Research on teacher professional vision: Mapping the landscape of theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions

Every day, teachers need to attend to what happens in their classrooms, make sense of what they see, and decide quickly how to proceed. The idea that this professional vision is a fundamental aspect of teacher expertise has been raised for a long time. In the last years, research on teacher professional vision has gained more attention, giving rise to new or refined theoretical models and methodologies. This chapter introduces these theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to teacher professional vision. First, an overview of four different theoretical perspectives on teacher professional vision is given: the sociocultural perspective, the perspective of ecological psychology, the discipline-specific perspective, and the cognitive perspective. Then, the methodological approaches corresponding to the respective theoretical perspectives are described, and selected empirical contributions of research on teacher professional vision are summarized. Finally, concluding remarks on new promising theoretical and methodological approaches, of which many are addressed in this edited volume, are given.