01.Professional Learning and Development
Paper
Action Research as Professional Learning
Susanne Francisco1, Anette Forssten Seiser2, Anette Olin3
1Charles Sturt University, Australia; 2Karlstad University, Sweden; 3University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Presenting Author: Francisco, Susanne;
Forssten Seiser, Anette
In education fields action research can be undertaken for a range of purposes. Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon (2014) argue that the purpose of critical participatory action research is to “change social practices” (p.2). Carr and Kemmis (1986) argue that improvement and involvement are the two key aims for action research (p.165). Hardy and Rönnerman (2011) identify action research as a valuable approach to professional learning that supports collaboration, an awareness of the complexity of educator learning, and a focus on site-based practices and arrangements.
For the action research projects that we discuss in this presentation, two of the presenters undertook the role of “academic action researcher” (Platteel et al. 2010, 432). As Olin et al (2016) note, “These practices are characterised by being both researchers and, at the same time, facilitators of professional development who aim to support and empower teacher participants” (p. 424). It is this professional development aspect, and how action research can support that development, that is the focus of this paper.
This paper considers two case studies of action research projects: one with Swedish principals; and the other with Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) teachers of beauty therapy. The Swedish principals’ action research project was part of a higher education course (7,5 credits) and the AR project was undertaken over 14 months. The overall aim of the course was to support a critical approach to principals’ professional practice. The Australian VET teachers project was undertaken with four Beauty Therapy teachers, with a focus on middle-leaders supporting the development of VET pedagogy. The participants in the action research projects were not alone in their learning. Academic facilitators are also learners during these projects (Olin & Pörn, 2021; Olin, Karlberg-Granlund, & Furu; 2016). By focusing on two quite different groups of educators (eg principals and teachers; Sweden and Australia), and different arrangements for the action research projects (one part of a formal qualification and one developed together with the participants as part of a research project to develop VET pedagogy) we hope to identify broader arrangements that enabled and constrained the professional learning of educators through undertaking action research projects.
The research questions for this paper draw on both projects, and the experiences of the academic facilitators. They are:
- What did action research team members report that they learnt as a result of undertaking action research projects?
- What enabled and constrained that learning?
- What did academic facilitators learn through their involvement in the action research projects?
- What enabled and constrained that learning?
These research questions will be considered through the lens of the theory of practice architectures. With a site-based focus on practices, the theory of practice architectures holds that practices are made up of sayings, doings and relatings that ‘hang together’ in a project (Kemmis et al. 2014). These sayings, doings and relatings are prefigured (but not predetermined) by practice architectures present or brought into the site. Sayings are prefigured by the cultural-discursive arrangements in a site, doings are prefigured by the material-economic arrangements in a site; and relatings are prefigured by the social-political arrangements in a site (Kemmis et al. 2014).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis paper draws on two case studies of action research projects: one undertaken in Sweden with school principals, and the other undertaken in Australia by vocational education and training teachers of beauty therapy.
Case 1 – Swedish principals and school leader education
The data in this case consist of assignments produced for a university course for school principals, in combination with observations carried out by one of the article's authors who was also one of the educators in the course. This course was undertaken over 14 months. The principals represented all school sectors (public and private) and school forms (from preschool to VET). The course was designed as action research where participating principals formed research teams based on common issues and dilemmas emerging in their professional leading practices. The course was undertaken in the form of three physical residentials of 2 days each, and two digital meetings (due to Covid). Additionally, each research team met digitally: sometimes by themselves, and sometimes inviting the educator.
Case 2 – Australian teachers of Beauty Therapy
The Australian case study involved an action research team of four Vocational Education and Training (VET) teachers of Beauty Therapy. They developed their project with the framework of pedagogical development, and the basic questions: what are the issues we would like to work on in relation to our teaching practice? What problems are we encountering? With the ongoing support of the academic facilitator the AR team undertook three cycles of action research over a period of nine months. Data collection included action research team meetings via zoom, recorded and transcribed, as well as one team meeting face-to-face; photos of the worksite; emails; documents provided by the team (surveys, survey outcomes, assessment tasks, reflections on their learning and the outcomes); field notes and reflections by the academic facilitators; and interviews with participants.
