Practitioner-Based Enquiry

Principles and Practices for Postgraduate Research

Brenda Lawrence, Louis Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135710651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book has been written specifically for postgraduate students carrying out small-scale research projects in and around their work environments and for those undertaking research projects as part of their higher education courses. The book will also be useful to teachers, tutors, lecturers and trainers who want to use the concept of practitioner-based enquiry to enquire into their own institutional practices, and produce reports which can be submitted for academic credits leading to the award of certificates and degrees from universities and other professional bodies.

1 What is Practitioner-Based Enquiry?

Introductory Remarks

The essential purpose of this book is to provide conceptual and methodological insights into the small-scale, applied educational research activity that has come to be known in recent years in the UK as ‘practitioner-based enquiry’.

It is perhaps ironic that as the publicly funded schools sector of the education system has been subject to increasingly centralized political controls, manifested in six major pieces of legislation under the Conservative governments of 1979–97 and emergent Labour Party legislation post-May 1997 (Unwin and Brown, 1998), and all that is implied for curricula and organization, the higher education sector has expanded, changed and diversified to an unprecedented extent in the same period. Since the incorporation of the former polytechnics into ‘new’ universities in 1992, the enlarged university sector and remaining institutes of higher education have become much more market-oriented and consumer-led in respect of courses offered and students enrolled. An indicative feature of this trend has been the provision of both award-bearing and short courses for the ‘practitioner’ in such fields as schoolteaching, nurse education and social work, and technical training for the police, armed forces and similar groups.

Departments of education and health studies, responding to imperatives as diverse as ‘Project 2000’ in nurse education, and the drive for ‘competences’ in the initial training of secondary school teachers (DfE, 1992), have been at the forefront of course developments which have established the professional concerns of practitioners as the raw material to be reconstituted in a teaching-learning process that contrasts markedly with content-oriented and direct instruction-based models that characterize much of the conventional higher education environment.

Strands Impelling the Emergence of Practitioner-Based Enquiry

There are several strands to the emergence of PBE approaches to teaching and learning in higher education. They form a complex mosaic that is itself an indicator of: cultural shift in institutional provisions for the delivery of education and training; the growth of a loose but discernible ‘teacher-as-researcher movement’ in and around teacher training especially; and paradigm or canon fragmentation within social science leading to competing methodologies and explanatory theories.

Cultural shift

In recent years the established culture of higher education organizations has come under pressure from the educational agenda of something crudely labelled ‘Thatcherism’, from the globalization of capital and industrial resources, from the ‘Knowledge Explosion’ generated by developments in IT, and from the internationalization of the market. Perhaps the most noticeable consequence of these pressures has been the trend towards a mass participation higher education system. The assumption here is that countries with elite higher education systems based on strict selection principles, are ‘wrongly geared’ to the socio-economic imperatives of the twenty-first century. The ‘new truth’ is that proportionately more of a given population must not only be educated to a standard higher than previous generations, but that they should also be educated to educate themselves. Without an educated and educationally flexible workforce, so the argument goes, traditional manufacturing countries in the West will be unable to compete with the economic powerhouses of the Pacific Rim (economic downturns notwithstanding) and the other industrialized nations.

The organizational logic that flows from this is that higher education must be less preoccupied with direct teaching of the young undergraduate. It must also concern itself with the ‘operating capacity’ of mature students already in work, with married women returning to work, young adults without A-levels and minority group members. The concerns of these potential users of higher education have historically been underestimated by the architects of the established system. In emergent market models, ‘deficits’ in operating capacity can be made good through the incentive that client purchasing of services through fees brings. Allied to this is the notion that abilities to cope will be enhanced by access and credit transfer schemes, by reconstituting curricula to focus on both the personal and occupational concerns of learners, and by generally making the experience of study in higher education institutions flexible through systems of course unitization and semesterization.

The discernible national trend described above makes concrete appearance in the course portfolios of university and college departments of education, schools of nursing and health studies, departments of social administration, and similar formalized agencies. These portfolios include the long-established PGCE now ‘revised’ under school-university ‘partnership’ rules for ITE, the Certificate in Education (Further Education) directed towards tutors and technical trainers in the post-16 further education sector, first degrees such as BEd and BA (Ed) which contain educational and pedagogical matter, a large variety of specialist certificates and post-graduate diplomas, and higher degrees such as MA and MEd which usually include a significant research requirement.

In disciplines rooted in natural rather than social science, cultural shift has taken slightly different form. The emergence of Teaching Company schemes around degree courses in physics, chemistry and biology is paralleled by ‘franchised’ course arrangements between industry and academia in civil engineering, information science and electronics. The ‘partnership degree’, in which educational institutions enter into joint teaching and research activities with major industrial companies, extends and develops the concept of ‘research and consultancy’ that is increasingly regarded as a necessary function of universities in their continuing adjustment to the demands of high technology, industry and the information-based society.

Teachers as researchers

In the previous 20 years, educational research, particularly in the UK, has broadened to accommodate a variety of developments. These have included a dissatisfaction with the detached and frequently abstract analyses of educational arrangement by psychology and sociology, and to a lesser extent, philosophy; and an increasingly strident call from schools and policy makers and the users of educational services for research to become relevant to the daily concerns of the educational practitioner.

