The Role of Research in Teachers' Work

Narratives of Classroom Action Research

Lesley Scanlon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351790161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

In the debate regarding what constitutes teachers' work, academics and bureaucrats continue to speak for teachers, with teachers' voices rarely heard and not accorded equal recognition. The Role of Research in Teachers' Work addresses this imbalance by privileging teachers' voices as they narrate their experiences of engaging in systematic inquiry. The book embeds the teacher narratives within the scholarly debates about the nature of knowledge and the nature of professional practice.

Scanlon examines the knowledge teachers create through their research and how that knowledge is perceived by others within the school community. This book can be read as a companion volume to Scanlon's 2015 Routledge publication My School, or as a standalone exploration of teachers' own narratives of engaging in action research. Together, these two books are unique in contemporary writing on schools, representing one of the only comprehensive longitudinal studies of a low socioeconomic secondary school from the perspective of those who learn and teach therein.

This book enables teachers to be part of the scholarly conversation about their work and the place of research in that work. As such, it should be essential reading for academics, teacher educators and postgraduates in the field of education. It should also be of interest to policymakers and teachers.

1
The nature of educational knowledge

Introduction

In this and the following chapter, I explore the epistemological and ontological dimensions of the role of research in teachers’ work. These two interrelated dimensions are the subject of extensive scholarly debate. In this chapter I focus on the epistemological debates surrounding the nature of educational knowledge, which is conceptualised as two distinct knowledges, namely, researcher knowledge and teacher knowledge. Researcher knowledge is produced by professional researchers in universities while teachers’ knowledge emanates from their practice in schools. This discussion is a prelude to the ontological discussion of the nature of teachers’ work in Chapter 2.

The exploration of the epistemological debates in this chapter is undertaken through two sociological perspectives: the sociology of knowledge, where I rely specifically on the work of Berger and Luckmann (1966/1991), whose perspective highlights the reasons for the institutional, hierarchical construction and valuing of knowledge, and the sociology of the professions, where scholars have pondered the nature of the professional essence in a steady stream of debate, beginning with the work of Flexner in the early 20th century and reignited by Scuilli (2005) in the early 21st century (Scanlon 2011). Through these two theoretical frames the chapter explores the epistemological debates which in the West have created knowledge dualisms such as theory and practice, and accompanying hierarchies of knowledge such as researcher knowledge and teacher knowledge. These debates have constructed what counts as knowledge and are fundamental to an understanding of teachers’ work and the potential role of research in that work. The debates also explain what scholars and teachers have long identified as a gap between practitioner and researcher knowledge.

The sociology of knowledge

I begin with the sociology of knowledge, which Mutekwe (2012, p. 808) locates within the work of Marx and Durkheim and American pragmatists such as Pierce, James and Dewey as well as in the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz – the work of Schutz only becoming accessible to the sociological community with the publication of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality in 1966. Swidler and Arditi (1994, p. 306) identify an ‘older sociology of knowledge’, evidenced in the work of Mannheim, which focused on ‘formal systems of ideas, concentrating especially on such matters as the world-views and the politics of intellectuals’. They contrast this traditional approach with the new sociology of knowledge, which the authors claim examines how organisations in which patterns of authority are located shape the content and structure of knowledge. It is this focus on the social construction of institutions and roles therein that makes the sociology of knowledge a pertinent frame for exploring the nature of educational knowledge in the guise of both teacher and researcher knowledge.

The sociology of knowledge is concerned with what society defines as knowledge and how this knowledge is constructed and maintained; in other words, the focus is on an analysis of the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966/1991, p. 15). This aligns, according to Berger (in Steets 2016, p. 14), with the admonition from Schutz: ‘If the sociology of knowledge is to live up to its name, it has to be concerned not just with ideas and theories but with knowledge in everyday life, with what passes for knowledge in everyday life.’ This sentiment was also iterated by Young (1973, p. 214), who argued that fundamental to an exploration of knowledge is the rejection of the superiority of any one form of knowledge over another. In this way, the sociology of knowledge challenges the taken-for-granted dualisms and hierarchies traditionally associated with institutionally constructed knowledge.

