R&D Unplugged #6 – discover our research

Join us for R&D Unplugged #6 with Ignacio Atal

Teachers’ collective intelligence, is it possible?

Teachers are in the front line to ensure high quality education for all. Improving teaching quality by giving teachers top-down recommendations on proven practices often doesn’t work because these practices might not fit with the challenges or practices teachers face in real life. In fact, teachers learn to teach primarily based on their own experiences and exchanges with peers. Such experiential knowledge is produced and shared daily by millions of teachers. Yet this experiential knowledge is often intuitive, not generalizable and localized. To what extent can this experiential knowledge become a trusted knowledge base for the teaching profession?

In 2019 we created the Profs-Chercheurs program (profschercheurs.org), a participatory research program to engage teachers in producing trustworthy, shareable and cumulative knowledge about their own educational practices. It aims at orchestrating the collective intelligence of teachers to help them find collective solutions to their shared challenges.

In this presentation, we will look back at the main lessons learned from our 5 years of experience, in particular the opportunities offered by collective intelligence and participatory research for building knowledge in education, but also the barriers and difficulties encountered in emulating such a dynamic in France

Register now

an event both onsite and online
no research background needed! 

More about the speaker

Ignacio Atal is an engineer from Ecole Polytechnique and holds a PhD in Public Health and Epidemiology from Université Paris Descartes. He initially worked in the field of medicine where he conducted mappings of clinical research to identify gaps in the global research agenda. He then moved to educational sciences at CRI (now the Learning Planet Institute) to develop participatory approaches to bridge the gap between research and practice in education.

R&D Unplugged is organized by the Research Unit Learning Transitions. For more details about the format of R&D Unplugged, along with information on past and upcoming events, please visit our website.