Abstracts - Earli

The Sparkling School: A secondary school community of learnersLisette van Rens, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NetherlandsJoop van der Schee, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NetherlandsJos Beishuizen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NetherlandsThe Sparkling School is a joint project of an urban secondary school and the Centre forEducational Training, Assessment and Research of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Together,students, their teachers, university students, researchers and teacher educators establish acommunity of learners in which (1) students are considered as serious partners in a process ofknowledge building, (2) students and teachers collaborate in order to answer questions accordingto the method of inquiry learning, (3)the research questions clarify big ideas in the domain ofresearch, (4) students are immersed in a culture of scientific research, in which they learn to workwith research methods, rules for collaboration and scientific communication, (5) students learn toreflect on methods and rules, on principles and schemas on the basis of concrete experience and onthe value of their work for science and society, and (6) students get access to resources andequipment for research. The research projects developed up until now have been closely monitoredwith various instruments: video recordings, interviews, document analysis, achievement tests andquestionnaires. Data will be reported on the extent to which a community of learners has beenestablished and on the effects on students’ understanding of research methods and appreciation ofscientific research. Embedding a research project in the ongoing curriculum appeared to be one ofthe predominant success factors.International partneships for knowledge building communities: An emerging model for teacherdevelopmentMireia Montane Tuca, Ministry of Education, Catalunya, SpainInternational cooperation is approached from an organizational perspective. As regards teacherdevelopment, four aspects of a partnership dynamics are emphasized: First, knowledge buildingcommunity as a shared vision; second, diversity of expertise, third, local/global participation, andlast, pluri-level innovation. The principles of Knowledge Forum are integrated in our research as anew generation cognitive-oriented technology and pedagogy. Diversity of expertise is linked to theengagement of several experts in the process of adoption, implementation and institutionalizationof the innovation. Local grounding communities between primary, secondary and adult schools,been supported by universities, and their participation in a worldwide network is also stressed. Thepluri-institutional cooperation is approached as a social innovation. A case study of aninternational partnership including universities, schools and governments between Catalunya andQuebec is briefly presented along this framework. Data has been gathered by local university andministry research teams using ethnographic methods, including interviews and participantobservation of online Knowledge Forum databases and video-recording. Researchers andpractitioners of different cultures converge to improve the classroom by transforming it into a localand international knowledge building community. Teacher expertise, technology experts,instruction and curriculum experts, cognitive science experts, evaluation experts, and pupils andstudents as experts create knowledge building communities, with parents support. And there maybe a student teacher presenting the knowledge building principles in the classroom, and theclassroom teacher coaches another classroom teacher, or a graduate student feeding back dataanalysis to a knowledge building community. Diversity of expertise is thought to be key to asuccessful knowledge building partnership. After a qualitative evaluation, results point to specificconditions for these four dynamics to be operative. The four dynamics identified and their– 622 –