Petra Ponte

Don't wait till the cows come home: action research and initial teacher education in three different countries

This article outlines the experiences of educators in three teacher education institutes in the USA, Australia and the UK as they experiment with carrying out programmes based on ideas of action research. The emphasis is on experiences with programmes of initial education for secondary school teachers. A descriptive case study aimed to find out what critical issues teacher educators on the three courses experienced as they attempted to work with programmes based on ideas of action research and what we can learn from that. The data were gathered by means of semi‐structured interviews.1 In this study action research is conceived as an interactive method by which teachers and student teachers can develop knowledge. The paper first presents the theoretical framework, followed by the research design and presentation of the findings and finally the conclusion and discussion. The educators in all three institutes reported that students mastered simple, non‐systematic forms of reflection before they were able to carry out fully‐fledged action research in a systematic way and that they learned to master action research by doing it. Courses extending over several years with ideas of action research running through them as a constant theme provided the most fertile ground for this. The programmes seemed to have the best chance of success when there was commitment, continuity and communication in the education team. It was also important that it was not only the institutes or only the schools that had a say over the education of teachers: a shared say created better conditions for programmes based on action research.

Relational architectures: recovering solidarity and agency as living practices in education

This article will explore education, pedagogy and praxis (morally informed and committed action oriented by tradition, and ‘history‐making action’) through the lens of the ‘relational’. The article brings together empirical investigations of professional development and classroom teaching to explicate the role of this relational dimension, via the concept of ‘practice architectures’. The first section describes what is meant by the term practice architectures and introduces the notion of ‘relational architectures’ as a vehicle for understanding the crucial role relationships in education, including interpersonal relationships (between actors in social settings) and institutional relationships (within systems and organisations). The second section tests this notion of relational architectures by examining it in light of the day‐to‐day, living practices in cases of educational practice. The third section defends a position that education is compromised wherever the relational dimension in educational practice is not properly addressed, that failure to attend to the relational may empty education of its moral and social purpose. Further, failure to attend to the relational also threatens agency and solidarity among participants in those practices. In our view, restoring focus on the relational dimensions of education will sustain future educational and societal growth, and provide resources of hope for educators: a sense of cohesion of purpose, commonality of direction (solidarity), and a sense of collective power and control (agency).

Action research and teacher leadership

The present article reports on a case study into the influence and impact of action research carried out by teachers in a special school. The action research was an important component of the two‐year, post‐initial, in‐service course in special educational needs, provided by Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Department of Inclusive and Special Education. From the outset the case study was based on the premise that action research can be seen as a strategy for teacher leadership. Not only was it expected to help teachers to get to grips with their own work in the classroom, it was anticipated that their action research would also have an impact on the work of others in the school. We found that this was indeed the case, provided certain conditions were met.

Researching Classroom Communications and Relations in the Light of Social Justice.

This article discusses participative action research performed by a network consisting of researchers and student-teachers of a University of Applied Sciences and teachers and pupils of four primary schools in the Netherlands. The research took place in the context of the research group ‘Behaviour and Research in the Educational Praxis’. The primary schools focused on inclusive education in order to allow children with special educational needs to participate in mainstream schools. The central idea of the research project was to integrate the insiders’ perspective of the teachers with the outsiders’ perspective of the university researchers. Therefore, the research project combined process and content goals. The research lasted from September 2008 to June 2010, and consisted of five different stages: orientation, general and specific exploration, reconstruction and overall analysis. This article describes the goals and results of each of these stages. The article concludes with a final discussion on the main findings. An important result included a nuanced view of teachers on their power position in the classroom. Teachers facilitated children to increase their own responsibility for their behaviour and their interaction with their classmates and the teacher. This seemed to provide a basis for a more organic order in the classroom, which was less dependent on the interventions of the teacher.

Pedagogy as human science, bildung and action research: Swedish and Dutch reflections

Action research can be understood as a complex interplay between local circumstances and local research traditions, embedded in their turn in local intellectual–philosophical traditions, national as well as international. Because of this interplay it is questionable whether it would be particularly fruitful to look for ‘typical local forms of action research’. In this article we will reflect on this issue, and we base our reflections on the Nordic tradition of bildung (bildning) and the continental European tradition of pedagogy as human science. As a departure for the reflections, illustrations will be used of what is actually happening with regard to action research in our own countries of the Netherlands and Sweden.

How do teachers legitimize their classroom interactions in terms of educational values and ideals

An important dimension of teachers’ professional judgments is connected to their educational values and ideals. Teachers’ professional judgments are not only informed by instrumental considerations but also affected by what they consider to be educationally worthwhile, that is, what teachers consider to be in their pupils’ best interest. This study explores the substance of teachers’ educational values and beliefs that underlie their daily classroom interactions. The guiding research question is ‘How do teachers legitimize their daily classroom interactions in terms of educational values and ideals?’ A structured interview procedure was conducted with thirty-seven teachers. With the help of a conceptual framework based on the compound question, ‘Who should be taught what, how, when and why?’, a systematic analysis of the interview data was conducted. This resulted in a typology of six legitimization types that teachers used when interpreting their classroom interactions in terms of their pupils’ best interest: (1) a caring legitimization type, (2) a personal legitimization type, (3) a contextual legitimization type, (4) a critical legitimization type, (5) a functional legitimization type, and (6) a psychological legitimization type. A legitimization type entails a systematic description of what teachers consider to be educationally worthwhile. This typology of legitimizations could contribute to the development of an educational vocabulary that enables teachers to inquire, articulate and discuss their educational values and ideals in a deliberate manner.

Developing a descriptive framework for comprehending the inherent moral significance of teaching

Developing a descriptive framework is one step in the complex process of theory development in qualitative research. This complexity is especially evident when analysing data about how teachers interpret the inherent moral significance of their classroom interactions. A common way of gathering data is to follow an iterative process, in which both theoretical concepts and empirical data play an important part. Theoretical concepts to describe teachers interpretations of the inherent moral significance of their classroom interactions could be offered by continental European pedagogiek. However, because of difficulties connecting these pedagogische theories to empirical data directly, an intermediary operation was required. To meet this requirement the central pedagogische question: ‘Who should be taught what, how, when, and why?’ was used as the starting point for the development of the framework. This article sets out in detail the process of getting from this question to a framework that is able to describe teachers interpretations of the inherent moral significance of their classroom interactions.

Inquiry-Based Professional Learning in Educational Praxis: Knowing Why, What and How

A view of teachers and pupils consistently comes across in Susan Groundwater-Smith’s work that is far removed from current neoliberal thinking: thinking which is characterised by an emphasis on standardisation of education. The desire to standardise stems from a mechanistic view of humankind. Repudiation of a mechanistic view of humankind rests among other things on the idea that people construct their reality by giving meaning to it and that these meanings vary from person to person, from situation to situation and over time. Even more important, however, is the fact that a mechanistic view of education ignores its most fundamental attribute, which is that education is essentially a moral endeavour. In our chapter, we will argue that therefore the reality of education has to be reinterpreted over and over again. We will explore this idea with a praxis model that takes most of its inspiration from the work of Weber, Mannheim and Habermas. Praxis is social practice that can always be judged in terms of the ‘what, how and why’. We will then go on to relate our praxis model—which we have developed from empirical research—to inquiry-based professional learning in teacher education courses.