The data analysis related to the research questions addressed in this presentation will be undertaken in two stages. Thematic analysis related to the research questions (Braun and Clarke, 2006) will form the first layer of analysis. A further layer of analysis will involve the use of the theory of practice architectures to identify practice architectures that enable and constrain professional learning through action research.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsExpected outcomes relate to the research questions
• What action research team members reported that they learnt as a result of undertaking action research projects?
• What enabled and constrained that learning?
• What academic facilitators learnt through their involvement in the action research projects?
• What enabled and constrained that learning?
Initial findings suggest that specific areas of learning varied considerably between the two groups. The broader arrangements that enabled and constrained that learning have more areas of convergence, with power, trust and agency important factors.
ReferencesBraun, V., & Clarke, V. (2021). Thematic Analysis: A practical guide to understanding and doing. Sage.
Forssten Seiser, A. (2021). When the demand for educational research meets practice – A Swedish example. Research in Educational Administration & Leadership, 6(2), 348-376. DOI: 10.30828/real/2021.2.1
Forssten Seiser, Anette. (2020) Exploring enhanced pedagogical leadership: An action research study involving Swedish principals. Educational action research (28 (5) pp 791-806.
Forssten Seiser, A., & Portfelt, I. (2022). Critical aspects to consider when establishing collaboration between school leaders and researchers: two cases from Sweden. Educational action research, 1-16.
Francisco, S., Forssten Seiser, A., & Grice, C. (2021). Professional learning that enables the development of critical praxis. Professional Development in Education, 1-15. doi:10.1080/19415257.2021.1879228
Hardy, I., & Rönnerman, K. (2011). The value and valuing of continuing professional development: current dilemmas, future directions and the case for action research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 41(4), 461-472. doi:10.1080/0305764X.2011.625004
Jerdborg, S. (2022) Learning principalship: Becoming a principal in a Swedish context [Doctoral thesis]. University of Gothenburg. https://hdl.handle.net/2077/70566
Kaukko, M. Wilkinson, J. and Langelotz, L. (2020) Research that facilitates praxis and praxis development. In K. Mahon, C. Edwards-Groves, S. Francisco, M. Kaukko, Kemmis, S. & K. Petri. Pedagogy education and praxis in critical times. Springer.
Kemmis, S. (2022). Transforming practices: Changing the world with the theory of practice architectures. Singapore: Springer.
Kemmis, S., Edwards-Groves, C. Lloyd, A. Grootenboer, P. Hardy, I. and Wilkinson, J. (2017) Learning as being 'stirred in' to practices. In Practice theory perspectives on pedagogy and education: Praxis, diversity and contestation, edited by P. Grootenboer, C. Edwards-Groves and Sarojni Choy, 45-65. Singapore: Springer.
Kemmis, S., J. Wilkinson, C. Edwards-Groves, I. Hardy, P. Grootenboer, and L. Bristol. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer.
Mahon, K. Kemmis, S. Francisco, S. & Lloyd A.M. (2017) Introduction: Practice Theory and the Theory of Practice Architectures, In K. Mahon, S. Francisco, & S. Kemmis (Eds.), Exploring education and professional practice: Through the lens of practice architectures. Springer.
Olin, A., Karlberg-Granlund, G., & Furu, E. M. (2016). Facilitating democratic professional development: exploring the double role of being an academic action researcher. Educational Action Research, 24(3), 424-441. doi:10.1080/09650792.2016.1197141
Olin, A., & Pörn, M. (2021). Teachers’ professional transformation in teacher-researcher collaborative didactic development projects in Sweden and Finland. Educational Action Research, 1-18.
Platteel, T. Hulshof, H. Ponte, P. van Driel, J. & Verloop, N. (2010) Forming a collaborative Action Research Partnership. Educational Action Research 18 (4): 429–451.
01.Professional Learning and Development
Paper
Assembling Book Club, Video Club, and Lesson Planning to Sustain an Inquiry Community of Teachers
Jingning He, Sihan Xiao
East China Normal University
Presenting Author: He, Jingning
Teacher educators and teacher education researchers have long underscored the importance of professional learning community (PLC) in facilitating teacher professional development (PD) in context (Borko, 2004; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008). Recent body of scholarship discusses the ways in which PLCs promote teacher development (Zheng, Yin, & Wang, 2021), factors that influence teacher participation in PLCs (Bridwell-Mitchell & Cooc, 2016), the transformative consequences (Brennan & King, 2022), and so on. Nevertheless, while the portrayals and mechanism of productive PLCs become increasingly clear, how to sustain them in varied social and political contexts remains a difficult challenge (Hairon et al., 2017).
