Connecting Inquiry and Professional Learning in Education

International Perspectives and Practical Solutions

Anne Campbell, Susan Groundwater-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136032066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

How might inquiry enhance the professional practice of student and practising teachers, teacher educators and other practitioners? What effect might this have on the learning of young people in and outside of the classroom?

Based on the findings of an international colloquium and drawing upon a range of practices from the UK, USA, Canada, Europe and Australia, this book is designed to make explicit the connections between Practitioner Inquiry and Teacher Professional Learning in Initial Teacher Education and Ongoing Teacher Professional Development.

Considering issues such as

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• the relationship between practitioner inquiry and pedagogical content knowledge

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• whether it is possible to scale up from small local and intensive innovations to more broadly-based inquiry

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• inquiry's role in professional identity, both individual and communal

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• prevailing socio-political contexts and consequences for social policy formation.

It brings together writers who work in designing teacher education courses, and those who are practice-based researchers and policy makers. Crucially, many of these writers inhabit both spheres, and their accounts of how they successfully combine their multiple roles will prove vital reading for all those involved in examining and improving practice leading to enhanced teacher professional learning.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Anne Campbell and Susan Groundwater-Smith

This book is based upon an international colloquium convened by the editors and held at Leeds Metropolitan University, 7–10 October 2007. The participants at the colloquium discussed the nature of teacher professional learning in initial and continuing teacher education and across the spectrum of the international landscape and teacher inquiry. Chapters in the book were presented in draft to the three-day colloquium and subjected to critique and debate.

The book’s scope is wide but coherence is sought through a focus on how inquiry might enhance the professional practice of student teachers, teachers and teacher educators and other practitioners. The focus is also on the effect that such development might have on the learning of young people inside and outside the classroom. This focus takes us into a variety of different contexts and sites: school experience (practicum) and university-based elements of pre-service teacher education where students are assessed and develop their professional learning; classrooms and schools where experienced teachers inquire and improve their practice; networks and collaborations where practitioners collaborate for improvement; the university classroom where teachers undertake research-based study and teacher educators develop curricula, research expertise and inquire into their own practice; and finally, into other communities of practice such as the museum education service, which supports teacher development and student learning, and into the wider community of local and national government and agencies, and to parents and carers and other people who live in local sites. We also argue that sites for learning are increasingly global and hope this book may contribute to professional learning across the world.

There is a renewed interest in practitioner research and inquiry in both teacher education and other related professional fields which stimulated the formation of this book. It includes a variety of case studies including initial (pre-service) teacher professional learning in Scotland, Australia and the United States, through to policy formation and continuing teacher professional learning in the Netherlands, Scotland and England. This book is designed to make explicit the connections between practitioner inquiry and teacher professional learning in initial teacher education (ITE) and ongoing teacher professional development. It draws upon a range of practices from the UK, the USA, Continental Europe and Australia and addresses the following questions:

• What could practitioner inquiry look like in the initial education of teachers?

• Does it go beyond problem-based learning? What role does assessment play in inquiry?

• What kinds of scaffolds are necessary or sufficient for preparing teachers to engage in practitioner inquiry in the formation of their practice?

• What is the relationship between practitioner inquiry and pedagogical content knowledge, considering postgraduate and undergraduate concerns?

• Is it possible to scale up from small local and intensive innovations to more broadly-based inquiry informed courses in the context of current government policies?

• Are there new orthodoxies in inquiry in research informed teaching of which we need to be cautious? (e.g. Teacher’s research being colonised for instrumental purposes, the marketing of continuing professional development and the appropriation of pupil voice)

• Are there matters of professional identity, both individual and communal, that need to be explored?

• What does communication ‘at the borders’ look like? Who translates and into what language?

• What are the prevailing socio-political contexts and what are the consequences for social policy formation at the micro/mesa/meta levels?

This book aims to explore new ground by bringing into a conversation with each other the voices of those who work in designing teacher education courses, in both university and school, and those who are principally practice-based researchers and policy-makers. In a number of instances, several of the writers inhabit more than one of these worlds. By bringing them together the book aims to enable teacher educators, researchers and policy-makers to examine and improve practice leading to enhanced teacher professional learning.

Chapters 2 to 5 discuss the wider aspects of connecting inquiry to professional learning and focus on global, international phenomena affecting the field and serve as overviews of the major issues.

Chapter 2 arose from Campbell and McNamara’s discussion of the plethora of terms used to describe practitioner research and inquiry and related professional learning in educational contexts. They found that the abundance and variation in terminology presented a complex and messy picture. Seeking to clarify their ideas through mapping the area, they aimed not to ‘tidy’ it up but to get an analytical purchase on the field.

