, case 2 shows how designs for teaching and learning may interact
closely over time.
Organized as a part of a teacher education course on Norwegian at the Arctic
University of Norway in Tromsø(UiT) the project,‘Introduction to R&D’, gave
student teachers in theirfirst and second year a basic experience in the use of
research procedures. In the initial phase of the introduction the students were
presented with guidelines for observation and interview, which served as stimulus 1
as they had to acknowledge what such approaches entailed or demanded. Based on
templates from the course literature, the guidelines were refined in cooperation
between students and university teachers to be applied by the students in thefield
work during the internship.
During periods of internship practice the students observed and interviewed their
supervisors, generating data which served as a stimulus 2. While the observations
focused on aspects of the supervisors’classroom conversation issues such as topics
suitable for discussion, types of questions used and on who were talking, the
interviews emphasized the goals for the conversation and the criteria used for
evaluating the conversation.
After the internship, the data were analyzed during a two-week intensive work
period. Through the work, the students developed skills in interpreting and sys-
tematizing data by developing categories and reducing the information into a
particular format. The analysis took place through explorative plenary conversa-
tions and several stages of group work where the students worked closely together
734 J.M. Vestøl and A. Lund