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.     

A tale of the field: reading power and gender in the learning organization

In this article, I will argue that learning organizations that claim certain emancipatory promises in principle continue to ignore issues of gender, which, in practice are a distinctive and defining feature of our workplace contexts. Applying a feminist–Foucauldian interpretive framework, I intend to demonstrate and analyse the material workings of power, and how power relations work to produce both people and actions in organizations, which contributes to reproducing a patriarchal system, through a recounting of my own experiences as a Learning and Development manager implementing a change program at Xtrading Worldwide. In particular, by means of an auto-ethnographic account, I intend to illuminate the manner in which this patriarchal system not only contradicts the philosophy of the learning organization, highlighting its embeddedness within contemporary capitalist and managerialist discourse, but also how it works to produce both subordinated women and behaviours, which continues to exclude them from occupying levels of seniority in organizations.     

On being critical: uniting theory and practice through emancipatory action research

This paper engages with some of the specific issues that challenge critical practice. My argument is related to the Carr and Kemmis debate on ‘staying critical’ and to ideas expressed in my current book, Community Development: A Critical Approach. I refer to critical practice as any practice that has a transformative social justice intention, and which happens in a range of contexts from grassroots community activism to more institutionalised settings, such as hospitals or schools. My own professional base is community development, and this paper is founded on emancipatory action research developed over many years in grassroots practice. It is my view that emancipatory action research, committed to the practice of social justice, with the intention of bringing about social change, is a necessary component of critical practice. In fact, I would go so far as to say that emancipatory action research is the glue that binds critical praxis in a unity of theory and action. However, all too often collective action for change is not followed through to its greatest potential, and practice remains contextualised in the immediate, local and specific without making critical connections with the structural roots of oppression from which inequalities emanate. The result is that we constantly fixate on symptoms, and leave the root causes free to perpetuate oppressions. At the same time, we find ourselves in a globalised world marked by intensifying social divisions. So, it is my intention to raise a few issues which present challenges to get beyond sticking points in critical practice as we face times in which there is an accelerating urgency to ‘become critical’.     

Reciprocal learning: One teacher’s narrative

This paper is a personal narrative from the perspective of one teacher in Toronto who participated in the Canada–China Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education Partnership Grant Project. I took part in a Sister School partnership between 2013 and 2017. Over the four years, I came to understand relationships in an international professional learning community. Participating in the project gave me the benefit of seeing my practice through an international lens. For my students, it offered a global citizenship experience. Although there are numerous professional development opportunities in Toronto, this partnership extends beyond a lunch and learn, or a full day professional learning. The commitment to my partners has fueled my desire to incorporate new teaching ideas and has required ongoing reflection on my own teaching practice. In this article, I will explain some of the challenges, stages of development, reciprocal learning, and implications for future international professional learning communities.     

Themes at the intersections of theory and practice in online and blended education

This is a reflexive account of my experiences teaching online and blended doctoral research methodology courses and seminars. Vacillating between skepticism and affirmation, my thoughts mirror the many issues that arise from my daily professional practice and from what I have discovered in my quest to better understand the nature and workings of online and blended education through scholarly discourse. The purpose of sharing my experiences and points of view is to test a set of my truths among the community of experts on the subject. I refer to these truths as evocative discourses – emergent themes at the intersection of theory and practice of online and blended teaching and learning.     

From isolation to symphonic harmony: Building a professional development community among teacher educators

Professional development among teacher educators requires a framework in which collaborative learning can support growth and change. This study describes a professional development project modeled on a professional development community focused on thinking education in a teachers college. Qualitative measures revealed a multilayered process consisting of breaking personal and professional isolation through interdisciplinary collaboration, talk about student learning, improvement of teaching through skill acquisition, and professional development with the adaptation of new teaching dispositions and a sense of efficacy. The community was characterized by a safe environment which encouraged risk taking and mutual support, enabling significant change in college courses.     

