Teachers’ professional knowledge develops through experience.
Through lessons, discussions with colleagues, and engagement with classroom technologies, teachers continually interpret practical events. Over time, these experiences shape how teaching is conceptualised, adapted, and sustained in daily practice.
As Douglas Adams once observed:
“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
— Last Chance to See
Careful examination of teachers’ lived experiences reveals the knowledge embedded within professional practice.
This website presents a curated collection of crafted stories derived from a doctoral study that investigates computing teachers’ lived experiences of teaching physical computing in English secondary schools.
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Developed from a series of interviews with computing teachers conducted over thirteen months, these narratives illustrate how teaching physical computing is shaped by daily interactions with students, technologies, colleagues, and the organisational and accountability structures influencing professional practice.
Welcome
Why these stories matter
A significant portion of teachers' professional learning emerges through direct classroom experience.
An unexpectedly successful lesson.
A technological tool that fails at a critical moment.
A conversation with a colleague that subtly transforms instructional approaches.
These anchor moments prompt subtle changes that shape subsequent classroom practices.
Teachers enact this knowledge daily, yet much of it remains embedded and unexamined within the routines of school life.
This website seeks to make such knowledge visible by presenting curated narratives based on the lived experiences of teachers who integrate physical computing, including programmable devices such as microcontrollers, sensors, and robotics, to render computing concepts tangible for students.
The primary objective is to learn from teachers' lived experiences.
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Often, the significance of professional practice emerges only through deliberate reflection and reconsideration.
Existing research on computing education primarily focuses on curriculum design, policy, and student outcomes. Although these perspectives are important, they often overlook the lived experiences of teaching in everyday practice.
This study adopts an alternative approach by examining the following research question:
What is the meaning of teachers' lived experiences with physical computing in English secondary schools?
Through interviews conducted with five heads of computing departments over a thirteen-month period, the study examined how teachers navigate the practical, relational, and institutional dimensions of their professional roles.
These interviews resulted in forty-two narratives that illustrate how teaching develops through moments of challenge, care, creativity, and adaptation.
The Research Question
About the
Research
The study used a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to explore teachers' lived experiences and interpretations in daily practice.
Five heads of computing departments participated in extended interviews over 13 months, producing 42 crafted stories of their experiences.
The study found that teachers consistently navigate technical, relational, and institutional challenges in physical computing pedagogy, offering insight into their lived classroom experiences.
What the research reveals
Analysis of the narratives revealed several recurring patterns of experience.
Four central themes emerged that elucidate how physical computing is enacted in practice.
Leaping-in
Leaping-in describes situations in which teachers respond directly to emerging challenges, including repairing hardware, debugging code, supporting students, or assisting colleagues. Such actions exemplify teaching as an immediate form of care directed toward others.
Leaping-ahead
Leaping-ahead encompasses the anticipatory work teachers undertake to prepare for learning. Activities such as planning projects, organising equipment, and designing lessons create conditions that enable students to experiment and explore with confidence.
Mentoring
Mentoring positions teaching as a relational practice maintained through dialogue, shared planning, and collaborative problem-solving. Through mentoring, professional knowledge is developed and sustained within the computing community.
Professional identity
Teachers’ commitments, values, and experiences shape their understanding of their professional role. Anchors such as equity, curiosity, and computational thinking guide responses to curriculum change, accountability pressures, and technological uncertainty.
Collectively, these themes demonstrate that physical computing pedagogy is shaped by care, relationships, and lived experience.
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Learning from experience
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This website encourages an alternative approach to engaging with research.
Rather than presenting teaching as a set of strategies to replicate, it offers stories to dwell with.
While reading these crafted narratives, you are encouraged to recall your own experiences. Through this reflective process, new meanings may emerge.
Much of teachers’ knowledge develops through everyday moments that often pass unnoticed in the flow of teaching. By pausing to revisit these moments, their significance can become newly apparent.
Jenner’s (2000) metaphor of the “freezer of waterfalls” captures this idea:
A man who lives by a waterfall does not “hear” the fall; it is such a familiar sound that it goes unnoticed. Yet he notices the cry of wild geese in the sky when they pass overhead. But if the waterfall freezes overnight, he notices the difference immediately.
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Hermeneutic phenomenology interrupts the routine of everyday classroom life to reveal what is often concealed by familiarity.
Seemingly routine practices—such as troubleshooting devices, planning lessons, mentoring colleagues, and responding to students—reveal deeper significance when examined with renewed attention.
Through the crafted stories presented here, this research examines how teachers’ engagement with physical computing is influenced by technical practice, care, identity, mentoring relationships, and the everyday judgments that sustain classroom life.
Returning to the stories
Understanding emerges through interpretation, yet it is initially grounded in experience.
The crafted stories constitute the core of this research. These accounts illuminate moments in classroom practice when the relationships among teachers, students, technologies, and institutions become apparent.
Readers are encouraged to revisit these narratives and engage with the experiences from new perspectives.