The licence to produce knowledge has customarily been situated within universities and over time this has remained relatively unchallenged because ‘institutions appear in the same way as given, unalterable and self-evident’ and continue to flourish through the legitimation of their activities, which provide them with a ‘protective cover’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966/1991, pp. 77, 79). In the case of educational institutions, it is their engagement with knowledge which furnishes them with legitimation – for example, in the case of universities it is the production of knowledge widely accepted as valid, and in the case of schools it is the conveyance of knowledge. The roles of these two institutions are taken as obdurate reality which is difficult to challenge because the allocation of these different epistemological roles has resulted in specialised services which make it possible for these institutions to exist (Berger and Luckmann 1966/1991, p. 92). Any challenge to these identities, such as the production of knowledge within schools through teacher research, is a challenge to the habituated institutional order and is defended by that order, as we will see in Chapter 2.

Berger and Luckmann (1966/1991, p. 135) point out that once knowledge production became institutionalised, the knowledge producers began to operate on a level of ‘abstraction from the vicissitudes of everyday life’, opening the way for potential conflict between experts and practitioners because the latter ‘may come to resent the experts’ grandiose pretensions and the concrete social privileges that accompany them’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966/1991, p. 136). What is likely to be particularly galling is the silencing of practitioner voices, as experts claim to know the ultimate significance of the practitioners’ activity better than the practitioners themselves. This is reflected in the perceived gap between teacher and researcher knowledge explored later in this chapter.

The sociology of knowledge is a way of explaining situated knowledge work within universities and schools and why these long-standing, hierarchical arrangements become taken-for-granted reality and therefore difficult to challenge and, by extension, why research is accepted as the preserve of academics in universities and not considered the work of teachers in schools. The sociology of the professions provides further insight into another knowledge hierarchy and again problematises the nature of knowledge and of teachers’ work.

The sociology of the professions

There has been a prodigious outpouring of work on the professions over the past 100 years, beginning with the first systematic study by Flexner (1910) in the United States and Tawney (1921) in the United Kingdom. This work was followed by that of Carr-Saunders and Wilson (1933), Etzione (1969); Freidson (2001), Scuilli (2005) and Dingwell (2008), to name but a few (Scanlon 2011, p. 19). All of these scholars agree that the professions are knowledge-based endeavours, and that the ‘basis of professional authority is knowledge’ (Etzione 1969, p. xiii). It is, however, the nature of that knowledge about which scholars disagree and it is this that has had an impact on how teachers’ work and knowledge is conceptualised and actualised.

Educational knowledge as teachers’ knowledge

Within the literature on the professions there is a distinct hierarchy of knowledges, with medicine, law and engineering, for example, rating significantly higher than the knowledge of the so-called semi-professions such as teaching and nursing. Within this hierarchy, teachers’ knowledge is seen as not meeting the criteria for elite status because it is neither exclusive nor generalisable.

The exclusivity criterion

The argument here is that teachers’ knowledge fails the exclusivity test, Maxwell (2015, p. 100) observes, because their subject knowledge is possessed by almost all adults who have been to school. This is compounded, Maxwell continues, by the generally held belief, even amongst teachers, that ‘good teaching is more of a knack than a highly-trained skill’. Teachers themselves, educational institutions and governments have colluded in advertising the non-elite status of teachers’ knowledge through their development and participation in truncated teacher education programmes which undermine claims to high-stakes knowledge. Maxwell (2015) refers to these as ‘quick fix’ teacher preparation programmes and cites Teach First in the United Kingdom and Teach for America in the United States. Australia has also been complicit with the introduction of Teach for Australia. Tatto and Furlong (2015, p. 146) note that these accelerated school-based programmes have undermined other attempts to improve the professional status of teachers through, for example, the raising of entry standards. The reduced programmes counterpoise the long, arduous training traditionally associated with high-status professions (Scanlon 2011, p. 21). Maxwell (2015, p. 101) suggests that if such initiatives occurred in other professional areas, such as engineering, dentistry or medicine, there would be ‘public outrage’; this has not been the case with the teacher preparation programmes.

