Hearing each other’s voices

In this innovative approach to professional learning, we will provide opportunities for researchers and practitioners (STEM coaches) to identify how research might address locally relevant problems and provide new perspectives for all participants on translation of research to practice and practice to research. These two communities of practitioners and researchers are often disconnected and this approach will help bring new ideas to both as we provide opportunities for them to hear each other's voices and then work towards a new shared approach. Researchers have the benefit of a bird’s-eye view of the field, and practitioners have the benefit of fully seeing real-world learning  contexts, thus making these exchanges mutually beneficial. The sustained community approach will provide a foundation that will enable the building of trusting relationships. Taking a sociocultural perspective, specifically looking through a cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) lens, the project will have two phases that consider the material and social aspects of learning. The third-generation CHAT analytic framework was designed to examine two interacting activity systems as the unit of analysis, which will allow us to study the complexities from multiple perspectives as we work with the two communities of researchers and practitioners, including finding tensions and contradictions that can be sources for innovation and lead to new activities and outcomes.