A growing body of scholarship stresses the local perspectives of teachers in sustaining PLCs. For example, Brodie (2021) describes the vital role of teachers’ professional agency in deciding to participate in or withdraw from PLCs. Similarly, Heikkiläa, Iiskalaa, and Mikkilä-Erdmann (2020) depict the nuances of professional agency in a group of student teachers and examine how different enactments of agency shape their participation in the community. One would assume, based on existing literature, that the more diverse the community members and the activities they engage in are, the more sustainable the PLC will be. Yet, most studies focus merely on a homogenous group of teachers (e.g., senior school teachers in Cooper et al., 2020) or regular PD activities (e.g., teacher research in Zheng, Yin, & Wang, 2021). What does a PLC with diverse participates engaging in varied activities look like and how does it sustain?
To address these problems, this study draws on the idea of “inquiry as stance” to explore how a group of in-service teachers and teacher educators in China build and sustain a PLC through an assemblage of book clubs, video clubs, and lesson planning sessions. Against the view that professional development is a time-bounded project where “what work” get shared and duplicated, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) argue that inquiry is a way of generating local knowledge of practice from within. From their perspective, novice teachers do not necessarily learn from the experienced. Instead, teachers with different backgrounds and experiences work together to “pose problems, identify discrepancies between theories and practices, challenge common routines, draw on the work of others for generative frameworks, and attempt to make visible much of that which is taken for granted about teaching and learning” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 45). In our study, thus, we see a PLC as a local organization in which teachers discuss their everyday work in school, share their experience, feelings, and reflections on their teaching practice, and make their ideas public and legitimate through noticing, discussion, and critiques (e.g., Bakker, de Glopper, & de Vries, 2022; Zhang & Wong, 2021). Our focus is not on how a teacher applies what she learns in some PD program to her classroom, but on how she makes sense of her professional learning with others and within particular contexts and how her sensemaking is consequential to herself, to others, and to her school. Following Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999, 2009), we name such PLC “inquiry community” hereafter to stress our inquiry-as-stance lens.
Two research questions guide our study here. First, how do the teachers participate in the inquiry community? Second, how are different activities assembled to sustain the inquiry community? We use a video-based approach to documenting and analyzing the workings of an inquiry community in an urban school district in Shanghai. By focusing on the sustainability of an inquiry community, our study provides insights into one of the most serious challenges professional development and learning research faces and sheds light on the design of and support for teacher learning.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedOur data are drawn from a PD program in which a large school district in Shanghai partners with a university research group to support productive orchestration of talk in the classroom (Michaels & O’Connor, 2012). Twenty-nine teachers and teacher educators with different backgrounds with regard to schools, grade levels, subjects, and professional experiences participated in the program.
The second author designs and leads the program with two administrators of the school district. It is a one-year program comprised of a set of workshops over the 2022–2023 school year and, as of January 2023, we have just finished the first half. In particular, a book club, a video club, and regular lesson planning activities were assembled. In the book club, the participants read, discussed, and critiqued a book about classroom interactions and learned relevant ideas and theories (e.g., revoicing, the third space). In the video club, the participants observed, transcribed, and analyzed video clips from a sixth-grade science classroom, using conceptual tools they learned from the book club. The lesson planning is a regular event that teachers in Shanghai, like their colleagues around the world, discuss and co-design a particular lesson or a unit and reflect on the implementation after the lesson(s) on a weekly or even daily basis. The program will continue in Spring and Summer 2023.
We are collecting multiple sources of data for our study, including the video records of all the workshops, teacher interviews, artifacts generated in the program (e.g., teachers’ slides presented in the activities, their written analysis of the video clips, lesson plans). For this proposal, we analyze a case of one teacher, Mr. Yan, drawing mainly on the video records of the first semester (approximately 700 minutes). In the final presentation in ECER, we will present, in addition, our analysis on the interviews and the artifacts.
