New reform contexts increasingly demand that teachers to be the leading actors of innovation, thus challenging teachers' learning and professional development. As a result, from a socio-cultural standpoint that relates social interaction with learning, teachers' cooperative work becomes a focus of interest. However, we know little about how science teachers work cooperatively for curriculum innovation, and particularly, how they develop professionally in these contexts. The aim of his research is to increase our knowledge in this field by doing a qualitative content analysis of teachers' discourse in cooperative scenarios. We analyse the discourse produced by a self-organised group of secondary-school science teachers when participating in curriculum design. The goal is to find the different distributions of teachers' discourse when involved in different activities of cooperative curriculum design, and explore the potential for teacher learning and development of these discourse distributions/activities. To have an idea of the activities in which teachers are involved, teachers' meetings have been summarised and structured in Activity Segments. For the exploratory analysis of teachers' discourse, the types of discourse teachers use in these scenarios have been categorised in Semiotic Spaces and Discursive Sequences. Semiotic Spaces have been defined as the content-areas in which teachers' discourse has meaning. In our research study, three different Sendotic Spaces have been identified: Didactical, i.e. teachers' discourse about features of teaching, such as selection of content, teaching methodology, etc; Scientific, i.e. teachers' discourse within the science field; and Cooperative, i.e. teachers' discourse that acts upon cooperation, such as its management or regulation. While the first two are inherent to science teachers' discourse, the last one is context-dependent and characterises teachers' cooperation. Discursive Sequences, our analysis unit, are sequences of teachers' discourse that form meaningful units and refer to different features of reality within the same Semiotic Space. For instance, the selection of content and the classroom methodology belong to the same Didactical Space but refer to different features of it. A part from the qualitative identification of the content categories of teachers' discourse, a quantitative analysis of this data has been done. We have used two analytic and representational tools that are able to show the distribution of teachers' discourse for each meeting. Histograms show the total amount of a particular Discursive Sequence in a meeting, allowing easy comparison between general features of discourse in different types of cooperative meetings. Thematic Clustering Graphs (TCG), a tool adapted from the discourse analysis field, show the chronological evolution of teachers' discourse, providing information about when (in which type of Activity Segment) teachers speak about what (the particular Discursive Sequences of their speech). The results of this analysis show interesting discursive patters in the cooperative work of teachers. For instance, both the histograms and the TCG of the two meetings analysed identified the often and regular presence of metacognitive discourse throughout the teachers' meetings. This pattern can be related to the well-known Schon's "reflection-on-practice", not as regard the practice of teaching but rather the practice of cooperative curriculum design within the studied teacher group. In this sense, from the discourse analysis done, the group is characterised as a reflective one. A second interesting discursive pattern identified is the difference in the presence and distribution of discourse in the scientific field throughout the different activities. In particular, when teachers are deciding what practical work they would include in their teaching unit, the presence of scientific discourse increases in a significant way when compared with other design situations. When going back to the qualitative data of teachers' discourse that correspond to these patterns, we see that in these discursive situations teachers' make explicit their scientific understandings and also their doubts regarding subject matter knowledge. This interesting discursive exchange on subject matter seems to also be related to the interdisciplinary character of the teachers' group and the materials they designed. This has implications regarding the consideration of the cooperative context analysed as a fruitful professional development scenario for teachers. According to these results, this exploratory study of teachers' cooperative discourse offers a first description of the discourse teachers use within a curriculum design setting. It also shows how the analysis of this discourse, in particular its distribution and discourse patterns, can be a useful tool for characterising teachers' cooperative work and identifying interesting professional development contexts.