Campbell and McNamara organise their chapter around a number of key questions about the field of practice-based research, inquiry and their relationship with professional learning. In addressing these questions they tackle issues about the ‘making public’ of practitioner research and advocate a review and rethinking of what this could mean for the field. They quote Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2007: 24) who ‘use “practitioner inquiry” as a conceptual and linguistic umbrella to refer to a wide array of educational research modes, forms, genres and purposes’. They conclude that research and inquiry in the contexts described are closely aligned, and may often be the same activity. A case study of a project is examined and the themes are: the political context of teacher research; issues of ownership and autonomy; the role of academic partners; issues to do with representation of outcomes and practitioners used to illustrate the tensions in collaborative research partnerships. Ethics, trust and quality issues are raised and discussed as important factors in the recognition of practitioner research. In conclusion the chapter identifies the crucial role of academic partners in collaborative ventures with schools as a crucial one.

In Chapter 3, Lingard and Renshaw address the conception of research- based teacher education but essentially they work with the concept of ‘research-informed’ rather than ‘research-based’. They argue that the use of ‘informed’ rather than ‘based’ gives relevant consideration to teacher professional discretion and the need for systemic trust relationships with teachers. They work with Pasteur’s quadrant of research for knowledge and understanding, as opposed to research for use or applied purposes, the old pure/applied binary. However, they argue to eschew this simple binary; and advocate more collaborative relationships between researchers and research-informed teachers.

They consider how educational research actually reaches teachers and draw on the work of McMeniman et al. (2000) and Figgis et al. (2000), which was research commissioned in Australia by the federal government to consider the impact of educational research on policy and practice. Lingard and Renshaw argue that teacher education and teacher professional development requirements are framed to a very large extent by policy. For example, moves to link teacher education more closely with schools and the practicum, possibly mean the reduction of the formal research component in teacher education.

They draw on The Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS) (Lingard et al. 2001, 2003: Hayes et al. 2006) and develop the concept of productive pedagogies after mapping classroom pedagogies in about one thousand Queensland primary and secondary school classrooms in 24 schools over a three-year period in English, Maths, Science and Social Studies. They argue the importance of a pedagogical disposition in educational researchers. In their view, teaching as both a research-informed and research-informing profession is a necessary development towards better schools and educational systems.

In Chapter 4, Broadhead takes us to an early years’ focus and explores how ‘insiders’ (teachers in a primary classroom and teachers and nursery nurses working in early years’ classrooms) and an ‘outsider’ (an academic researcher who enters their classrooms, with permission, to engage in joint research) can, together, influence wider and deeper understandings of learning and teaching in classrooms. She examines how joint research and emerging understanding might subsequently come to re-shape policy and practice when learning takes place for children, educators and educational researchers in the classroom. She also addresses some ethical aspects relating to outsiders when entering others’ daily spaces.

Two research projects are reported, spanning 20 years or so, and Broadhead discusses her research into teaching and learning and the extent to which it had always sought to reveal the perspectives of the workers at the heart of the process, the educators. Castells’ work (2004) on a process of social mobilisation referring to urban movements resonated with the early years’ research and the connections to return play, in a conceptual and more clearly understood way, to early years’ classrooms. Broadhead talks about resistance to the policy-political denial of the value of playful learning. In both the primary and the early years’ research she sought to bring the voice of the child and learner to centre stage within classroom life by trying to understand what the characteristics of such classrooms might be, an ambition that rests within a long tradition of research and publication, its voice largely unheard in policy circles for some time. She describes the greatest leap forward towards understanding ethical practice and towards the realisation that research can only shape policy and practice if ethical and political awareness go hand in hand in collaborative educational research.

Continuing to focus on wider issues in the field, Hulme and Cracknell explore the value of practitioner inquiry in the development of common language and shared understandings for a group of mid-career professionals from a variety of public service backgrounds, brought together in order to formulate and disseminate responses to the Every Child Matters (2003) agenda for integrating services for children. It draws upon data gathered from multi-professional action learning groups and focus groups within the Learn Together Partnership, a collaboration between a university in the northwest of England and six local authorities (LAs) in the region in response to this national agenda. This chapter complements others in the book by broadening the perspective from teacher education to the wider workforce in children’s services and explores the current English agenda for the development of multi-agency working. The work presented resonates with the book’s international themes since the challenge of workforce ‘integration’ is an agenda with global reach.

