| Abstract: | This study inquires into the influence of subject communities on the practice of secondary school teachers as they teach a new science and technology course that crosses traditional subject and department boundaries. The study focuses on two teachers from different professional communities—a science teacher and a technology teacher—who were teaching an applied physics course that was piloted in British Columbia. Interview and observational data were collected that illuminate the classroom practices and perspectives of the two teachers. As the teachers taught the course, they both changed their normal teaching practice. Their respective new practices, however, were different in important ways even though they both started with the same course outline, textbooks, and laboratory materials. We interpret these differences in the teachers' practices using sociocultural practice theory and argue that the differences can be understood in terms of the influence of their different professional communities which are shown to provide the backdrops against which the teachers developed their approaches to the course. Recommendations are made that encourage using the subject community as a unit of analysis in educational change studies and using sociocultural practice theory as a theoretical perspective for thinking about educational change and making policy decisions. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach, 35: 777–789, 1998. |
