Ruth Leitch

Teachers' and teacher educators' lives: the role of emotion

Abstract This paper reports research which focuses on ways of enhancing understandings by teachers of the key role that emotions play in their personal professional growth. It combines the narrative, autobiographical accounts of teachers attending part-time masters degree programmes in England (Continuing Professional Development and School Improvement) and Northern Ireland (Personal and Social Development) with an interrogation of the underlying values which affect the practices of their tutors. It reveals the effects of powerful and often unacknowledged interaction between personal biography and professional and social contexts upon teachers in schools and higher education.

Limitations of language: developing arts‐based creative narrative in stories of teachers’ identities

This paper is based on a multidimensional study employing a heuristic methodology termed ‘creative narrative’ that combines arts‐based methods with narrative inquiry. Six female teachers’ narratives of identity are explored through artistic, visual images to illuminate if and how they story ‘unconscious’. The creative narratives, illuminated through a multi‐layered extract from one creative narrative, illustrate various ways in which the participants imputed meaning and power to tacit and non‐conscious influences which were emotionally potent but previously hidden from themselves and others and that continued to affect their professional identities. The paper argues that such unconscious or non‐conscious dimensions to teachers’ lives are crucial to the experience and exercise of professional identity and yet are largely absent from our understandings and outside the capture of narrative inquiry as it is presently conceptualized. Narrative inquiry should strive to extend its theoretical boundaries and incorporate non‐verbal arts‐based research methods in order to go beyond the limits of language and capture the meaning of lived experience in more holistic ways.

Caged birds and cloning machines: how student imagery ‘speaks’ to us about cultures of schooling and student participation

With the advent of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), there is an increasing requirement that schools ensure children and young people’s views are voiced, listened to and taken seriously on matters of significance. Encouraging these shifts by law is one thing; changing the culture in schools is another. For a significant proportion of schools, actively engaging students’ voices on how they experience education poses a significant challenge, and crucial gaps may exist between the rhetoric espoused and a school’s readiness for genuine student involvement. This ethnographic study illuminates tensions that persist between headteachers’ espoused views of how students are valued and students’ creative images of their actual post-primary schooling experience. If cultures of schooling are to nurture the true spirit of democratic pupil participation implied by changes in the law, there is a need to develop genuine processes of student engagement in which students and staff can collaborate towards greater shared understandings of a school’s priorities.

Consulting pupils in Assessment for Learning classrooms: the twists and turns of working with students as co‐researchers

Research literature on students as researchers demonstrates a spectrum of constructive ways in which students are being actively engaged in school and classroom action inquiries. Any identified tensions lie in the degree to which students themselves are genuinely engaged as action researchers. Increasingly, externally driven agendas for change and improvement are appropriating action research as means to facilitate teachers in developing new skills and tailor‐making national initiatives. According students appropriately democratic roles in such research processes are a lot less evident. This paper illustrates and discusses some of the difficulties, tensions and positive outcomes of engaging with students as co‐researchers at Key Stage 3 within a nationally funded project that intersects an action research policy framework supporting the introduction of Assessment for Learning throughout Northern Ireland. Issues discussed include student research advisory groups, students as data gatherers and students acting as co‐interpreters of video‐taped and image‐based classroom data.

Masks as self‐study. Challenging and sustaining teachers’ personal and professional personae in early–mid career life phases

Drawing on previous research identifying how teachers’ capacities to sustain their effectiveness in different phases of their professional lives are affected positively and/or negatively by their sense of identity, this paper illuminates three early–mid career teachers’ self‐study inquiries, centring on mask work. The creative development of individual masks discloses teachers’ complex, occasionally dislocated narratives of personal/professional identity. Subsequent improvisation with their masks is shown to engage teachers emotionally with tensions and dissonances within and between their various personae and personal, professional and political contexts at each of their respective career life phases. Storylines ultimately become reframed and, in a number of instances, lay claim to reinvigorated commitment, self‐determination and initiatives for change.

Reflective Processes in Action: mapping personal and professional contexts for learning and change

Abstract Although reflection is widely considered to be a type of learning from experience central to professional learning and the development of practice (Loughran, 1996), its metacognitive, contemplative and emotional processes in continuing professional development remain underresearched. This article reports on an in-depth, empirical investigation of the purposes and processes of reflection, which contribute positively and negatively to the effectiveness of teachers, nurses and psychologists learning. Through ‘mapping’ personal and professional contexts for learning and change on a doctoral level in-service course, it raises issues concerning the relationship between reflection and change at least at the espoused level. The findings (i) suggest the need for ‘providers’ of in-service (and other forms of collaborative work in which reflection is used as a means of learning), to engage with the cognitive and affective, personal and professional learning histories, and present contexts of participants and (ii) explore how these may provide a means of increasing the capacities of the participants themselves to engage in reflective practices as a way of developing, maintaining and enhancing their professionalism. It concludes that further client-centred, systematic research on the phenomenology of reflection and its relationship to the role of emotion is required in order to have a fuller understanding of how reflective processes may operate to improve practice

Harnessing the Slipstream: Building Educational Research Capacity in Northern Ireland. Size Matters.