The chapter draws on theories of ‘third space’ and ‘hybridity’ in arguing that the realistic achievement of such an integrated knowledge requires the creation of ‘undecided’ or ‘third’ spaces, in which professionals from a variety of backgrounds can engage in critical reflection and from which dialogues about new ways of working can develop. They are in tune with many authors in this book on the value and the necessity of professional learning communities. Hulme and Cracknell claim that we are still a long way from developing a meaningful or systematic notion of trans-professional knowledge for integrated service provision. Policy-makers appear to be clear about the goals of policy to ‘join up’ service provision in the legislative framework and policy pronouncements but the authors state that far less in evidence are the necessary strategies to construct new forms of professional learning. The authors conclude by pondering whether this kind of collaborative work can be embedded in the day-to-day reality of practice in multi-professional settings.

The foci in Chapters 6–14 move to more specific examples of projects around the world, with the intention of digging more deeply into the range of questions identified earlier in this chapter.

In Chapter 6, Ponte uses Smith’s idea of teacher education programmes as platforms (Smith 2000) and then links this up with the Dutch interpretation of the word ‘platform’: as a group of people (in this case, teacher educators and students) who have come together for a common social or moral purpose (in this case, for the benefit of a democratic and just education). The central idea behind a programme as a platform is that the participants consult each other to decide what they will learn and how, the goals of learning and how that learning can be facilitated.

She discusses the differing contexts of prospective and experienced teachers and promotes a liberal approach to equality and quality of student learning. She argues that the aim of learning on platforms is broader than just the professional development of the individual student. Close links between professional education and work, in this case between programmes, schools and others, should also be geared to the professional development of the profession in relation to the emancipation of vulnerable pupils. These platforms create a meeting place, where the worlds of researchers, teachers, teacher education staff and others can learn from each other and engage in debate.

In Livingston and Shiach’s chapter on the Scottish Teachers for a New Era (STNE) project, funded by the Scottish Government and The Hunter Foundation (THF), they describe and discuss the changes being made as the universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen develop a new model for teacher education. The project has focused on generating dialogue with key stakeholders about what it is that teachers need to know, care about and be able to do to work in twenty-first-century schools and learning communities. The underpinning principle of the direction in teacher education is that models can only be developed effectively through collaboration between colleagues in universities, LAs and schools. The development requires new approaches to learning and teaching, new ways of working to enable critical inquiry, reflection and action and new relationships with student teachers and with colleagues within the universities, in the LAs and in the schools. The approach to teacher education described in this chapter focuses on ensuring that inquiry and thoughtful reflection become natural for every teacher. The courses in the first two years of the new model have been restructured with the specific aim of providing opportunities for students to develop confidence in their own thinking about learning and teaching where questioning and reflection become essential to their development as learners and teachers. The changes include student involvement in programme design and assessment, student-led tutorials and a new investigative approach to school experience.

There is some similarity with Davies’s (Chapter 10) programme in teacher education in Victoria, Australia where the issue of the process of change has highlighted the importance of communicative practices, of clarification in seeking understanding and of making values and beliefs explicit.

In Chapter 8, Murray concentrates on teacher educators themselves and on how new, authentic research identities can be forged through practitioner inquiry. The chapter draws on an analysis of relevant research and an illustrative case study of one new teacher educator’s induction to debate how practitioner-based research might provide solutions to current challenges for new teacher educat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mapping the field of practitioner research, inquiry and professional learning in educational contexts: a review
• 3 Teaching as a research-informed and research-informing profession
• 4 ‘Insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ researching together to create new understandings and to shape policy and practice: is it all possible?
• 5 Learning across boundaries: developing trans-professional understanding through practitioner inquiry
• 6 Postgraduate programmes as platforms: coming together and doing research for a common moral purpose
• 7 Co-constructing a new model of teacher education
• 8 Academic induction for new teacher educators: forging authentic research identities through practitioner inquiry
• 9 Teacher researchers in the UK: what are their needs? Some lessons from Scotland
• 10 The place of assessment: creating the conditions for praxis inquiry learning
• 11 Learning by doing: a year of qualitative research
• 12 Networks of researching schools: lessons and questions from one study
• 13 From lesson study to learning study: side-by-side professional learning in the classroom
• 14 Learning outside the classroom: a partnership with a difference
• 15 School leaders using inquiry and research: a podcast between Philippa Cordingley, Kristine Needham and Mark Carter and discussion by Susan Groundwater-Smith and Anne Campbell
• 16 Joining the dots: connecting inquiry and professional learning
• Index