Valerie Drew

Extending the constructs of active learning: implications for teachers' pedagogy and practice

Active learning is a pedagogical construct widely appealed to within the global discourse of lifelong learning. However, an examination of the literature reveals a lack of clarity and consensus as to its meaning. This article provides a critical analysis of a range of dimensions underpinning the concept of active learning including policy discourses, definitions, interpretation and enactments in educational settings, and resultant pedagogical implications. A more robust theoretical framework is presented to support educator understanding which synthesises and extends current constructs and which bridges the divide between active learning considered as either theory of learning or pedagogical strategy.

Relays and relations: tracking a policy initiative for improving teacher professionalism

This paper offers a new way of exploring some of the complexities inherent in attempts by policy makers and others to promote educational change. The focus of this study is on the current drive in education policy to alter the basis of teacher professionalism through the application of principles of lifelong learning to teachers’ professional development. Drawing upon data from two studies of the Chartered Teacher (CT) initiative in Scotland the paper examines the formation of successive transmission points as material relays of relations during the process of implementing this policy objective. It explores how three key discursive elements of a professional standard for accomplished teaching: collaborative action, critical reflection and enquiry, and teacher leadership, were progressively recontextualised during the introduction of CT status in schools. The findings indicate some of the conceptual and political struggles involved at the critical junctures where policy implementation requires the movement of a discourse from one social context to another. The paper suggests that a discursive analysis of how a centrally mandated initiative is transmitted can help to promote an understanding of the complexities of this process and increase critical awareness of the issues at stake for those involved.

Curriculum development through critical collaborative professional enquiry

Purpose – In recent years, there has been considerable interest within education policy in collaborative professional enquiry/inquiry methodologies, both as an alternative to top-down implementation of change and for the purpose of fostering educational improvement. However, researchers have been critical of this approach, pointing to various concerns: these include the risk of reducing a developmental methodology to an instrumental means for delivering policy, as well as issues around sustainability of practices. The purpose of this paper is to describe a Scottish university/local authority partnership, which developed an approach entitled Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry, designed to address some of these concerns. The paper also reports on empirical outcomes related to the partnership project. Design/methodology/approach – This interpretivist study generated qualitative data from multiple sources, utilising a range of methods including semi-structured interviews with teachers and school lead...

Doing action research in organizations: Using communicative spaces to facilitate (transformative) professional learning

This paper considers the nature of professional learning arising through the processes of carrying out action research in professional organizations. It suggests that communicative space opened up outside of the professional context can lead to unanticipated professional learning. Such learning could be considered transformative in the way it leads professionals to reframe their understanding of the dilemma arising from doing action research. To illustrate this, two cases are presented to show the pivotal role university tutors can play not only in the way they create and maintain communicative space but also in the way they purposefully employ strategies to interrupt and challenge viewpoints, assumptions and practices held by professionals doing action research, enabling professional learning to become transformative.

Learning analytics: challenges and limitations

ABSTRACT Learning analytic implementations are increasingly being included in learning management systems in higher education. We lay out some concerns with the way learning analytics – both data and algorithms – are often presented within an unproblematized Big Data discourse. We describe some potential problems with the often implicit assumptions about learning and learners – and indeed the tendency not to theorize learning explicitly – that underpin such implementations. Finally, we describe an attempt to devise our own analytics, grounded in a sociomaterial conception of learning. We use the data obtained to suggest that the relationships between learning and the digital traces left by participants in online learning are far from trivial, and that any analytics that relies on these as proxies for learning tends towards a behaviorist evaluation of learning processes.

Teacher Sense-Making in School-Based Curriculum Development Through Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry

The success or otherwise of mandated curriculum reform policy has been widely discussed within the literature (e.g. Cuban in Teachers College Record 99: 453–477, 1998). A major issue is the ‘implementation gap’ (Supovitz and Weinbaum in The Implementation gap: understanding reform in high schools. Teachers College Press, New York, pp. 1–21, 2008) between policy intention and classroom practice, due to the potential for teachers to significantly modify the intrinsic logics of the curriculum policy to match the institutional logics of the setting where it is enacted (Young in The curriculum of the future: from the “new sociology of education” to a critical theory of learning. Routledge, London, 1998).

Humour and laughter in meetings: Influence, decision-making and the emergence of leadership

Recent constructions view leadership as a process of social influence which coordinates processes of change. Moreover, such processes are not necessarily linked to role hierarchy but may be emergent and distributed within teams. However, the micro-processes through which this occurs are not well understood. The significance of the article lies in its contribution to an understanding of the emergence of leadership in teams, and in particular how humour and laughter are drawn on as a resource by which to exert social influence. Here, we use the construct of the play frame, ‘non-serious’ talk in which participants jointly construct extended humorous sequences as improvisations, to analyse how team members manoeuvre in order to accomplish influence, decision-making and leadership. In taking this approach, we are not concerned with considerations of how managers use jokes to exercise control, or workers use humour to subvert management. Rather, we examine how humour, and particularly the laughter it engenders, can contribute to an understanding of organisations as centred on communication and founded on the precept that organisations are ‘talked into being’. We show how talk in a play frame institutes a context which can be utilised by participants to exert influence, and we demonstrate the highly contingent and contextual nature of the emergence of leadership within teams.

Enacting educational partnership: collective identity, decision-making (and the importance of muffin chat)

ABSTRACT The rhetoric of partnership is ubiquitous in the current policy context. In education, partnerships take a number of forms among which is ‘interorganisational collaboration’ (IOC), defined as a partnership between institutions/organisations aimed at developing synergistic solutions to complex problems. But policy has a tendency to veneer, obscuring its enactment. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine what such partnerships look like on the ground. Here we present an empirical analysis which aims to produce knowledge about the working of such collaborative groups and to provide insights into leadership within such partnerships. Drawing on communicative constitution of organisations operationalised within a schema for understanding the emergence of collective identity in IOC, we undertake an analysis of meetings held by a working group comprising academics and local authority staff set up to develop masters-level work-based professional learning for teachers. We ask, how do professionals working within different contexts create a collective identity that supports decision-making, and what are the implications for leadership?

Small data, online learning and assessment practices in higher education: a case study of failure?

Abstract In this paper, we present an in-depth case study of a single student who failed an online module which formed part of a master’s programme in Professional Education and Leadership. We use this case study to examine assessment practices in higher education in the online environment. In taking this approach, we go against the current predilection for Big Data which has given rise to ‘learning analytics’, a data-intensive approach to monitoring learning. In particular, we draw attention to the model of the learner produced by learning analytics and to issues of ‘dataveillance’ in online learning. We also use the case to examine assessment in higher education more broadly, exploring the tensions between the requirements for certification and the need for learning. We conclude that assessment practices in higher education may have more to do with ‘quality assurance’ and regulatory frameworks than with ‘enhancing the student experience’ and inculcating the qualities that mark out higher education as an ethical project.