As the 21st century unfolds, the world has become increasingly fast-paced, interconnected and unpredictable compared to previous generations (McChrystal, et al., 2015). As a result, education researchers and practitioners must be prepared for the challenge of helping students better apply their knowledge to respond to the complex and novel problems that they are increasingly likely to encounter on a regular basis – not only to make them employable in the rapidly-evolving global job market (World Economic Forum, 2016), but also for their ability to navigate their everyday lives and responsibilities (e.g., weighing ever-changing degrees of risk involving COVID-19 variants). But even as education policymakers have explicitly noted the need for students to develop such 21st century skills for the sake of both their individual well-being and the flourishing of human society as a whole (Michigan Department of Education, 2019), K-12 schools in the United States continue to implement curricula and standardized assessments that tend to reinforce maladaptive “habits of mind”, including an oversimplified understanding of “ill-structured” topics and a desire to identify “essential” information to apply across all situations even when such information does not exist (Spiro & DeSchryver, 2009). Beyond this, even though learning theories have been promoted within academia that are aimed at instilling a cognitive mindset that embraces complexity and the situationally adaptive assemblage of one’s knowledge – for instance, Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT; e.g., Spiro, et al., 1987) and corresponding forms of Web-based learning, such as LICRA (Learner-Initiated, Complex, Reciprocally Adaptive) Web searching (DeSchryver & Spiro, 2008) – difficulties involving translation of research into practice have frequently hindered efforts to integrate such cognitive frameworks within ecologically valid learning environments. Partly because of such issues of translation, to date, no curricular strategies have been formally developed by education researchers to adequately address the need to help students develop adaptive learning mindsets in a manner that embodies better understanding of how the thoughts of researchers/theorists and teachers/practitioners need to mutually move toward each other to address that need (i.e., the integrative “meeting of the minds” in the title). And on a broader scale, efforts have not yet been undertaken to formally plan or empirically test what might be entailed when trying to develop paradigms or frameworks aimed at forming a bidirectional translation process between researchers and teachers, in order to more meaningfully bring together learning theories designed to address changing times and teachers’ navigation of their pedagogical “realities” in relation to introducing students to such substantial change.As a preliminary step in trying to address these issues, this dissertation sought to begin exploring what a new theoretical paradigm of “translation” might entail, one that in principle calls for a multi-stage process of using collective understanding formed between theorists and practitioners involved in joint collaborative efforts (i.e., communities of practice) to inform modification of academic theories and teachers’ notion of practice as needed for more meaningful translation into practice. For such a purpose, a detailed examination of extensive planning discussions was undertaken to begin examining what might go into the process of teachers and researchers coming together to develop mutual understanding between each other for the purpose of ultimately translating modified theory into practice, particularly by documenting the first iteration (planning) of a multi-stage collaboration between two education researchers specializing in CFT/LICRA and one high school U.S. History teacher. More specifically, efforts were made to chronicle their initial six planning discussions over Zoom, which involved the collaborating parties learning about each other’s perspectives, discussing constraints reported as being inherent to the teacher’s professional “reality”, and brainstorming how CFT as a cognitive framework (including use of LICRA for Web-based learning activities) might be integrated by the teacher into his classroom instruction alongside his preexisting pedagogy. The early stages of design research methodology were utilized to modify topics of discussion covered as they evolved in both structure and focus, in order to account for and adaptively respond to notable concerns and insights as they were shared by the collaborators. In a manner involving multi-stage documentation of their interactions for the purpose of informing future systematic and generalizable research in the teacher’s classroom setting, data analysis was aimed at identifying noteworthy points of alignment between the teacher and researchers’ perspectives, including their respective opinions about how the collaboration itself unfolded and key considerations raised for the teacher’s potential implementation of CFT/LICRA within his classroom setting in the future. Finally, emphasis was placed on balancing theory-informed and grounded theming (on a content-based and metacognitive level) for all data obtained across the planning discussions, in order to richly capture the “realities” shared by the collaborators, as well as any “meanings” underpinning those “realities” that appeared to shape their interactions across the collaboration (Saldaña, 2016).By examining the teacher and researchers’ interactions over their discussions in such a manner, this study aims to inform the development of a framework – one that, like CFT itself, is intended to be flexible, open, adaptive and multi-perspectival in nature – to guide future research on the bidirectional translation process (for example, exploring the potential merits of integrating CFT/LICRA into educational discourse streams seeking to improve existing teaching practices). In particular, it is hoped that the discussions documented for this study can offer valuable insights regarding how such a cognitive theory of learning might help K-12 students more deeply learn and adaptively apply knowledge from ill-structured academic subjects like U.S. History. More broadly, by ascertaining the teacher and researchers’ reciprocal influence on each other while constructing meaning within their shared collaborative space, it is anticipated that this communicative framework in development will facilitate future efforts to enact education reform through use of communities of practice similarly designed to systematically bring scholars and practitioners together to help students navigate an ever-changing world.
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