The role of reflection on preservice teachers’ development in the context of a professional development school

As a faculty member teaching in an innovative, two-year Master's of Teaching program, I found myself reexamining my beliefs and assumptions about the role of reflection in preparing preservice teachers to become reflective practitioners. In the first semester of a four semester program, I introduced a three-part reflective framework (Loughran, 1995, Windows into the thinking of an experienced teacher. A paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, April.) designed to guide the preservice teachers in systematically reflecting on their lessons before, during and after teaching. The preservice teachers, mentors and I practiced and used the reflective framework for three semesters. In the fourth semester, during which preservice teachers taught in a paid internship position, I conducted individual interviews with the preservice teachers (interns) to explore their understanding and use of reflection. The results of the study suggest that use of the framework helps develop preservice teachers who actively think about their practice to improve their teaching and their students’ learning. Implications for using the reflective process in teacher education programs, particularly in professional development school contexts, are discussed.     

Teaching as a Healing Craft: Decolonizing the Classroom and Creating Spaces of Hopeful Resistance through Chicano-Indigenous Pedagogical Praxis

This paper builds upon the edict for self-determination in El Plan de Santa Bárbara: a Chicano plan for higher education (1969), which calls for “strategic use of education,” by placing value on needs of the community (La Causa, p. 9). For me, this passage translates into valuing needs of community-college students entering my classes and life. I believe it is my obligation, as an educator, to problematize ways in which knowledge has been defined, framed, presented, and researched by dominant ideologies informing institutions of learning at all levels. In essence, this work is a meditation allowing readers to witness how I am weaving together various strands of myself including the personal, emotional, professional, intellectual, and spiritual. It captures how my participant-observation of MAS-Tucson educators, while describing their use of barrio pedagogy and critically compassionate intellectualism, has been enhanced by my re-reading of Elena Avila’s (2000) Woman who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. This paper represents an ongoing epistemological exercise about my own teaching and scholarship, resulting in an emergence of my own modality as an apprenticing practitioner of Chicano-Indigenous pedagogy.     

Exploring Self-Study to Improve My Practice as a Mathematics Teacher Educator

While supervising a student teacher in school, an incident occurred that highlighted a contradiction between my practice and my beliefs and prompted me to question why I do not always live the values I profess. The aim of this article is to investigate how self-study can help me to understand the complex and context-based situations of my practice. I draw on the work of other teacher educators to examine the potential of self-study to improve my practice. Through this exploration I have begun to transform the way that I comprehend teaching and learning in teacher education. I identify several tensions and challenges in implementing the methodology within my professional context. I believe that self-study can help us in our roles as teacher educators to develop more reflexive self-awareness and to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions relevant to our contexts of practice.     

Taking a Return to School: Using Self-Study to Learn about Teacher Educator Practice

The work of teacher educators is complex and multifaceted and requires knowledge of pedagogy and practice in both schools and teacher education institutions. This complexity, combined with calls for teacher educators to work in close partnership with schools, sees some in teacher education working in hybrid roles and across the boundaries of schools and universities. Drawing on a self-study conducted over a one-year return to teaching, I explore my return home to teach in a secondary school and I examine the continuing impact of this experience on my practice as a teacher educator. Using the concept of tensions as a conceptual framework to analyse the data I explore three tensions in this article: (1) teacher as technician versus teacher as pedagogue; (2) challenging versus being responsive to other’s views of learning; and (3) teacher versus teacher educator identity. I explore how a return to teaching in school and the tensions I experienced enabled me to develop my practice and understandings as a teacher educator. I argue that rich professional learning can result from using self-study to examine teacher educator practice, particularly for teacher educators working in hybrid roles and partnership contexts.     

