Designing groupware for collaborative lesson planning for basic education teachers

Abstract

Collaborative lesson planning among basic education (K-12) teachers encourages experience and educational resource sharing. Those practices are distributed in time and space and vary as professionals evolve their experiences. Teachers creatively improvise the functions of mundane and digital artifacts to accomplish circumstantial objectives that emerge in collaborative professional practice. In this thesis, we use a digital ethnography approach to deeply understand the social experience of collaborative lesson planning and build knowledge about these phenomena. We adopt the anthropological notions of improvisation and contingency to understand how creatively basic education teachers collaborate while preparing classes. We conducted sequences of unstructured interviews in the workplace (schools and homes) and virtually reenacted observations. All collected data were analyzed to evidence the situated meanings of materials, relationships, and circumstances of these idiosyncratic procedures among professionals. The main results evidence some improvisations and contingencies in sharing experiences and how artifacts directly structure practices and experiences, leading to frustration, dissatisfaction, and, consequently, helplessness. We present specific recommendations for the design of teachers' collaborative lesson planning support systems. Thus, we performed a situated participatory design that allowed teachers to visualize themselves in possible future scenarios, using groupware to support their collaborative classroom preparation practices. The results indicate that carrying out collaborative lesson planning activities in a class planning groupware designed from a participatory design with elementary school teachers is a successful approach, as it allows the design of significant artificial artifacts for teachers and promotes well-being related to the domains of affect, community, and work.