Learning Communities And The Doctoral Journey: Exploring Understandings Of Place

Author(s):

Janinka Greenwood(presenting / submitting)Joanna Lim(presenting)Md Al Amin Mahammad Abul Hasnat Muhammed Mahbubur Rahaman Safayet Alam

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 07 D,

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

17:15-18:45

Room:

325.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Marit Ulvik

Contribution

There are shifts in doctoral study in education. Numbers of applicants escalate. Budgetary constaints on academic time and expenditure intensify. There is increasing student mobility with consequent increase in the multiculturalism of doctoral communities. And as research projects proliferate there is even more need to find ways to ensure doctoral projects are meaningful and that doctoral study is rich and challenging.

This paper reports a further stage of a project tracking the development of a doctoral learning community in a university college of education. A report of the emergence of the learning community and its early interactions and collaborations was presented at ECER 2014 (Greenwood, Alam, Salahuddin, Barrett, Nawi & Rasheed, 2014). While the larger community continues a number of processes of collaborations (such as the staging of an in-house conference focusing on doctoral students’ discoveries about the research process, and continuing support of social networks), the size of the community has led to some splintering into smaller (and somewhat fluid) working groups. This paper reports the work of one such group. The students in this group are multi-national, at varying stages of progress in their candidature, and they share a common interest in educational change, in capacity building for their home contexts, and in research methodologies are critically interpretative and emergent (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). The group collaborates in a number of ways: including regular ‘hot seat’ sessions where one of them will invite discussion on an issue s/he is currently wrestling with; seminars in which themes and concepts of common interest are explored with one or more supervisors; symposia with visiting international academics; and collaborations in conference presentations and publications. A challenge individuals grappled with is the need to strongly contextualise their projects, particularly when the social and economic conditions, history, and values of their home country (sites of their field work) may be different from those that gave rise to leading academic literature in their field. This led to a collaborative exploration of theorisations of the concept of place, and of the ways such theorisations might illuminate or problematise their work.

This paper reports ways participants have deconstructed place and how that has impacted on how they interpret the meaning of their research. It also reports key aspects of ways the group functioned as a learning community, particularly ways they co-constructed understandings, critiqued and refined each other’s analyses and developing theorisations, and dealt with multiplicity of perspectives and managed dichotomy and tension. One such tension that was confronted and continuously explored was between deconstructing the homogenisation that takes place through the imposition of dominant externally originated epistemologies and the need for looking outside one’s own context and for strategic and useful adaptation.

The paper addresses place as a complex, multi-faceted and dynamic concept that includes physical, social, experiential and historic aspects, and engages with the concepts of learning that acknowledge it as dynamic, experiential and interactional. It draws on concepts of the critically interactive and creative nature of learning communities (Lave & Wagner, 1991; Wegner, 1998), the processes of participatory action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000).

We play with the theorisation that what transforms a community of practice into a learning community is the process of questioning, and that what holds the learning community together as a community of practice is adaptability (Greenwood, 2015).

The themes explored in this paper align with the conference theme of transition. We build on the developing understandings of learning as situated and knowledge as contextualised, we explore a case where there is a shift in the management of doctoral study, particularly fostering collaborations, we track shifts in individual and group understandings.

Method

The methodolgical approach is one of case study within a broadly qualitative framework. The intention is to provide a situation specific (Stake, 2003) and thick description (Greetz, 1988) of the critical events and processes in the collaborations of the learning community and of participants’ understandings of its operation and usefulness/shortcomings, as well as a report of their particular explorations of place. The data is twofold. Firstly we have collected how our each of the partcipants in our group understands, anlyses and utilises the concept of place in their own research. Secondly we report how we have probed these individual understanding to develop a critical platform from which each can reflect on their own perspectives and challenge each others. Case study allows an investigative approach that focuses on the complex and dynamic nature of experience. As Stake (2003) explains, each case has its own unique history and is a multifaceted entity operating within a number of contexts. Because this particular case is one where a community develops and changes we have also found it useful to draw on aspects of improvisational theory as developed by organisational theorists (Vera & Crossan, 2004; Leybourne, 2006). Kamoche, Cunha & Cunha (2003) define improvisation “as the concept of action as it unfolds, drawing on available cognitive, affective, social and material resources” and relate these processes to “organisational phenomena, ranging from teamwork and creativity to product innovation and organisational adaptation and renewal”. This approach has also led us to the use of narratives (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004), as means of capturing the complex interplay of perspectives and the dynamics of change. Participatory Action Research (PAR) (Brydon-Miller, Kral, Maguire, Noffke, & Sabhlok, 2012; Zuber-Skerritt, 1996) may be seen as an umbrella term for methodologies that involve participants as co-researchers and that progress through successive cycles of investigation, planning, acting, evaluation. Our collaborative improvisational process thus fits within the broad category of PAR. Our approach seeks to reflect the various goals and perspectives, track the processes of development as well as the outcomes, reflect the complexity of interests, and allow new goals and strategies to emerge as the cycles of the project evolve. Embedded within PAR are investigative and analytical processes of reflective practice (Schön, 1983), which prompt participants to look at their practice through successive critical lenses in order to deconstruct and evaluate work in-action, to map planned unplanned discoveries, confusions and future trajectories.

Expected Outcomes

The overarching project of developing a learning community is still in progress. There have already been a number of material outcomes including cross-national symposia, publications, resource development and specific learning support structures, as well as a continuing detailed case study of the processes of the academic collaboration, with specific findings about the setting up of a learning community, the negotiations and strategies that develop , the divergences and convergences of global and local goals, and the ways in which the parties navigate notions of reciprocity and relevance. In this phase of the project individual evolve their own priorities within the broad scope of a learning community. Outcomes include shifts in their awareness, and the development of strategies to use in contextualizing their own doctoral research. They also include the development of a rich theorisation of place that will be tested in submissions for publication and that will be available for participants to use in their localised practice. Outcomes will also include report and discussion of a research methodology that is both creative and innovative, and that enables the investigation and reporting of complex and multi-vocal projects. At a more aspirational level the personal practice of calibration and sensitivity to place , history and culture will enable participants to develop approaches to research and to schooling that recognise how students and teachers are parts of complex social networks, and that investigate the processes of learning and teaching as multi-directional and evolving.

References

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