Augmented Becoming: Personal Reflections on Collaborative Experience

This self-study is an exploratory, autoethnographic journey, aiming towards understanding my becomings through the 14 years of my collaborative experience. It provides a reflective look at the effects of this unique experience on my personal–professional self, questioning my understandings and trying to identify my becomings along these years. Adapting the Deleuze–Guattarian framework, the study draws the spectrum of possibilities that create the rhizomatic connections of the collaborative space and affect the emergent subjectivities of its participants. I discuss the notions of continuity between interior and exterior processes, between the individual and others in the context of the collaborative environment and the inter-relational flux of actual and virtual possibilities. I suggest viewing this process as augmented becoming that embodies the difficulties and turbulence along with sagacity and resilience, an interweaving of rhizomatic formations that affect the ability to change and an inter-subjective ontological coming to know in relation to the learning environment and others' roles in its dynamics.     

Learning to be critically reflective: exploring fiction writing and adult learning

Many educators in adult, community and higher education contexts are concerned with fostering reflective learning amongst their students. This paper explores the concept of critical reflection and considers how engaging with fiction may be an innovative pedagogical approach to support critical learning opportunities. Drawing upon interviews with fiction writers, ways in which critical reflection may be encouraged in connection to reading and writing fiction are taken up by exploring three different thematic areas that relate to a Habermasian framework of knowledge constitutive approaches to learning. These different areas can be categorised as (a) technical-rational, (b) humanistic and (c) critical or emancipatory. The first of these considers critical reflection as a way to develop technical capacities as a creative writer. The next section takes up a humanistic framework to explore the value of individual and collective learning opportunities to enhance personal growth and critical reflection. The third area of discussion considers a deeper critical or emancipatory framework of learning through critical reflection which may lead to social change. The paper concludes by considering the value of arts-informed adult education approaches, such as those related to fiction writing, to enhance the development of critical reflection amongst adult learners.     

Same Assessment,Different Practice: Professional consciousness as a determinant of teachers' practice in a school-based assessment scheme

The forms that assessment takes are widely recognised as determinants of educational practice. This paper, however, argues that a teacher's professional consciousness is a more fundamental determinant of teaching practice. To explore the issue, this paper examines data from a larger study which set out to examine the relationship between teachers' practice and their beliefs in the context of a mandatory school-based assessment scheme. Using a theoretical framework that advocates an emancipatory approach to educational changes, it was found that some teachers adopted a passive role regarding policy interpretation and implementation while others adopted a more critical stance in interpreting the policy requirements, demonstrating a more proactive approach in its implementation. The emancipatory approach is conceptualised in terms of three key dimensions: professional confidence, professional interpretation and professional consciousness. The findings of the study carry implications for teacher professional development.     

Race and ‘Disability Passing’ in a Chicago Public School Art Classroom

Race, history and visibility have a great deal to do with how disability operated socially and educationally in the Chicago public high school art classroom where I taught for ten years. I am severely near‐sighted, and I am also white, educated and often, but not consistently, able to pass for non‐disabled. A large number of my students were identified as having learning, emotional and behavioural disabilities, diagnoses which were certainly conditioned by the institution, but diagnoses which perhaps also underrepresented the amount of socially and historically occasioned impairment or debility that existed in the low‐income majority‐Black community served by my school. In this article I reflect on the overlapping social performances that occurred in terms of ‘disability passing’, a state that can characterise both hidden and exaggerated or invented impairments. My reflections examine my own individual experience in contrast to the long‐term experience of the African diaspora in and beyond the USA, in order to think about other ways to parse the complex factors determining how disability plays out in educational environments.     

Teaching diversity: a reflexive learning opportunity for a teacher educator

This article reports on a two-year self-study exploring my roles and evolving philosophy as an early childhood teacher educator teaching diversity in the US. I was interested in better understanding how and what I can learn from the complexity of my teaching experiences. Data included my professional journals, students’ reflection journals, and communication with a critical friend. I examined, when teaching diversity, how I constructed and navigated my roles, how the students constructed and perceived my roles, and how they have transformed my instructional philosophy and practices. The findings illustrated a dynamic and tension-filled experience of a teacher educator teaching diversity in the US as a perceived outsider, suggesting that it was a reflexive learning opportunity. The findings are aligned with a growing recognition that appropriate time and space is necessary for teacher educators to share and exchange their experiences and to gain support for their professional development when teaching diversity. Further, the findings are supportive of the contribution of self-study research in advancing the broader field of teacher education research.     

