Research Partnerships in Early Childhood Education

Teachers and Researchers in Collaboration

Judith Duncan, L. Conner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137346889
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Formación del profesorado

Duncan and Conner demonstrate how collaborative research on early childhood education results in gains for educators, researchers, and children alike. Drawing on examples of successful partnerships from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, they set out the successes, struggles, insights, and opportunities that come from such partnerships.

1

Introduction

Lindsey Conner and Judith Duncan

Purpose of the Book

In many countries around the world, early childhood centers and schools are increasingly being given greater responsibility for determining their own future directions in professional learning (Schleicher, 2012). While this involves a political agenda (Nuttall, 2010), related to why we do things the way we do them, the challenge for practitioners in the early childhood sector is to find appropriate common objectives for collaborative activities. It seems that successful collaborative research has an element of common purpose, despite the various backgrounds and knowledge bases of the collaborative partners. When teachers bring forth what they intuitively know works and consider these situations from other alternative perspectives, they begin to reconceptualize practice in light of their new insights. Promisingly, there is a growing body of evidence that research partnerships within early years learning communities are leading to improved outcomes for children and, at the same time, are enabling the development of teachers as researchers of their own practice (Nuttall, 2010). Not only does this contribute to new knowledge about and for the sector, but it can also build the capability and capacity for teachers to contribute to their own learning and the learning of the early years education community more widely. As a result there seems to be a growing acceptance among early childhood teachers that involvement in such research projects, with support, can provide opportunities to consider practice from an informed base, rather than adopting a more intuitive approach or one that only perpetuates past practices.

The prospect that research might inform and reform practice is appealing to teachers, academics, policy makers, and curriculum developers. Such research may include multiple dimensions of what might be classed as professional development (Borko, 2004), even though this approach is not akin to more traditional models of professional development, such as taking a course or reading background information in isolation. Research based in practice and conducted collaboratively within a community of practitioners and academics can include combinations of investigating previous research and practices, the co-generation and iterative development of new knowledge, the opportunity to consider what changes in practice might enhance outcomes for young children, contributions to recommendations for policy, and contributions to teacher education. However, Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo in this volume caution us that research partnerships should not be seen as drivers of changes to practice, but rather as opportunities for possible changes in educators’ practices. Lai and McNaughton indicate in this volume that establishing research partnerships as such does not necessarily guarantee improvement of teaching and learning. Success of these research projects has more to do with the way the partnerships are developed and sustained through relational appeasement throughout the research, where the research has a shared common purpose. As Bellacasa (2012) has pointed out, relationship building in partnership research is always multidimensional and complex, as well as far from being innocent. While the partners become complicit in the outcomes, there may be occasions for attribution that may or may not be warranted. We touch on the ethical concerns in this relational space in a separate section below and take these up again in the final chapter.

The potential outcomes of collaborative partnership research also reflect the shift in educational research on practice more generally, where teachers, rather than being researched by an external researcher, become an integral part of designing and conducting the research and analyzing the results, thus gaining a better insight into their own professional practice (Joseph, 2004). In the projects discussed in this volume, teachers had actively and purposefully given input into interventions, the evaluation of the outcomes, and their own learning. In other words, there were some choices about the level of reflective engagement and how they would then incorporate anything they learned into future practice.

Many of the contributions in this volume indicate that there was an inherent plasticity in the partnerships and the progress of the projects. That is, there was flexibility both in terms of the ways people contributed within the projects and in terms of relatively open outcomes, rather than predetermined ones. Through participation in these research projects, the partners are inevitably changed, but the change was not necessarily predictable as it was ongoing, through intra-action through time and space and was situated in thinking and actions (Barad, 2003).

All of the authors have indicated that insights gleaned from one project led to adjustments and adaptations that were incorporated into future projects. Each chapter describes these in detail. The summary elucidates the elements that contribute to the purpose of this book, including how partnership research in early years education can contribute to

a) building cumulative knowledge that links teaching to learning;

b) enhancing knowledge and generation of educational research on teaching practices;

c) enhancing connections between partners in research;

d) growing research capacity and its application to teaching practice (effectiveness of teaching on learning and effectiveness as a vehicle for teacher learning or professional development).

