DESIGNING REGULATION IN ACTION TO MANAGE THE UNFORESEEN IN TEACHING-LEARNING CONTEXTS

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.