A critical reflection on the multiple roles required to facilitate mutual learning during service-learning in Creative Arts education

In this article, I critically reflect on my own learning during a community-based, service-learning pilot project, highlighting the multiple roles that were required of me as facilitator. I provided opportunity for student teachers in a Creative Arts module to engage with youth from a local township community. The purpose of the participatory action research was to explore how this process enhanced reciprocal learning. Data were generated through multiple qualitative methods in four cycles of interactive activities. Adapting to the challenges of community-based learning necessitated that I was flexible enough to know when to don the hat of educator or research designer and when to be less directive to promote professional development and intercultural competencies. I learned to value relational platforms, enable diverse modes of communication and find workable strategies for mutual learning. By sharing my lessons learned, I hope to provide a better understanding of the facilitator’s multiple leadership roles.     

Presuming Competence

This study discusses my attempt to improve educational experiences of fifth-grade students living in public housing. The context of a social justice-oriented classroom is revealed through reconstruction of my thought processes while teaching and learning with students. The narrative portrayal that emerges demonstrates the impact our theorizing together had on our growth, outlook, and learning in an effort to make substantive change in the community. Although this curriculum was not explicitly grounded in a service-learning framework, the processes, activities, and results of the classroom typify the potential and possibilities of a justice- and service-oriented elementary classroom. Reflections of classroom occurrences and struggles I engaged in privately and with students are conveyed through vignettes of the change-focused, integrated curriculum based on students' priority concerns—particularly the attempt to replace their dilapidated school. The role of theorizing with students and curriculum realizing democratic principles in a poor neighborhood is depicted.     

It takes a village: supporting inquiry- and equity-oriented computer science pedagogy through a professional learning community

This article describes the importance that high school computer science teachers place on a teachers’ professional learning community designed around an inquiry- and equity-oriented approach for broadening participation in computing. Using grounded theory to analyze four years of teacher surveys and interviews from the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) program in the Los Angeles Unified School District, this article describes how participating in professional development activities purposefully aimed at fostering a teachers’ professional learning community helps ECS teachers make the transition to an inquiry-based classroom culture and break professional isolation. This professional learning community also provides experiences that challenge prevalent deficit notions and stereotypes about which students can or cannot excel in computer science.     

Engaging Kenyan secondary students in an Oral History Project: Education as emancipation

This article uses a case study approach to explore the viability and impact of learner-centered, emancipatory pedagogies. The research focuses on the implementation of an Oral History Project with students at a Kenyan secondary school. Findings reveal that the project had a significant impact on participants’ beliefs about teaching and learning, strengthened students’ sense of self-efficacy, and enhanced participants’ perceptions of community knowledge. The study suggests that while learner-centered, emancipatory pedagogies are viable and can have a transformative impact on students and teachers, systematic and sustained instructional support and professional development are needed to ensure long-term success.     

An educational framework for participatory action learning and action research (PALAR)

The purpose of this article is to provide an educational, theoretical, and methodological framework for using a special kind of action research, namely PALAR (participatory action learning and action research). This integrated methodology of lifelong action learning (AL) and participatory action research (PAR) has been developed over the past 25 years. It has been proven to be an effective approach to individual, professional, organizational, community (and generally practice) development. PALAR can be instrumental in pursuit of social justice and is well suited for both experienced and beginning researchers interested in researching and improving their own practice. The article illustrates with case examples how this framework has been put into practice for various programs in a variety of fields and countries. The PALAR framework is the basis for a generic program design, structure, and content, and for processes of learning, teaching, assessment, evaluation, and leadership development. It is a systemic and systematic program on how to design, justify, conduct, evaluate, write, and publish research that is particularly useful for community or work-based theses at master’s, professional doctorate, and PhD levels. An original feature of this article is its comprehensive overview and summary of the theory and practice of PALAR for the first time, with references to further readings.