Prominent amongst these developments has been the emergence of focused groups such as the Classroom Action Research Network (CARN), influential university departments such as the School of Education at the Open University and the Centre for Applied Educational Research (CARE) at the University of East Anglia, and the increased popularity of ‘action research’ as a method of enquiry appropriate in settings as diverse as factories, psychiatric nurses’ training schools and kindergartens. A central theme in these newer definitions of educational research is that of ‘continuous professional development’. That is, it is postulated that by engaging in systematic enquiries into one’s own practices the possibilities for improvements in practice are made real. Through a process of accumulation of research skill, wisdom, experience, and so on, the educational service is improved. We detail the hidden assumptions in this generalized idea later. At this point it is sufficient to indicate that the ‘new’ educational research has produced, and is producing, its own orthodox justifications (Elliott, 1991; McGill and Beatty, 1992; McKernan, 1991; Schon, 1983, 1987), its own journals (see, for example, Education Action Research and the Journal of Teacher Development) and its own thematic agenda for study and research (see, for example, the Open University 1993 Specification for Professional Development in Education).

The emergent notion that teachers can be, and should be, both teachers and researchers is an interesting one. Plausibly, there is the claim to common sense: that any professional should continually think about what he or she is doing, and that presumably what one then does subsequently is done better. This fits quite comfortably with the strident demand from society in general for educators, especially schoolteachers, to be increasingly more technically competent at what they do and to be more publicly accountable for what they do.

At a more opaque level is the elusive theme that researching into one’s own practices is democratizing and empowering. This is a recurrent motif in British writing on practitioner research (Carr and Kemmis, 1986; Lomax, 1986) and its ideological outlines are resonant of much 1970s to 1980s work that centred upon humanistic themes of learning, alternative pedagogies and sociologically informed critiques of educational arrangements in post-capitalist industrial societies. In essence this theme is anti-statist. Political control and direction of the education system, the de-skilling of teachers by a process of bureaucratizing regulation of the conditions of employment, etc., may be mediated, filtered and possibly subverted by a process of self-enlightenment through research. The extent to which this appeal is desirable, practical, fanciful or plain bogus is examined in Chapter 2.

There is a further, very practical implication of the notion of teachers as researchers. In an organizational sense, the expansion of higher education, especially in the new universities, has required new or different forms of course delivery. ‘Student-centred learning’ is one form of an organizational coping strategy. Making students seemingly responsible for their own learning partially removes the responsibility over institutions to provide the staff, lecture rooms, equipment and paraphernalia normally associated with teacher-centred forms of instruction. Thus the rhetoric of adult learning is such that it can emphasize home study packs, flexible tutorial arrangements, independently crafted assignments and, especially, the remote accessing of resources through computers. In a sense, the technology of the times in which we live acts to produce inexorable organizational imperatives – that far less time can be spent (or is needed) by the learner in expensively provided lecture halls. Where very large numbers of students are involved, as in Project-2000 for student nurses, the model of student-centred learning involving a significant component of structured research is an attractive one.

Finally, in this section it is important not to discount the pressure that external agencies are imposing upon university departments. Partly through its ‘Thematic Priorities’ approach and partly through financial stringency exercised via the Research Grants Scheme, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has been able to influence greatly the emergence of a research culture in those universities that aspire especially to be research-led in character. In practice, national competitions for funding, such as the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), have forced universities to become not only more research active but more research adept in the ways they configure strategic planning. HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) policy requirements, such as the registration (for funding purposes) of higher degree students in education departments with a 3b rating (or above) in RAE terms from April 1998, are an indication of how the research agenda has been shaped by external agencies. Similarly, the expropriation of funding by the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) for continuous professional development purposes in education undoubtedly has consequences for the content and orientation of research-based courses in education. The ‘teacher as researcher’ may be welcome at the institutional gate, but the gate contains a list of criteria necessary for entry.

Canon and paradigm fragmentation in social science

Several contemporary textbooks devoted to educational research methodology (Cohen and Manion, 1994; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983; and others) seem to find it necessary to ‘discuss’ an apparent disjunction between something called ‘positivism’ and something variously referred to as often as not as the ‘qualitative research paradigm’. The reader of such texts may be confronted with a dichotomy between the natural and social sciences that on first encounter, may seem incapable of reconciliation. That is, he must choose a method of enquiry and a form of explanation that is either rooted in the traditions of the physical sciences of chemistry, physics and biology, or draw upon ‘people-oriented’ methods that seem to derive from anthropology and sociology. In Chapter 2 we say more about the epistemological character of the dichotomy, what it suggests in respect of certain differences between the social and physical sciences, and why (in our view) it has assumed an exaggerated significance in and around sites for applied educational research.