Overview of the Chapters

Each chapter discusses the challenges and insights that arise when working in research partnerships. Each chapter also considers the challenges for practice-based partnership research as set out by Joce Nuttall (2010):

a) the… challenge of knowledge, practice, and research—separated but deeply connected;

b) collaborations “demanding a level of relational expertise that must in itself be developed and enacted within the complex, social, political, cultural, environmental and economic agendas facing the education sector” (p. 3);

c) collaborations that must “result in a higher level of research consciousness amongst those practitioners adding yet another level of complexity” (p. 3).

Given that there are multiple uncertainties confronting contemporary human services professionals (Fook, Ryan & Hawkins, 2000), the research collaborations among these professionals demand complex forms of relational expertise (Edwards, 2010). The majority of collaborations described in the chapters herein were between teachers and research academics. Fleer, in her chapter, also describes multiagency projects that had to develop such relational expertise that she calls relational agency. In this sense, success depended on positive ongoing communication that checked the assumptions of the participants and included multiple activities that fostered reflection on and discussion about practice. Edwards (2010) indicates that successful research partnerships conceptualize themselves as a collective, with collective expertise. They do not rely only on their own expertise, but consider how they and others can collaborate to synergistically create new knowledge. Throughout the examples highlighted in each chapter, we see that valuing others’ expertise and contributions forms a fundamental element of positive relations between partners in research.

If the co-evolution of activities that support changes (in thinking and practices) is an indicator of successful partnership research collaboration, then it follows that researchers must also develop more nuanced forms of expertise to create opportunities for developing new ways of generating knowledge (Nuttall, 2010). This may include developing new sensitivities and ways of finding out what assumptions and knowledge already exist, as well as pedagogical changes, developing new resources, artifacts, or events as potential sources or opportunities for collaborative discussion (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012). It may also involve developing new methodological strategies to sustain success (Mayo, Henson & Smith, 2008).

Ethical Responsibilities and Dilemmas as Researchers

As indicated in earlier sections of this chapter, when research is situated in educational practice, where professional development and research are intertwined, ethical concerns, dilemmas, and issues abound. The ethical dilemmas influenced how the partners operated and adjusted their approaches during the projects and how they reconceptualized subsequent projects. Within each chapter, the authors touch on how these ethical dilemmas related to each context in more detail. To varying extents, each set of authors grappled with the complex nature of partnership research and the ethical questions that were generated. For example:

1. How do we acknowledge existing expertise and enable educators to become empowered to make changes and experiment with their own practice, yet at the same time advocate for the children in their settings?
2. How are the risks of revealing practice negotiated?
3. What relational expertise enables groups to challenge their assumptions?
4. What strategies and tactics help communicate and sustain the community of researchers?
5. How do projects leverage the collective expertise of their participants and others?
6. How provocative can the participants be while maintaining ethical practice and professional relationships among the group?

The last question also relates to the complicity that researchers and teachers have in influencing each other’s thoughts and actions during partnership arrangements. This is touched on in the chapter by Kim Atkinson and Enid Elliot in this volume, where a teacher chose to reveal how she challenged her own assumptions about the play Bad Guy Beavers and what was ethical in terms of her intervention in such a play. Understanding how the thoughts and actions of others are influenced by our contributions precludes setting up opportunities to discuss and understand others’ perspectives and beliefs about practice and what is valued. The authors pose these questions and try to find out how they might be considered in the design of future approaches to partnership research in educational settings.

Contents of the Book

In Chapter 2, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Fikile Nxumalo use the concept of regeneration to reframe what is needed to interpret research partnerships. They argue that we need to move beyond models of progressive linear trajectories of change to embrace gestures aligned with growth. This seems to be a very useful concept given that regeneration, as a biological term, refers to new growth or replacement growth. Additionally, growth can be seasonal, occurring in spurts and varying depending on environmental conditions. Growth, if we consider a vine as an analogy, requires something to climb on, such as what is already known. The idea that growth can occur in three dimensions helps us to visualize that regeneration might support multiple solutions and trajectories for the future. That is, there is not necessarily one way of achieving a goal. Regeneration embraces mutuality, mess, multiplicity, and contradiction.