We followed an interaction analysis approach to the data (Erickson, 2006). First, the video records were transcribed in full. Then, all of Mr. Yan’s contribution, such as presentations and utterances, were segmented. We reviewed the marked segments in their contexts to identify how Mr. Yan participated in the activities, what he contributed to the community, and how other participants responded to him. Meaningful categories and themes were generated during the process with a focus on the shaping and sustaining of the community. Last, categories and themes were constantly compared between different activities.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsFor the first research question, we identified four iterative patterns of how Mr. Yan participated in the inquiry community: (1) positioning, in which Mr. Yan positioned himself in relation to his career path, his organizational contexts, desired teaching (e.g., argument-oriented), and his particular classroom; (2) gaining ideas, in which Mr. Yan tried to understand new concepts and ideas from literature and “experts;” (3) working the dialectic of theorizing and doing, in which Mr. Yan planned, implemented, and critically reflected on his lessons; and (4) problematizing, in which Mr. Yan interrogated his existing assumptions about teacher knowledge and practice, and started to adjust his positioning. This finding resonates and expands on existing research (e.g., So, 2013).
For the second research question, we found that different activities served varied roles in the sustaining of the inquiry community. In particular, the book club provided a source of connective concepts, ideas, and theories that the teacher could “work the dialectic on.” Throughout the program, all the teachers referred frequently to the book they co-read for elaboration, clarification, and justification. The video club, on the other hand, afforded them to find discrepancies between their beliefs, ideas from the book, and their practice. It drove Mr. Yan’s “working.” Finally, lesson planning provided structured, organizational support. We argue that these various activities altogether sustain the inquiry community.
In the next few months, we plan to continue collecting data during the second half of the program and to conduct finer-grained analyses. Specifically, we have identified another two focal teachers who differ in various aspects from Mr. Yan. A comparative analysis will delineate the nuances of participation in the community. Moreover, analyses on the interviews and artifacts will examine how teachers make sense of their inquiry as stance. We will present our full analyses and findings in ECER.
ReferencesBakker, C., de Glopper, K., & de Vries, S. (2022). Noticing as reasoning in Lesson Study teams in initial teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 113, 103656.
Borko, H. (2004). Professional development and teacher learning: Mapping the terrain. Educational Researcher, 33(8), 3–15.
Brennan, A., & King, F. (2022). Teachers’ experiences of transformative professional learning to narrow the values practice gap related to inclusive practice. Cambridge Journal of Education, 52(2), 175–193.
Bridwell-Mitchell, E. N., & Cooc, N. (2016). The ties that bind: How social capital is forged and forfeited in teacher communities. Educational Researcher, 45(1), 7–17.
Brodie, K. (2021). Teacher agency in professional learning communities. Professional Development in Education, 47(4), 560–573.
Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: teacher learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24, 249–305.
Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (2009). Teacher research as stance. In S. Noffke & B. Smoekh (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Educational Action Research (pp. 39–47). London: SAGE.
Cooper, R., Fitzgerald, A., Loughran, J., Phillips, M., & Smith, K. (2020). Understanding teachers’ professional learning needs: What does it mean to teachers and how can it be supported?, Teachers and Teaching, 26(7-8), 558–576.
Erickson, F. (2006). Definition and analysis of data from videotape: Some research procedures and their rationales. In J. L. Green, G. Camilli, & P. B. Elmore (Eds.), Handbook of complementary methods in education research (pp. 177–192). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hairon, S., Goh, J., Chua, C., & Wang, L. (2017). A research agenda for professional learning communities: Moving forward. Professional Development in Education, 43(1), 72–86.
Heikkiläa, M., Iiskalaa, T., & Mikkilä-Erdmann, M. (2020). Voices of student teachers' professional agency at the intersection of theory and practice. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 25, 100405.
Michaels, S., & O’Connor, C. (2012). Talk Science Primer. TERC.
Vescio, V., Ross, D., & Adams, A. (2008). A review of research on the impact of professional learning communities on teaching practice and student learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(1), 80–91.
Zhang, X., & Wong, J. L. N. (2021). How do teachers perceive their knowledge development through engaging in school-based learning activities? A case study in China. Journal of Education for Teaching, 47(5), 695–713.
Zheng, X., Yin, H., & Wang, X. (2021). “Doing authentic research” with artifacts to facilitate teacher learning across multiple communities. Teaching and Teacher Education, 105, 103394.
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