This paper describes a Lesson Study in which in-service mathematics secondary-school teachers, collaborating with researchers, involve grade 10 students in tessellation problems. The data are collected by an experiment carried out in the context of the “Liceo Matematico” project, with three volunteer teachers. The experiment goal was to craft a collaborative design of the research lesson between teachers and researchers. The research aim of the paper is to examine the use of Lesson Study in the institutional and cultural context of Italian secondary school with the use of Cultural Transposition as a theoretical framework. The research is qualitative with idiographic aims, based on video research. The educational aim of the research is to provide a solid basis for a revamped in-service teacher education first in the context of the project, then in curricular context. Semiotic mediation is used to provide, within Lesson Study, the conceptual framework for teachers and researchers collaborative design of the research lesson. The results show that Lesson Study, as a foreign practice, is an opportunity for teachers to confront their teaching practices, to enrich their professional development, resulting in more awareness on their didactical action in and outside the classroom.

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En este artículo trazamos un recorrido que da cuenta del trabajo de Transposición del Lesson Study (LS) de la cultura oriental a la italiana a través de la perspectiva dada por el enfoque de la Transposición Cultural. En ella, el encuentro con una cultura diferente es visto como un medio capaz de suscitar en los docentes nuevas y más profundas reflexiones sobre sus propios hábitos y prácticas educativas. Llamamos al producto de este proceso el “Lesson Study Italiana” (ILS): no está establecido a priori, sino que depende de las solicitudes a los participantes que los investigadores, como formadores de docentes, eligieron implantar en él. En particular, presentamos 4 ejemplos de ILS llevados a cabo en diferentes años escolares (1, 5, 8, 9), para resaltar cómo cada equipo de LS respondió a estas solicitudes a través de sus elecciones de diseño sobre la Clase de Investigación y las reflexiones críticas de los diferentes participantes. En base a esta descripción, en las conclusiones esbozamos algunas características comunes y diferencias entre los ejemplos, con el fin de resaltar reflexiones más generales sobre las posibles formas de implementar LS en culturas distintas de las orientales.

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to describe teachers’ professional development in Lesson Study (LS) as processes situated in Semiosphere and generated by the unevenness due to different cultural traditions. The authors characterise teachers’ professional development in two LS experiments as processes generating new knowledge to point out their products, i.e. new professional frame teachers produce after these experiments. The authors use Hybridization, a particular form of Networking of Theories (NWT).Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected video-registration of several Italian LS meetings. The authors analyse two LSs, where time emerged as a conflictual aspect. Through Hybridization components, the authors show how teachers make sense of LS and how teachers revise their professional frame.Theoretical frameworkIn NWT different theories are deployed to study the same problem. To grasp the issue of unevenness in our LS, we use Hybridization of a Theory, a form of NWT characterised by a structural asymmetry. It is given when a construct c is introduced coherently, operatively and productively into a theory T, obtaining a hybridized theory T'.FindingsHybridization lens allows to describe potentialities and limits of LS as a tool for teachers’ development. The two analysed LS are different: in one of them Hybridization process produced a new theory T', whilst in the second one it was limited to the awareness of a gap between LS and initial teachers’ professional frame.Practical implicationsIdentifying links between different Hybridization components is a helpful tool for teacher educators/researchers to foster the shift from one another. For instance, through this tool, teacher educators could keep track of what happens in successive LS and mirror the dialogue between teachers, moving towards group-shared metareflections. This initiates the advancement of a new theory T', where asymmetries are interpreted.Originality/valueIn this approach teachers are protagonists of the construction of a new professional frame. LS is a tool for teachers’ professional development, allowing teachers to question their own educational intentionalities. Hybridization components provide a tool to analyse such a process.