Session Information
10 SES 09 A, Research in Teacher Education: Cultures and Methodologies
Paper Session
Contribution
Overview and research questions
This paper is an account of our action enquiries, as a higher education-based professional developer (McNiff) and publisher (McDonnell) into how we can support education practitioners in global cross-cultural settings to study their practices and make public their research accounts as they ask questions of the kind, ‘How do we improve our work?’ (Whitehead, 1989). Appreciating the significance of Stenhouse’s (1983) views of research as systematic enquiry made public we also ask, ‘How do we enable practitioners to speak for themselves while contributing to inter-national policy formation and implementation?’
Aims
Our research focuses on helping educators appreciate what counts as (a) high quality action enquiries and (b) high quality research reports, key issues in global policy debates about the nature and organisation of professional education; and we help them get their work published through print and electronic outlets. In presenting this paper we explain how and why we hold ourselves publicly accountable for these practices. We believe that, by sharing the accounts of practitioners, and our own, a new knowledge base may be created to show how people in cross-cultural dialogical communities of practice may re-identify themselves as agents for organisational renewal, especially in contexts that are instantiations of psychological demoralisation through institutional de-moralisation, as we now explain.
Theoretical frameworks
We appreciate the link between psychological demoralisation (Clarke et al, 2002), where people feel a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, and organisational de-moralisation (Broudy, 1981), for example, when an organisation is driven by technical-rational values and so positions practitioners as means towards organisational ends rather than ends in themselves (MacIntyre, 1984). This situation denies our perceptions of others and ourselves as persons who wish to realise their natality (Arendt, 1958); who can exercise their agency through speaking for themselves (Foucault’s 2001 idea of parrhesia); and whose responsibility is to exercise their intellectual freedom as public intellectuals (Said, 2004). Thus we encourage individuals to take control of their practices through offering descriptions and explanations of their work as their living educational theories (Whitehead, 1989) and re-identifying themselves as educational researchers and creators of original knowledge. Following Dewey’s (1933) ideas about practitioners’ capacity for theorising, and linking this capacity with processes of social evolution (Popper, 1952), we see practitioner-researchers’ explications of their work as a major contributing factor in enabling those organisations to reclaim moral responsibility for their social purposes.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
References Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Broudy, H. (1981) Truth and Credibility. New York, Longman. Clarke, D. and Kissane, D. (2002) ‘Demoralization: its phenomenology and importance’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (36) 733–742. Dewey, J. (1933) How We Think. New York, Free Press. Foucault, M. (2001) Fearless Speech. Los Angeles, CA, Semiotext(e). MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Philosophy. London, Duckworth. McNiff, J. and Whitehead, J. (2006) All You Need to Know about Action Research. London, Sage. Popper, K. (1952) The Poverty of Historicism. London, Routledge. Said, E. (1993), Representations of the Intellectual. London, Vintage. Stenhouse, L. (1983) ‘Research is Systematic Enquiry Made Public’, British Educational Research Journal. 9(1): 11–20. Whitehead, J. (1989) ‘Creating a living educational theory from questions of the kind, “How do I improve my practice?”’, Cambridge Journal of Education 19(1): 13¬7¬–53.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.