Developing holistic practice through reflection,action and theorising

This article outlines how I, as a primary teacher engaging with a self-study action research process, have come to a deeper understanding of my practice. It explains how I have also come to an understanding of why I work in the way I do; of how this understanding influences my work, and the significance of this new understanding. My work as a teacher frequently includes doing collaborative digital projects with my class. As I engaged in research on my practice, I initially experienced difficulties problematising this work. I struggled to achieve clarity not only with engaging in critical thinking but also with articulating my educational values. I found Mellor’s idea about ‘the struggle’ helpful as he explains how ‘the struggle’ is at the heart of the research process. My new understanding around these collaborative projects emerged in terms of holistic practice; clarifying my ontological values and learning to think critically. I am now generating an educational theory from my practice as I see my work as a process for developing spiritual and holistic approaches to learning and teaching. I conclude by outlining what I perceive to be the significance of my work and its potential implications for education.     

Philosophical Research and Educational Action Research

I argue here, that, ultimately and in large part, the stakes of educational action research are conditioned by the various ways of conceiving theory, research and practice, and I attempt to explore and put forward one such way that I view as potentially more helpful than others. I begin with a comparative overview of the implicit philosophical assumptions that have informed or grounded educational action research in the broadly conceived Germanic and Anglo-American contexts. I then examine the tensions around theory and practice and the role such tensions play in educational action research. In my interpretation, the polemics surrounding this topic have significantly shaped the course educational action research has taken. Examining such polemics, then, might be useful in the effort to approach risks, prospects and visions and to develop the perspective of a recuperated, enhanced but modest philosophical intervention in educational action research.     

Adapting the boundaries in primary physical education: an account of my learning,my educational influence and improved practice

In this paper I explore how I have come to theorise my work as a critical emancipatory practice as a lecturer in primary physical education (PE). I give an account of what I understand to be the epistemological foundations and practices of practitioner research and my potential educational influence in my own and other practitioner-researchers’ learning. I explain how I have generated my living educational theory of practice and discuss the changes in my learning from a propositional approach towards a dynamic epistemology of practice that is grounded in inclusional and dialogical ways of knowing. Within my paper I position myself as a professional educator and researcher, and share the exciting and transformational experiences of teaching and learning in evolving action research cycles of practice. I view my learning to date as an active act, working with the novice teachers I support to offer improvement and change in our future practice. I celebrate my reconceptualised view of education as a learner from within my practice and explain my move from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-creation. I make an original contribution to educational knowledge by explaining how I try to inspire others to research their practice and contribute to a new scholarship of educational enquiry.     

Assuming my Transformation: Transforming my Assumptions

As a White, middle-class, English-speaking female of the type commonly found in teacher education programs, I have had to learn how to use my perspective to challenge the assumptions of the “typical” student teachers for whom I am a teacher educator. This self-study describes how I have been transformed by this learning process. Studying my teaching has provided me with opportunities to challenge my own assumptions about teacher education and to confront my issues of control and ambiguity as they relate to teaching.     

Professional identity and educational reform: confronting my habitual practices as a teacher educator

This essay explores my role as a teacher educator within a changing policy and curriculum landscape, including managerial attempts to define acceptable educational ‘outcomes’ and other globalising pressures to regulate education. I interrogate my professional knowledge and experience as a teacher educator, raising questions about the adequacy of my support for student teachers as they enter this new landscape. I conceive the key challenge facing me at the moment as a challenge to my professional identity that requires me to find new ways of understanding and talking about my work (cf. Teaching and Teacher Education 19(1) (2002) 5). The essay might be read as a ‘self study’, in which my ‘self’ is conceived as a function of the networks or relationships in which I operate as a teacher educator and the larger structures that shape my professional world.     

Autoethnography,a Chicana's Methodological Research Tool: The Role of Storytelling for Those Who Have No Choice but to do Critical Race Theory

This article investigates the role of autoethnographic research as the methodological tool of choice for a Chicana who positions herself along the liminal perspective. I posit that testimonios, autobiographical educational experiences, must be used as valid ethnographic research to contribute to existing knowledge around issues of educational equity. Producing autoethnographic research acknowledges and validates my Chicana presence as well as draws attention to my marginal position inside dominant structures of education. Autoethnography and critical race theory are the manners in which I think about the world and the ways I have chosen to engage in educational research. My work is derived from personal experience in Los Angeles urban schools and later in elite institutions of higher education. These distinct locations present a unique opportunity to problematize the internalized forms of class and racial structures that permeate educational institutions. Grounded in my own educational biography, testimonios frame my research perspective to interrogate the role that educational institutions play in the creation of particular ideologies in working-class students of color.     

