Lesson study: can the talks be exploratory? - A case study.

Abstract

The paper presents some of the results I gathered while working towards the completion of my PhD thesis. I place myself in a historical-cultural perspective that considers language as the tool of tools for the development of thought. I sought to understand what and how a lesson study group interacted when preparing a geography lesson for pupils aged 8 to 12. Considering lesson study as a possible way to reduce the tensions between practitioners and researchers, the research questions focuses on the thematic contents elaborated during the process, as well as on how the claims “to truth” are discussed and how possible disagreements are resolved. The corpus of the research consists of the transcripts representing in total about 16 hours of videos. I used an inductive methodology based on Maulini (2013/1017) to identify the thematic contents and the discourse analysis to understand how interactions take place in a way to think pupils’ learning. The main results show a predominance of convivial or friendly talk to the detriment of an exploratory talk (Littelton & Mercer, 2013) that should foster professional development. This leads to reconsider the role of facilitators and the use of theoretical frames in the process.