Marilyn Fleer reports on a research project related to the implementation of the first national early childhood curriculum in Australia in Chapter 3. The project drew on cultural-historical theory (Vygotsky, 1997) to assist the collaborators to consider how their different backgrounds and experiences contributed to different viewpoints. She argues that successful partnerships across these projects built relational agency (Edwards, 2010), where researchers and practitioners attuned themselves to the collective through activities that helped them to build common goals and understandings and clearly understood strategies for effective implementation. The chapter indicates that effective communication and challenging assumptions about each other’s knowledge are important for sustaining partnerships, so that members can take the standpoint of others, be explicit about what matters, as well as recognize what matters to others. It is through the ability to attune one’s actions with the action of others for generating knowledge in a project that relational agency of all members can be established. Fleer contends that it is the kind of knowledge valued by members that is worth paying attention to within a partnership, and that this must be explicitly discussed. The agency refers to how researchers, policy writers, and early childhood educators together raise the level of consciousness about constructing new ways of working with evidence. It is only then that relational agency can be genuinely established to realize in practice Australia’s first national curriculum.

Researchers at the Woolf Fisher Research Institute have been conducting partnership research with schools in poor urban communities for the past decade or so. In Chapter 4, Mei Lai and Stuart McNaughton present an approach for partnering with schools that has been developed and successfully applied to improve teaching and learning in four New Zealand Teaching Learning and Research Initiative (TLRI) projects. They highlight key lessons learnt from applying a specific framework that addresses the challenges of partnership research. These included:

1. Research methodologies that require researchers to understand the reasons and beliefs for particular school practices so they are able to challenge these beliefs and cocreate ways of improving practice that will be accepted by school practitioners;
2. Building and maintaining a well-functioning community of practice with shared priorities and protocols (Wenger, 1998);
3. Recognizing the complementary and reciprocal nature of the expertise required to solve everyday problems (McNaughton, 2011);
4. Establishing mutual and reciprocal obligations (Snow, 2001). In the New Zealand context, this is represented by developing a whānau (family) of interest (Smith, 1999);
5. The research design needs to incorporate all of the above deliberately and systematically.

They argue that the development of effective partnerships does not necessarily happen naturally and requires support for researchers and practitioners in terms of time and skills development. The four projects discussed were partnerships between 13 schools in two urban, low socioeconomic communities serving primarily linguistically and culturally diverse students. The first two projects were three-year interventions using quasi-experimental designs to improve reading comprehension across the two communities. The third project examined the sustainability of achievement gains after the end of these interventions and the practices that led to sustainability. The final project built on findings from the sustainability project by adding a home–school partnership component to see how families could support school efforts in improving literacy achievement. When schools continued to partner with researchers and other external agents, there was a greater likelihood of sustainable outcomes.

Chapter 5, by Claire McLachlan, Alison Arrow, and Judy Watson, also focuses on literacy improvement in early years as an outcome focus. The authors discuss two different approaches to conducting research on literacy: one with a professional learning event and the other with a more intensive coaching and guiding strategy that helped teachers to reflect on their practices about how they might enhance children’s literacy. Both of these projects were situated in early childhood low socioeconomic communities in New Zealand. The interesting aspect of this chapter is that what was learned from the first partnership project was directly incorporated into a new design for the second project. For example, the data collection period was extended over a much longer period of time in the second project, to capture changes in practice and outcomes as they occurred rather than a one-off event. They also discuss a methodological dilemma of setting up a control group that did not have the intervention similar to the groups of interest, only to find that the head teacher of the control center provided her own literacy intervention.

Jenny Ritchie, Janita Craw, Cheryl Rau, and Iris Duhn each provide in Chapter 6 examples of how their projects were situated in social and cultural contexts that provided opportunities and challenges for engag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Maggie MacLure
• Foreword by Richard Johnson
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Re-generating Research Partnerships in Early Childhood Education: A Non-idealized Vision
• 3. Attunement of Knowledge Forms: The Relational Agency of Researchers, Policy Writers, and Early Childhood Educators
• 4. Developing Effective Research–Practice Partnerships: Lessons from a Decade of Partnering with Schools in Poor Urban Communities
• 5. Partnership in Promoting Literacy: An Exploration of Two Studies in Low-Decile Early Childhood Settings in New Zealand
• 6. Ko koe ki tēna, ko ahau ki tēnei kīwai o te kete: Exploring Collaboration across a Range of Recent Early Childhood Studies
• 7. An Ongoing Exploration of Uncertainty: Ethical Identities—Ours and Children’s
• 8. Teacher Reflection in Early Years Partnership Research Projects: But It’s No Use Going Back to Yesterday, because I Was a Different Person Then (Says Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
• 9. Conclusion: Research Partnerships in Early Years Education
• Index