Session Information
01 SES 09 A, Teacher Professional Learning and Development in Europe (Part 1)
Symposium to be continued in 01 SES 11 A
Contribution
The critical inquiry proposed here was intended as an exploration of how conceptualizations of learning, responsibility and change have been articulated through the pandemic crisis. Issues framing teachers’ professional learning and development, along with the dynamics of roles and architectures of temporality shaping the meaning-making and the policy-making processes, were rendered visible. In discussing their normative implications for teachers’ professional learning and development (PLD), I proposed taking a more complex view (Strom, Mills and Abrams, 2021) of the multiplicity of co-evolving conditions and factors explaining the dynamics of change during crisis (Rikowski, 2020; Sayed et al., 2021). This meant looking for historical, systemic, structural, political and cultural connections with the context of continuing professional development in Romania. A number of 66 policy documents and policy statements issued by government actors, NGOs, experts (local members of the academic or non-academic community), stakeholders (professional bodies, trade unions, etc.) and market actors have been sampled for analysis. Analytically, positions theory (Davies & Harré, 1990) and critical frame analysis (hereafter, CFA) (Dombos et al, 2012) have been employed to look at how issues of teachers’ professional learning and development have been articulated in the education policy debates in Romania between March 2020 and June 2021. The analysis resulted in unpacking conceptual and processual factors constraining innovative approaches to teachers’ PLD that the pandemic crisis might have harboured. Some of these constraints have systemic and structural roots. Others are epistemic and could remain concealed, should the inquiry abide by linear models of framing the research design, as Kennedy (2016) warns. The greater risk associated with linear approaches to conceptualizing learning, responsibility and change through crisis, rests with hindering the ethical and political responsibilities conjoined with innovating teachers’ PLD. The pandemic crisis has provided great opportunities to see that innovating the teachers’ professional learning is not only about asking what or how, but also by whom and towards which horizon of possibilities. These questions demand that we recognize the complex multitude of factors and agencies cutting into post-pandemic innovative approaches to PLD, and that we place this recognition more in service of developing solidarity and socially just educational practices, than in serving neoliberal agendas of performativity, progress and competitiveness.
References
Davies, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the theory of social behaviour, 20(1), 43-63. Dombos T, Krizsan A, Verloo M, Zentai V (2012) Critical Frame Analysis: A Comparative Methodology for the QUING Project. Working Paper Series, Center for Policy Studies. Central European University. Hungary: Budapest. http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00006845/01/cps-working-paper-critical-frame-analysis-quing-2012.pdf [downloaded April 2020] Kennedy, M.M. (2016) How does professional development improve teaching?, Review of Educational Research, 20 (10), pp. 1-36. DOI: 10.3102/0034654315626800 Rikowski, G (2020). Crisis: critical reflections on the language of neoliberalism in education. Routledge. Strom, K., Mills, T. and Abrams, L (2021) Illuminating a continuum of complex perspectives in teacher development, Professional Development in Education, 47 (2-3), pp.199-208, DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2021.1901005 Sayed, Yusuf, Cooper, Adam, & John, Vaughn M.. (2021). Crises and disruptions: Educational reflections, (re)imaginings, and (re)vitalization. Journal of Education (University of KwaZulu-Natal), (84), pp. 9-30. https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i84a01
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