Education Commons^™

Smooth Sailing Through Stormy Seas? High School Social Studies Teachers Navigating Their Informal Professional Learning, Emma Sowards Thacker

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

The present study used Nardi and O’Day’s (1999) information ecology theory, along with activity theory (Wertsch, 1998), social learning theory (Wenger, 1998), and situated learning theory (Lave, 2009; Lave & Wenger, 1991) to examine the informal professional learning of a high school social studies department. Existing literature is just beginning to attend to the potential of informal professional learning, so this exploratory study used a single-case study of a high school social studies department made up of 12 teachers. Data included observations of scheduled and spontaneous collaborative learning activities, department meetings, and in-service meetings; semi-structured interviews; and relevant documents to …