Experience as a contextual basis to connect professional concerns and conditions of practice. A case study of Teachers implementing a curricular reform in Italy

Abstract

In this chapter, teachers’ learning from experience is analysed by combining the situativity theory that considers human cognition as an interplay between an individual and the structure of an activity, and the microethnography approach that highlights the role of talk in interaction in supporting interpretative processes by professionals. Learning from experience is interpreted as an interactional process by which teachers reflect on the nature of their experiences and develop a new ‘perspectival understanding’ to recontextualise them into the evolving conditions of practice. Through reference to a case-study, the problematic relationships between teachers’ learning from experience and the conditions of practice are discussed