K-ULF : Creating Research Synergy in the Interface Between School and the Academy

The K-ULF project is part of a Swedish government initiative, to develop and evaluate sustainable collaboration models for empirical participatory research. The primary aim is to strengthen the research base for educational practice in schools through integrating the teaching profession and its development with university research and teacher education. Participatory research and co-design of teaching and learning studies is seen as a way to achieve the aim of strengthening the scientific ground and proven experience in education on a national level. Within the context of this initiative K-ULF places particular emphasis on egalitarianism in the context of schools and education. The project explores the role of practical work (laboratories and experimental curricula) on digital competencies and language development in STEM education. Studies conducted following the K-ULF model are a collaborative venture gathering teachers, teacher students, teacher educators and educational researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and three municipalities Haninge, Lidingö and Stockholm, in Sweden. The K-ULF project is tightly integrated with KTH’s teacher education programs, involving students in their teaching rounds and their master thesis work. During the school visits they collect observational data documenting classroom practice and student learning behaviors. Master degree students thesis work is conducted in collaboration with mentors at schools in the end of the degree. K-ULF integrates classroom-based research and innovation with teaching degrees using a participatory Scholarship of Teaching and Learning model. This provides schools with direct participation in research closely connected to educational practices, helping to build a culture of research driven change in school teaching as well as driving research relevant to teachers in a mutual exchange between academia and school. This need of participatory research has recently been emphasized in two large scale Swedish Government reports. This presentation provides an overview of K-ULF as well as an illustrative example from one of the K-ULF pilot schools, Fredrika Bremergymnasiet in Haninge. The context for the study is the technology program, a prerequisite upper secondary school program preparing pupils to study engineering at university. The result from the case study is a new course design in which a teacher student specialized in programming and an experienced teacher collaboratively developed a curriculum module for product development. The new approach combines class content by embedding programming into a pre-existing curriculum module of mechanical and hardware. The illustrative example above is one of several cases in which the K-ULF model contributes to strengthening the interface between school and academy. QC 20210526K-UL