Abstract:

Dealing with the unpredictability of didactic action (Magnusson, 2018) is one of the challenges the novice teacher meets in contemporary educational contexts.

Today's fluid, multicultural, and multidimensional learning ecosystems (Jeladze et alii, 2017; Valjataga et alii, 2020) require a reconsideration of the relationship between design and action: these are two indistinguishable dimensions, because the design is itself a simulated action, while the action involves a constant process of reflection, rethinking and re-designing (Rossi & Pentucci, 2021). Such reflexivity must be activated during the act of teaching: it is necessary in order to intercept unforeseen and unexpected situations (Perrenoud, 1999) that arise for the teacher, without compromising both the effectiveness of the practice and the alignment between teacher and student (Rossi, 2016; Molla & Nolan, 2020).

The research path we want to develop concerns a different way of thinking about the regulation in action. It was defined in the literature (Allal et alii, 2007; Chabanne & Dezutter, 2011) as a form of improvisation, or a partly unconscious effort of the teacher, in reaction to unexpected situations, often generative of pedagogical formats (Pentucci, 2018).

The regulation nowadays becomes a systemic process, produced by the ecosystem itself, according to a homeostatic logic, which aims at ensuring its survival and advancing learning (Kiesewetter & Schmiemann, 2022).

The question is therefore: is it possible to design the regulation? In this way, the teacher, especially the novice one, can find in learning design a useful strategic element to govern unforeseen situations and he can think about intentional fine-tuning modes, while simulating, during the design process.
To experiment with this process, we asked the teachers-to-be to use design strategies involving redundancy and deviation (Berthoz, 2011), in order to implement a lesson in a real classroom, during their traineeship in schools.

While simulating the future action, they had to:
a) think of different and simultaneous devices, useful to achieve the same objective by following different paths, according to the logic of multimodality (Kress, 2015);
b) create alternatives to intercept different objectives and goals, in quantitative and qualitative terms.

The students had to use a visible design artefact to be able both to compare the design and the action and to understand how many and which unforeseen events occurred during the action, and how the regulation was guided and directed by the design itself.

In the end, they filled in a questionnaire, consisting of five open-ended questions, to reflect on both the unforeseen situations they encountered and the effectiveness of the strategies designed to implement the regulation in action.

The students' responses were analysed by a-posteriori text coding, using the reflexive thematic analysis approach of Braun and Clarke (2012), to capture two key elements:
a) how students perceived unforeseen situations and what uncertainties they manifested in dealing with them.
b) How and if the design strategies supported them in realizing the regulation in action.

Keywords:

Learning design, regulation, unforeseen, learning ecosystem, teacher training.