Researching the learning of knowledge transformation

This chapter discusses how to research the learning of knowledge transformation and the challenges involved in doing so. The main question reads What developments in methodology are necessary for researching the learning of knowledge transformation empirically, and what are the challenges? This overall question is investigated through four sub-questions: 1) How do you investigate the learning of knowledge transformation empirically? 2) How do you identify instances of knowledge transformation? 3) How do you identify the learning of knowledge transformation? and 4) How do you distinguish between contexts? The theoretical outset – the context dependency of knowledge and the need to learn knowledge transformation – is presented and an empirical example is provided of the investigation of knowledge transformation. The chapter points out that an important, necessary methodological development is the establishment of a new type of long-term coupling of educational and practice contexts, where practitioners in both contexts collaborate with the researcher and each other to ensure enough repeated situations where learners can be expected to transform knowledge. A wealth of data of different types are required. Furthermore, it is necessary to develop a more iterative back-and-forth process between theory and data than is usual in theory-led studies.