Northern Ireland is uniquely distinguished from England, Scotland and Wales, by being a society in transition, emerging from a prolonged period of civil conflict and political instability that has affected its infrastructure and has increased the need for co‐ordinated and specialist research. The current paper traces some of the systemic challenges and opportunities for educational research capacity building that arise from Northern Ireland being uniquely positioned as a small polity and critically appraises how initiatives elsewhere to build capacity in teacher education, while providing valuable exemplars, are unlikely to transfer readily to this context. Rather, building on an expanded definition of research capacity, Northern Ireland needs to capitalise cautiously on the current climate of openness between policy‐maker and researcher communities. In so doing, the goals are to develop a shared, cohesive agenda, provide a sound evidence base, improve research support and harness the strengths and pockets of excellence that exist. All of these should simultaneously meet local research priorities, address the developmental capacity building needs of local researchers, while at the same time contributing to local, national and international knowledge production.

Where there is smoke, there is (the potential for) fire: soft indicators of research and policy impact

There is a growing literature examining the impact of research on informing policy, and of research and policy on practice. Research and policy do not have the same types of impact on practice but can be evaluated using similar approaches. Sometimes the literature provides a platform for methodological debate but mostly it is concerned with how research can link to improvements in the process and outcomes of education, how it can promote innovative policies and practice, and how it may be successfully disseminated. Whether research‐informed or research‐based, policy and its implementation is often assessed on such ‘hard’ indicators of impact as changes in the number of students gaining five or more A to C grades in national examinations or a percentage fall in the number of exclusions in inner city schools. Such measures are necessarily crude, with large samples smoothing out errors and disguising instances of significant success or failure. Even when ‘measurable’ in such a fashion, however, the impact of any educational change or intervention may require a period of years to become observable. This paper considers circumstances in which short‐term change may be implausible or difficult to observe. It explores how impact is currently theorized and researched and promotes the concept of ‘soft’ indicators of impact in circumstances in which the pursuit of conventional quantitative and qualitative evidence is rendered impractical within a reasonable cost and timeframe. Such indicators are characterized by their avowedly subjective, anecdotal and impressionistic provenance and have particular importance in the context of complex community education issues where the assessment of any impact often faces considerable problems of access. These indicators include the testimonies of those on whom the research intervention or policy focuses (for example, students, adult learners), the formative effects that are often reported (for example, by head teachers, community leaders) and media coverage. The collation and convergence of a wide variety of soft indicators (Where there is smoke …) is argued to offer a credible means of identifying subtle processes that are often neglected as evidence of potential and actual impact (… there is fire).

Outside the spoon drawer, naked and skinless in search of my professional esteem : The tale of an academic pro

This autoethnography explores the pain and unexpectedness of personal and professional learning in being challenged to find an other “voice” after years of being a “responsible anarchist” within the academy’s traditional expectations. It tells of the emotions in setting forth on a self-chosen quest to uncover and understand the history of the author’s shame as a female academic with management responsibility but without a doctorate until relatively late in her career and some of the ways in which she chose unconsciously to ameliorate this along the way. The commitment to persist with the process of writing that explores emotional resistances born of history, images, and experiences of vulnerability was a deeply personal, embodied experience for the author. Indirectly, the experience of the story demonstrates how writing spontaneously and unknowingly with a desire for self-understanding has the power to uncover what goes on below the surface of experience and identity.

Targeting Social Need in a Divided Society: An Evaluation of a Community-Based Adult Education Initiative.

Abstract This article examines the impact of a community-based adult education initiative designed to target social need in Northern Ireland. Set against a backdrop of extreme civil unrest and disadvantageous socio-economic conditions a cohort of adults was identified to participate in a personal and social development programme. The initiative was funded from Peace and Reconciliation resources made available to Northern Ireland by the European Union. High levels of unemployment and negativity about previous learning experiences were characteristic features among participants. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the programme was carried out and a follow-up qualitative survey ensued 6 months after the completion of the training. Results indicate that the learner-centred methodology was effective in providing a gateway to further education and training and enhancing participants’ self-esteem, confidence, motivation, tolerance, social skills, community involvement and employability.