Such a review necessarily incurs a consideration of paradigms, or how knowledge is patterned. In physics, for example, knowledge has been patterned in terms of Newtonian ‘analytical mechanics’ and, much more recently in terms of ‘chaos theory’. In the social and behavioural sciences, alternative and usually competing explanations for human behaviour may be illustrated in the ‘positivism’ of Augusté Comte – that rules and regularities could be discovered to explain social order – and the response to this position in the symbolic interactionism of G.H. Mead (1934) and his followers – that social order is no more than the million interactions produced by purposeful individuals.

There are tensions between the social and physical sciences. Equally, there are tensions within the disciplines of physical science, just as there are theoretical and substantive problems within say, sociology, psychology and anthropology. Whilst the history of science suggests that these tensions have always been present, the publication of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) provoked a dialogue about the philosophy and character of scientific enquiry that has raged ever since. Sometimes the debate polarizes around absurdist notions of who or what was right. In psychology the humanistic theories of Dewey, Maslow and Rogers have met a determined counter argument from Skinnerian behaviourism and the cognitive processing theories of Gagne and Bruner. Similarly, in sociology the consensus-structuralism theories of social order (Parsons, Merton, see Rex, 1968) have been challenged by various conflict theories, social phenomenology, and ‘post-modernist’ theorizing. Knowledge has increased in volume and diversified in character, partly as a function of historical accretion, partly as the result of genuine scientific discovery aided by powerful new technologies, and partly as the result of new patternings or paradigms. Fixed bodies of knowledge based on a presumed truth have tended to subside in the last few years of the twentieth century. In consequence, disciplinary boundaries have become permeable and modes of scientific enquiry have become multi-faceted and less paradigm-fixated.

The challenge for those involved in practitioner research is not to seek the superiority of one method over another (a peculiar quest of justification that characterizes certain texts claiming to be about action research), but to understand intellectual lineage of methods selected and/or their relevance to applied problems. That is why, presumably, the textbooks to which we earlier referred take the reader on a ‘Grand Tour’ of theoretical positions in their early chapters.

We would not wish to treat lightly the complexities of the epistemologies that underpin the practitioner approach to research in education. Nor would we wish to mystify the reader with a lengthy exegesis of the lore and language of the numerous paradigms and ‘schools of thought’ in social science. What we would wish to do is to enunciate a set of principles for practitioner-based enquiry that are capable of verification and validation via different conceptual and methodological treatments.

The Principles of Practitioner-Based Enquiry

Practitioner-based enquiry (PBE), in which academic credits are awarded for systematic studies into the processes of teaching and learning, is identified as having four primary characteristics. First, the educational focus or research problem of practitioner-based enquiry derives from and informs the professional concerns of educators. Second, such enquiries are conducted as part of a networked and developmental discourse between tutors, practitioners and significant others. Third, practitioners are confirmed in a range of theoretical approaches to the study of education and research methodology. Fourth, through the process of enquiry, educators are directed towards the acquisition of intellectual autonomy, improved judgment-making and enhanced technical competence in the classroom.

In practical terms PBE is a process in which teachers, tutors, lecturers and other education professionals systematically enquire into their own institutional practices in order to produce assessable reports and artefacts which are submitted for academic credits leading to the awarding of degrees, certificates and diplomas of universities, colleges and professional associations.

In such manner, PBE contrasts with essays, assignments and examination work conventionally derived and used by higher education institutions as assessment mechanisms for academic courses under their ownership and control.

In shifting the emphasis from predetermined institutional contexts to the corpus of concerns that confront the educational practitioner in his daily educational life, the principle of professional experience as a resource towards which research activities originating within different epistemological and empirical traditions may be directed is established.

It is important at this juncture to note that practitioner-based enquiry is not the awarding of credits for what education practitioners routinely do in classrooms. Practitioners are paid to teach; they are remunerated as a function of their contract of service with an employing authority. A central element in that contract is a ‘duty of care’ towards a pupil, a student, a patient or other institutional client. We would seek to avoid the misconception, arising in some university quarters, that PBE ‘rewards’ people for what they are already paid to do.

Rather, the key notion is systematic study of educational practices, usually involving the deliberate and arranged focusing of a research technique on a recurrent instructional or administrative problem. This implies the learning of a range of appropriate research techniques and their theoretical counterparts, plus the acquisition of a capacity to step in and out of two roles: teacher as teacher, teacher as researcher.

‘Reflection’ in this process is understood as an enhanced perceptual and cognitive ability – one in which reconsideration, reviews of work done and information gained, consultation with self and significant others, recapit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 What is Practitioner-Based Enquiry?
• 2 The Basis of Critique of Practitioner-Based Enquiry
• 3 Opening the Tool Bag: Proactive Behaviour in Planning an Enquiry
• 4 ’Ologies and Analogies: Tuning the Mind to Research Design
• 5 Contriving Methodology: Bringing Unity to Knowing and Doing in Research Activity
• 6 Analysing and Writing – Writing and Analysing
• 7 Making a Difference: Using PBE to Influence Policy and Practice
• Appendix 1: A Lexicon of Terms for the Language of Research
• Appendix 2: Conventional Features of Research Reports
• Appendix 3: Information Retrieval Exercise (BEI)
• Appendix 4: Information Retrieval Exercise (ERIC)
• References
• Index