Virtually Unpacking Your Backpack: Educational Philosophy and Pedagogical Praxis

In this autoethnographic, conceptual philosophical reflection, the author inquires: Can my students and I, in a technologically mediated virtual space, harness the work of philosophy of education scholars to engage in a shared experience of (re)considering paths to sensitivity to diversity for equity and equality? The author engages the reader in a theoretical hike through a philosophical argument for attending to philosophical theories of education. She focuses on the work of Jane Roland Martin regarding sensitivity and cultural (mis)education and draws heavily on the scholarship of Barbara Thayer-Bacon regarding relational “(e)pistemologies,” constructed thinking, and democratic community. After examining her own practices, the author contends that in the reality of the growth of online education, she is tentatively optimistic that educators can facilitate authentic examination of educational practices in the light of theoretical work and push beyond superficial engagement to lasting transformative growth for the sake of equitable student achievement.     

New generation’s career aspirations and new ways of marginalization in a postindustrial economy

The 1990s, a decade of democratic advances and consumption euphoria in South Korea, heralded a new wind called ‘neoliberal education’. It is within this historical juncture that I conducted an ethnographic research on low‐income youths who had dropped out of mainstream high schools. While I investigated these youths’ educational and career aspirations, I examined how discourses in neoliberal freedom and free marketization shape (and are shaping) these youths’ self‐fashioning. Central to my analysis is how this process of identity construction is intersected with class marginality. A predominate number of youths in my research express their preference in service sector and/or entertainment industries. The paper addresses how neoliberal discourses and consumerism ;rhetoric are negotiated and transformed in youth’s narratives on aspirations. The analysis speaks to the ideological pitfall of neoliberalism, echoing critical scholars’ thesis that neoliberalistic education with free market principles perpetuated and broadened existing inequalities.     

Modelling Experiential Knowledge Ethically: An Artefact‐Based Approach to Visually Documenting a Participatory Design Process with Young People

This article contributes to the growing debate within art and design education research about the role, legitimacy and accountability of artefacts in the creation and generation of knowledge. I present an artefact‐based approach to visually documenting and disseminating my doctoral practice‐based fieldwork that protected the anonymity of the participants whilst supporting my exploration of the situational, interactional and tacit dimensions of participation. Constructing a three‐dimensional scaled model of the fieldwork setting and using narratives from my field notes, I undertook a cyclical reflective process where I reconstructed critical moments that took place. This was used as both a tool for communicating my participatory design educational practice and for evaluating my findings with the participants. By sharing this sense‐making process, I offer an ethical means of visually documenting fieldwork when working in sensitive contexts and with vulnerable participants, setting out the dual role this design artefact played as both a producer and carrier of experiential knowledge.     

如何激发学生学习动机和自主学习意识

1.My context:I was once greatly influenced by the traditionalteaching methodology applied by almost all my previousteachers,and my classroom teaching practice was quiteteacher-centered.As a college teacher,I placed a signifi-cant emphasis on bringingknowl…     

Memoir as a form of auto-ethnographic research for exploring the practice of transnational higher education in China

In this paper, I argue that memoir, as a form of auto-ethnographic research, is an appropriate method for exploring the complexities and singularities in the practice of western educational practitioners who are immersed in the social reality of offshore higher education institutions, such as those in Mainland China. I illustrate this proposition by showing how my own use of memoir is guided by a need to interrogate the unique experiences of my past life as ‘the foreigner’, ‘the special one’, ‘the imported expert’ and ‘the cultural outsider’, in order to lay bare the complexity of what it means to work and live in China as a foreign teacher and be recognised as different. I am interested in the notion of foreignness, and the ambiguities that arise when one operates as a teacher in a foreign culture, with a misguided and naïve understanding of one's own specialness as the foreign expert. My research methodology is based on critically reflective writing that acknowledges the multiplicity of historical, cultural and social differences, and the uniqueness of all individuals, whilst recognising that difference, at its heart, is a matter of relationship(s). This form of writing as educational research makes it possible to challenge some of the generalisations western scholars inadvertently make when writing about their teaching experiences in China.     

Changing Places: some reflections

Essentially, this is an account of my recent change of post within the world of education, from Head of English in a comprehensive school to Lecturer in English in Education in a university department of education. In reflecting on this change of places, I consider various aspects of both professions, including my own expectations, the nature of the teaching involved, educational research, partnerships in teacher education and differences in management. I attempt to draw tentative conclusions about the relationship between school life and that of teacher education and how each, through the sort of cross‐fertilisation which inevitably occurs when practitioners change places, may draw benefits from the other.     

从《萨摩亚人的成年》看我国当前教育的缺失迹象

通过对《萨摩亚人的成年》一书的阅读,在将美国教育与萨摩亚人青春期教育的对比性研究基础之上,提出自己对我国当前教育体系中一些潜存问题的认知与剖析,认为教育就是要为生活而服务,为需要而生存。     

EVALUATING A TEACHER RESEARCHER'S CHOICE OF ACTION RESEARCH

In this paper I discuss my reasons for choosing educational action research in my enquiry into the process of writing, redrafting, learning and autonomy in the examination years (Eames, 1987). I look first of all at my own interests as a teacher‐researcher, and then explore my reasons for rejecting the ‘dominant research paradigms, which seemed to me inappropriate for what I was trying to do. I explain what I understand by action research, and examine objections to it, as well as considering its strengths.     

