Monash University Education Faculty

search

 

PDF
Professional Learning

 

Home ::

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _
_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
Page1 _

 

 

professional learning

negotiating the sameness and the tensions (Bakhtin)

The inevitable mix of sameness and diversity amongst communities of preservice teachers, like professional teachers, can inspire a profound appreciation for the value of difference, and it can also be a source of acute tensions, creatively, socially and professionally. Needless to say this mix does not dissolve when one enters a school or other teaching and learning setting. One might argue that negotiating this mix is a fundamental part of all teachers’ work.


The Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin speaks of all social activity involving such a mix. In fact, he describes this mix as a constant dynamic, a dialogic movement backward and forward between tension and resolution. On the one hand, it may feel like, as one early career teacher remembers her pre-service education, ‘a cacophony of voices that seemed to be competing for my attention at any given time.’ This is consistent with Bakhtin’s notion of URL heteroglossia. It suggests that part of teacher’s learning  involves an eking out professional identity amid a vast and teeming diversity of voices all struggling to be heard and to influence a teacher’s identity. For more discussion of Bakhtin’s ideas you may like to go to:

URL www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/bakhtin/chap2b.html

On the other hand, this dynamic mix might appear as a continuous dialogic struggle between those factors that might transform diversity into a more unified sameness – eg. to take a class of diverse learners and have them produce similar ‘products’ as required by a curriculum document (or an exam) – and those factors that might transform potential sameness into a richer mix of diversity – eg. to take a single curriculum document and explore the multifarious ways in which teachers and learners may work with this curriculum to produce vastly different products and different learning. In the first instance at least, and in different educational contexts, one can see the value of each of these tendencies.

Centripetal tendencies(ie. tending to produce sameness)

  

Centrifugal  tendencies
(ie. tending to produce diversity)

 

Top

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _
_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
Page1 _

 

| Home| About English | Becoming a Teacher | Curriculum & Assessment |

| Planning for Learning |Professional Learning | Voices | Sitemap |

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

voices
"“Life is dialogical by its very nature. To live means to engage in dialogue, to question, to listen, to answer, to agree …”.

Mikhail Bakhtin
The dialogic imagination
             (1981)"

 

“School life is a teeming heteroglossia of literate activity. A defining characteristic of a school is that it is a place where students read, write and respond to a great variety of written and oral texts. This requires the development of a fairly sophisticated knowledge of how to navigate this literacy space, including particular sociocultural ways of reading, writing and speaking and knowing valued in schools.”

Alex Kostogritz
In Writing=Learning
(2005, p. 104)

 

  

 
_