HOW TO WORK WITH STUDENTS' INTERESTS: THE ARTICULATION OF DIFFERENT PERSONALISED LEARNING STRATEGIES IN THE JOINT ACTIVITY BETWEEN TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

Abstract:

Learning interests are a fundamental element to engage students in learning activities (Slot et al., 2020). Therefore, it is necessary not only to identify students' interests, but also to help them explore them, reflect on them, connect them with their learning experiences and construct new interests (Solari et al., 2022). From a sociocultural perspective, interests have been defined as a psychological state, which involves motivational, cognitive, and affective aspects, that makes a person become involved and committed to some type of content over time (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). For their part, DiGiacomo et al. (2018) point out that having an interest is not something static, but rather it is constructed and changes through the experiences that learners have in various contexts. Furthermore, external support is required for interests to evolve (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). Consequently, teachers' work is essential to help identify students' interests, value them and generate new ones (Coll, 2018). According to Solari et al. (2022), working with interests within the personalised learning framework means designing activities and situations that allow learners to be involved by listening to their voice and supporting them so that they become engaged and gradually acquire greater autonomy. However, there are few studies that delve into the relationship between working with students' interests and other personalised learning strategies to support their evolution (Zhang et al., 2022).

We understand personalised learning, from a constructivist and sociocultural perspective, as a set of strategies that recognize the learner's agency and control capacity over different aspects of their learning process (Bray & McClaskey, 2015; Coll, 2018). This approach involves taking into account the voice of learners in decision-making, their interests and learning objectives, establishing connections between learning experiences carried out in different contexts (Akkerman & Bakker, 2019; Membrive et al., 2022; Oller et al., 2021; Ralaja et al., 2016) and the design of experiential activities close to the social environment that respond to real-life phenomena and challenges, including educational agents, resources and tools that can support their learning (Erstad et al., 2013); Furthermore, it implies connecting the activities with the learner's personal interests and options where they can assume control in the planning of the process and the characteristics of the products, offering them a wide range of possibilities so that they get engaged and learn better (Engel & Membrive, 2018). The design of the activities also requires spaces and time for dialogue between teachers and students and the use of instruments that mediate and promote reflections (Chan & Lee, 2021; Engel et al., 2022) as the main personalization strategy to help students to make sense of their learning (Madrid & Oller, 2023). Along these lines, Coll and Onrubia (2001) propose discursive strategies that facilitate the exploration of students' previous experiences and the elaboration of a first shared framework, the attribution of a positive meaning to learning and the elaboration of more complex representations about the content of learning.

A case study is conducted within the framework of a broader project entitled “Personalise learning based on the students’ interests. Collaboration of the teaching team and involvement of the students” (funded by Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Spanish Government, reference: PID2020-116223RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), whose purpose is to explore, analyse, and systematise personalised learning practices that promote students' engagement in different cities of Spain. This study includes the analysis of interactivity (Coll et al., 2008) and the discursive strategies of the teachers (Coll & Onrubia, 2001) to work with students' interests during an 11-week social commitment project, in which 20 third-year high school students (9 men and 11 women), one teacher and three mentors from other educational levels participated. The students had to respond to the challenge of creating products (prototypes) to respond to the needs raised by other educational levels of the educational centre using the Design Thinking methodology that integrates 5 phases: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test.

The study has two objectives: (1) to identify the personalised learning strategies used in teaching and learning activities and analyse their connection with the work with the students' interests, and (2) to analyse the discursive teachers' strategies at the service of working with interests. To respond to the research objectives, the participant observation technique was used where narrative, video, audio, photographic records and documentary evidence were collected from all classroom sessions during the process of joint construction of knowledge and attribution of meaning. In data analysis three strategies were used: interactivity analysis (Coll et al., 2008), educational discourse analysis (Coll & Onrubia, 2001) and thematic content analysis (Willig, 2013). To analyse interactivity, the interactivity segments in the set of project sessions were identified in the video records. Next, we identified the fragments of the discourse in which personalisation strategies occurred. For the categorisation process we took as an initial reference the list of personalised learning strategies proposed by Coll (2018).

Findings show the articulation of students' interests with other personalised learning strategies – connection, reflection, decision-making, experiential-based activities – at different moments of the project within the framework of the joint activity between teachers and students. Furthermore, the predominance of a complex discursive pattern is identified that incorporates the use of different discursive strategies in the service of articulating the work with students' interests and other personalization strategies. These strategies are aimed at exploring and activating previous knowledge and learning experiences, at advancing in the construction of more complex meanings and at the positive attribution of meaning to learning by students.

The conclusions indicate that the combination between different personalised learning strategies depending on the specific phase of the project appears as the main didactic strategy to work with students' interests, and the use of discursive patterns that promote and foster the engagement of the students is essential. Recommendations are made so that teachers can promote students' interests from a personalised learning perspective.

Keywords: Interests, personalised learning, decision-making, reflexion, secondary education