ABSTRACT
We depict and discuss a key outcome of the first year of a large three-year Australian Research Council supported e-learning research and development project (DESCANT—SciTech: Designing E-learning Systems to Celebrate and Nurture Teaching in Science and Technology). This collaboration with the New South Wales Department of Education and Training (DET) tests an innovative strategy for seeding a future-oriented, sustainable and effective professional development system for elementary school Science and Technology teachers. Initially, a group of teachers is designing and prototyping an e-learning environment to address teachers’ professional development needs, as they see them, supported by their consultant, DET officers and University researchers. DESCANT culminates a long history of investigations of learning and teaching, exploring the educational potency of a generative theory of learning. Here, learning is conceived (after Edelman, 1992; Plotkin, 1994, 1997, 2002) as iterative cycles of generating ideas, testing them on their value and keeping those that survive the tests (Schaverien and Cosgrove, 1999, 2000). This view of learning plays out in DESCANT at many levels. Teachers play key roles as researchers and designers. Researchers use established anthropological and ethnographic approaches, notably research conversations, to construct a rich case study of an emergent strategy as it builds in scale.
