The complex intersection among freedom, responsibilities and rights continues to frame European national and international development and European education research alike. Politically this intersection has encompassed debates about sovereignty, development and the recognition of marginalised communities. Educationally it has included a focus on the ways in which individual and communal learning can enhance and/or inhibit positive outcomes for particular groups of learners.

This paper explores this link between political and educational freedom, responsibilities and rights by examining the implications for European theorising, policy-making and practice of empirical research in two non-European sites of continuing professional development. One site is a hospital still in project development phase in the Middle East. The other site is early career researchers in a faculty of education at an Australian regional university (Danaher, 2008; Harreveld & Danaher, 2009).

The goal is to distil significant lessons for the European context from two distinctive locations of professional learning. This is based on the assumption that the provision of effective continuing professional development is neither easy nor uncontested. There is a growing range of competitors for organisations’ professional learning budgets, including in-house units that cater specifically to the institution’s agenda, and the budgets are increasingly under threat as seemingly more urgent priorities intervene. The onus is on providers to ensure value for money and to provide evidence of effectiveness for the professional communities whom they serve.

The objective of the project was to identify ways in which European and global approaches to continuing professional development can be reviewed and reinvigorated through a comparative study of trends in selected settings in the Middle East and Australia. The paper presents answers to two research questions: 1) what are the key features, strengths and limitations of the two sets of continuing professional development for expatriate western nurses and Australian early career researchers?; and 2) what are the synergies between those sets and new understandings of educational and political freedom, responsibilities and rights?

The paper’s theoretical framework brings together two elements. Firstly, various conceptualisations of freedom are canvassed, including the interdependence between freedom and ethics (Sikes & Piper, 2011) and the connection between freedom and agency (Marginson, 2008; Wright, 2011). Secondly, the notion of continuing professional development is interrogated simultaneously from the perspectives of the individual agent (Bailey, Curtis, & Nunan, 2001) and the professional communities in which personal learning is activated and enacted (Stoll & Seahorse Louis, 2007). Together these elements highlight the conceptual complexity of freedom and its crucial role in underpinning notions of professional development and learning.

Bailey, K. M., Curtis, A., & Nunan, D. (2001). Pursuing professional development: The self as source. Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle. Danaher, P. A. (2008). Teleological pressures and ateleological possibilities on and for a fragile learning community: Implications for framing lifelong learning futures for Australian university academics. In D. Orr, P. A. Danaher, G. R. Danaher & R. E. Harreveld (Eds.), Lifelong learning: Reflecting on successes and framing futures: Keynote and refereed papers from the 5th international lifelong learning conference, Yeppoon, Central Queensland, Australia, 16-19 June 2008: Hosted by Central Queensland University (pp. 130-135). Rockhampton, Qld: Lifelong Learning Conference Committee, Central Queensland University Press. Gerring, J. (2007). Case study research: Principles and practices. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harreveld, R. E., & Danaher, P. A. (2009, August 27). Fostering and restraining a community of academic learning: Possibilities and pressures in a postgraduate and early career researcher group at an Australian university. Paper presented at the 13th biennial conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Marginson, S. (2008). Global field and global imagining: Bourdieu and worldwide higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(3), 303-315. Seawright, J., & Gerring, J. (2008, June). Case selection techniques in case study research: A menu of qualitative and quantitative options. Political Research Quarterly, 61(2), 294-308. Sikes, P., & Piper, H. (Eds.) (2011). Ethics and academic freedom in educational research. London: Routledge. Stoll, L., & Seashore Louis, K. (Eds.) (2007). Professional learning communities: Divergence, depth and dilemmas. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. Wright, P. R. (2011). Agency, intersubjectivity and drama education: The power to be and do more. In S. Schonmann (Ed.), Key concepts in theatre/draft education (pp. 111-115). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.