professional learning

critical inquiry as professional learning

Clearly, everyone’s experience of secondary English will be different. That is very interesting in its own way. More interesting, though, will be the ways in which pre-service teachers and more experienced teachers unpack these experiences, the ways they critically inquire into the significance of their journey toward and through English teaching. To do this will no doubt involve looking carefully at what you do in the classroom, why you do it, what your students do and why they do it. However, it should also look beyond the narrowly practical, to see how any action or situations is grounded within a complex and ever-changing combination of socio-cultural phenomena and traditions. It will be generative to:

Inquire into and critique the values of the educational systems (local and global, institutional and policy) within which you are and were learning; and

Identify and critically inquire into the beliefs of the people from whom you are and were learning (colleagues and teachers, past and present). This notion of collaborative critical inquiry or dialogic inquiry has the potential to generate (or perhaps just bring to a clear focus) the most powerful parts of your learning throughout your professional career.

For further reading about the nature of this inquiry, you might like to consider some of the
following resources:

Gordon Wells’s essay, ‘Dialogic inquiry in education: Building on the legacy of legacy of Vygotsky’
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~gwells/NCTE.html

Wells’s book, Dialogic Inquiry: Toward a sociocultural practice and theory of education (1999).

Lev Vygostky’s Thought and language (1986, MIT press)

Mikhail Bakhtin’s, Discourse in the novel, in The dialogic imagination: Four essays (1981)

Parr, G. and Bellis, N. (2005) Autobiographical inquiry in pre-service and early career teacher learning, in Doecke and Parr (eds) Writing=Learning, Kent Town, SA: AATE and Wakefield Press.

All this concentrating on your own experiences and reflecting on these, even critically inquiring into these with others, may sound narrowly introspective to you and a bit too good to be true. You may be thinking: ‘Ok, I need experiences, and I need to think about them. Once I’ve done that I’m fine, yeah? I’m ready to teach!’ Mmm. If only it were that simple. Experience is a rich resource for professional learning. But just as overseas travel does not necessarily result in rich learning about the world by all travelers, so too we think you will find that experience of teaching and learning, in its ‘raw’ state (ie. without informed critical, dialogic and reflexive scrutiny) does not ensure rich learning about teaching.

The images and beliefs that prospective teachers bring to their preservice preparation serve as filters for making sense of the knowledge and experiences they encounter. They may also function as barriers to change by limiting the ideas that teacher education students are able and willing to entertain…. These taken-for-granted beliefs may mislead prospective teachers into thinking that they know more about teaching than they actually do and make it harder for them to form new ideas and new habits of thought and action…

Teacher candidates must also form visions of what is possible and desirable in teaching to inspire and guide their professional learning and practice. Such visions connect important values and goals to concrete classroom practices. They help teachers construct a normative basis for developing and assessing their teaching and their students’ learning.’

S. Feiman-Nemser From Preparation to Practice: Designing a Continuum to Strengthen and Sustain Teaching, (2001, p. )

Douglas Barnes has outlined a set of five ‘professional frames’ for reflecting on, and learning about, teaching and learning. Each of these frames provides rich and powerful ways for you to envision (ie. think ahead) and reflect on your teaching of English/literature/literacy (and the interconnection with your students’ learning):

your preconceptions, often implicit, about the nature of what you are teaching, and … about the subject content you teach and how you interpret it;

your preconceptions about learning and how it takes place, though modified by a view of what can be achieved in your particular classroom;

your preconceptions about students (in general, and about the particular group of students you will be teaching) that places limits upon what may be useful or possible;

your beliefs about priorities and constraints inherent in the professional and institutional context in which you will be teaching (ie. at the local, school level, and in terms of the bigger picture, including the political context); and

the nature of your overall commitment to teaching – do you see it as being a ‘vocation’, a ‘profession’, something in which you can build a ‘career’?

We will leave the final word on professional learning to a Monash pre-service student:

The dialogue I have had with others, and with myself, in the past has raised all sorts of things I will need to work on, and that I feel deserve importance in relation to teaching English. No doubt as I progress on my journey I will continue to learn, and aid learning, as an English teacher.

Julia Maier,
English method preservice student,
Monash University, 2003