The generalisable criterion

The claim here is that teachers’ knowledge is not generalisable because unlike the knowledge of the elite professions it does not transcend contexts. Elbaz (1991, p. 13) explores this by drawing on a distinction made by Hall between ‘high-context’ and ‘low-context’ thinking. ‘High context’ refers to knowledge that is embedded in a physical context or within a person; ‘low-context’ is conveyed through an ‘explicit language code’. Teachers’ knowledge is primarily ‘high context’ whereas researchers’ knowledge, which I explore in the following section of this chapter, is ‘low context’ and hence generalisable in a way that ‘high-context’ knowledge is not. Labaree (2003, p. 14) makes a similar distinction referring to hard/soft and pure/applied knowledge. Teachers’ knowledge, he contends, is ‘very applied and very soft’ because it arises from an institution rather than from theory and is soft because it ‘cannot transcend time, place, and person’ and is ‘mushy, highly contingent, and heavily qualified’. However, it is ‘high-context’ knowledge, or as Korthagen (2007, p. 306) puts it, ‘action-guiding knowledge’ which enables teachers to deal with context-specific practical situations. McIntyre (2005, p. 360) maintains that teachers’ knowledge, as well as being contextual, is embodied in the person of the teacher and is therefore ‘fundamentally personalised’ knowledge which is ‘dependent above all else on the knowledge, values, commitment, human insights, skills, sensitivity, enthusiasm, humanity and, in summary, the person of the teacher’. It is this knowledge which has not been subject to sustained, systematic inquiry by teachers themselves.

Scholars such as Hargreaves (1999, p. 129) have tackled the criteria of context specificity, embodiment and generalisability by distinguishing between transferability, the transmission of knowledge between persons, and transposability, which is the movement of knowledge between places. According to Hargreaves, knowledge or practice is transposable when, for example, a teacher takes a pedagogical practice from one classroom or school to another. Lohrey (Department of Employment, Education and Training 1995, p. 25) takes a similar view, although preferring the word ‘transfer’, arguing that transfer occurs between situations because the consciousness of the individual is common to all contexts, and it is the individual who brings prior learning to bear on new or different contexts. Transfer is therefore a transformative process which requires the learner to be an active agent by consciously manipulating the transformation of knowledge, which for Thomson (2015, p. 310) means ‘What is transferable is the practice of action research itself – cycles of reflection and action.’

Do teachers have a knowledge base?

Taken together, the above arguments about the status of teachers’ knowledge have led to suggestions that teaching does not have a recognisable knowledge base in the same way as the elite professions; this undermines the claims of teachers to professional status. Notable in refuting these arguments is Shulman (1987), who asserts that teachers possess a range of knowledges which taken together form an identifiable knowledge base. These knowledges include pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, curriculum knowledge, knowledge of learners, knowledge of educational contexts and knowledge of educational ends and purposes. The core of teaching for Shulman is pedagogical content knowledge, which is where theory and practice are integrated. Lyons (1990, p. 160) illustrates this concept of pedagogical content knowledge, describing the ‘web of teachers’ work’ in the following way:

teachers hover in thought and imagination around the needs of their students, a body of subject matter knowledge, and the ways they endeavour to have their students encounter it, they hone a craft responsive to all elements on their horizon.

(Lyons 1990, p. 160)

Lyons (1990, p. 173) further describes teachers’ knowledge as consisting of ‘nested epistemologies’ characterised by the ‘the interdependence of students and teachers as knowers in learning’. Hiebert et al. (2002, p. 4) equate teachers’ knowledge with ‘practitioner knowledge’ or ‘craft knowledge’, which is generated when teachers engage in ‘active participation and reflection on their own practice’. They do, however, recognise that this knowledge, while it is detailed, concrete, specific and integrated, is not public, storable, shareable or verifiable (Hiebert et al. 2002, pp. 6–8). For McIntyre (2005, p. 359) teachers’ knowledge consists of subject knowledge, knowledge about students’ learning and thinking, the curricula and contextual knowledge. What particularly interests McIntyre is pedagogical knowledge; this is knowledge-how, useful contextually specific knowledge enabling teachers ‘to address the context-specific and indeed unique characteristics of every class, pupil, lesson and situation with which they have to deal’.

An eclectic view of a knowledge base for teaching comes from Carr and Kemmis (1986, pp. 41–2), who observe that teachers use common-sense knowledge, folk wisdom, skill knowledge, contextual knowledge, professional knowledge, educational theory, social and moral theories as well as having a general philosophical outlook. These authors rescue teachers’ knowledge from a second-class status by arguing that while teachers’ knowledge is grounded in habit, ritual, precedent, custom and opinion, teachers nonetheless possess some ‘theory’ of education which structures and guides their activities (Carr and Kemmis 1986, pp. 111–13). Another approach to teachers’ knowledge is that of Winch et al. (2015, pp. 205–6), who identify situated understandi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: why this book, now?
• 1 The nature of educational knowledge
• 2 The nature of teachers’ work
• 3 Answering the action research ‘call to adventure’
• 4 Preparing for the research journey
• 5 Conducting the research
• 6 Sharing the research findings
• 7 From action research to whole school initiative: a case study
• 8 Impact and implications of the research
• Index