Extending teachers' professional spielraum: co‐participation in different experiential habitats

Teachers' professional spielraum, which molds their classroom activities, has been shown to be inherently difficult to change. This paper suggests a process that is aimed towards the extension and diversification of teachers' spielraum. The process rests on co‐participation of teachers in two different experiential habitats, each one being anchored in different underlying pedagogical assumptions and different ways of professional being. One habitat was a classroom setting that enacted ways of teaching associated with the metaphor of the transmission‐acquisition of knowledge, and the other was a habitat that enacted learning as a participative inquiry of social‐technological problems. The simultaneous participation in two habitats with different underlying pedagogical assumptions, sometimes even conflicting, encourage processes of reflection and the enactment of context bound teaching, leading to the emergence of practitioners with a versatile repertoire of ways of being and a broader spielraum.