Page 24 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 1
students (Vermetten, Vermunt, & Lodewijks, 2002). On the other hand, when these teaching and learning approaches are not compatible, frictions may occur. In some cases, these are constructive frictions, which “may be necessary to make students willing to change and to stimulate them to develop skills in the use of learning and thinking activities they are not inclined to use on their own” (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999, p. 270). and which “represent a challenge for students to increase their skill in a learning or thinking strategy” (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999, p. 270). A third possibility is that of destructive frictions, which can occur when discrepancies between students’ and teachers’ perceptions are too large. Destructive frictions may, for example, occur when students perceive the teaching and learning as irrelevant and experience the gap between their own perception and their teacher’s as unbridgeable (Hattie & Yates, 2014). As a result, destructive frictions “may cause a decrease in learning or thinking skills” (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999, p. 270). In other words, ignoring the student perspective in educational research could have a negative impact on the quality of learning. To summarise, based on the theories of Shulman (1986), Grossman (1990) and Grossman, Schoenfeld, and Lee (2005), the students’ perspective is regarded as indispensable in PCK research and will therefore take a prominent position in this thesis.
In this thesis, we operationalize the students’ perspective in several ways: (1) as co-constructors of knowledge with a unique perspective on EFL literature education (Chapter 3); (2) the students’ level of engagement (an external manifestation of motivation) (Chapter 5) and (3) how students view the importance of foreign language literature lessons (an internal manifestation of motivation) (Skinner, Kindermann, & Furrer, 2009; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) (Chapters 4 and 5).
1.5.2 Focus on teacher perspective
The teacher perspective is included in this thesis in two different ways: as a source of information regarding how the teacher approaches literature in their EFL lessons (Chapters 2 and 6) and as a co-constructor of knowledge regarding how they experienced working with a desired EFL literature teaching model (Chapter 6). Regarding the latter, one way to establish an active role for teachers in PCK research is via an intervention study that includes professional development opportunities for teachers. According to Desimone and Stukey (2014), professional development opportunities are sustainable when both the Theory of Change (does the new knowledge improve teacher knowledge and instruction?) and the Theory of instruction (does the new knowledge improve student learning?) work. When
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