Whose Ethics? Toward Clarifying Ethics in Mathematics Education Research

The philosophical branch of ethics is foundationally concerned with the question of right or wrong, benevolent or harmful, and ultimately what is proper conduct. The present inquiry addresses two related questions: (1) How have theories of ethics been applied to mathematics education research? and (2) What alternatives have not been considered? What might the implications be if these alternative formulations were considered? To answer the first question, I offer a review of the philosophy of mathematics education literature, considering those articles which discuss ethics and mathematics education together. The ethical perspectives adopted within the literature span normative and non-normative, modern and postmodern orientations towards ethics. To answer the second question, I explored philosophy literature to identify which philosophical perspectives of ethics have (not) been adopted by philosophers of mathematics education research. The structure of this paper parallels these two questions: the first part considers the philosophy of mathematics education research and how researchers have defined ethics while the second part discusses additional philosophical approaches to ethics and puts those approaches into conversation with those identified in part one. I conclude by intertwining these two strands into my central thesis: ethics per se is construed too narrowly in the philosophy of mathematics education literature and considering additional ethical perspectives from philosophy can be generative of new ideas.     

An entry into a creative,rhizomatic narrative inquiry into young people’s identity construction

Located in a larger study that attempted to challenge taken-for-granted or homogenizing assumptions about constructions of adolescent identity and to interrogate radically the process of qualitative research in this field [O’ Grady, G. (2012). “Constructing Identities with Young People using Creative Rhizomatic Narrative.” PhD Thesis. Queen’s University Belfast], the paper picks up the narrative of the research journey at a moment of meeting with Kim Etherington, Professor of Narrative Research at the University of Bristol. It opens with the conversation that ensued and my introduction to the figure of the rhizome [Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. ([1987] 2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. London: Continuum, 8) which, alongside other poststructuralist ideas, I subsequently used to conceptualize and frame the inquiry. In grappling with the questions posed in our conversation, I hope to make visible three interweaving themes in this paper: My difficulties initially in ‘inhabiting’ the philosophical positions I took up in this creative narrative inquiry; my growing commitment to a form of narrative inquiry that challenges inherited dominant understandings of subjectivity and research methodologies and finally, my encounters with ‘otherness’ in the construction of self/other as a thematic thread that interwove all the narratives of the young people in the larger study.     

Writing the queer self: Using autobiography to mediate inclusive teacher education in Canada

Writing the queer self involves locating the self within a broad understanding of queer that recognises a spectrum of sex, sexual and gendered subjects. In this article, I discuss how I write the queer self to link the personal to my positional practice as a gay teacher educator. I overview my work with Agape, which is a focus group that I initiated in my university's teacher education programme to explore sex, sexual and gender differences in education and culture. I explore how I link my queer autobiography to the professional and the pedagogical, and how I use it to engender deliberations about queer presence, representation and place in education. I conclude by speaking on the importance of doing this work as an ethical project for social justice and educational transformation.     

Towards a collaborative methodology: An ethnography of widening educational participation

This paper examines my attempts to develop a collaborative methodology, and critically considers the limitations and possibilities of this approach. It draws on a small-scale ethnography of widening educational participation undertaken for my doctoral degree. I worked with a group of access students in a UK further education college to develop the methods and methodology, to identify research questions and key areas of focus and, to a lesser extent, to analyse the data. Post/structural analytical tools enabled co-participants to deconstruct hegemonic neo-liberal discourses of widening participation. Feminist theory enabled the refashioning of radical discourses that are concerned with destabilising unequal relations of power in research and in education. In the paper I consider issues of power, research relationships, author-ity, reflexivity and ethics in collaborative methodology.     

Presidential Address: Culture and the future of education research

Recent changes in higher education have confronted education research with a conundrum: how our traditionally multidisciplinary field can refine itself as a unified discipline. In this address I sketch out what this conundrum may mean for education research, both substantively and methodologically, in the future. I propose that one starting point is for education researchers to consider what unites rather than divides us. One common, unifying conceptual concern is with the operation of culture/s in educational settings. I use the narratives of two teachers from different places and times to illustrate how culture analysis can be a fruitful tool for understanding the experience and practice of Education. In my conclusion, I extend the theme of culture to education research itself. I suggest that the challenge of disciplinary identity confronting education research requires a culture change in the modus operandi of our practice, and that this will involve an articulated focus on methodological pluralism, interdisciplinarity, and the use of new modes of communication as key unifying elements of the discipline of education research.