Unlearning what you know: A narrative analysis of university and school teacher reflective journals

• In Event: “To Know Is Not Enough”: Action Research as the Core of Educational Research

Abstract

This paper reports on action research in a postgraduate course focused on understanding and developing approaches to creative learning. The paper argues for ‘unlearning’ as integral to the knowledge-building/mobilisation practices of both university and school teacher ‘students’.

The paper holds that knowledge is a practice which is always in formation in particular places, spaces and times. It focuses on knowledge (re)production, rather than seeing knowledge as a static ‘thing’ to which new ‘things’ can be added (Popkewitz 1991). It is situated within action research traditions which produce knowledge and action together – as praxis and practice (Carr and Kemmis, 1986). It is in conversation with the literatures that focus on action research as a key mode of professional knowledge production and teacher learning (Anderson, Herr and Nihlen, 2007; Elliott, 1991; Mertler, 2009)

Action research mobilises cycles of reconnaissance, action and reflection (Kemmis and McTaggart, 1988). This paper constitutes a formal reflection from the university teacher.

The course’ Understanding Creative Learning’ was offered to 14 teachers in an urban secondary school with a designated status of ‘national school of creativity’, one of 57 such schools in England. Throughout the course both school teacher ‘students’ and university teacher kept reflective journals. All 15 journals have been subject to narrative analysis (Reissman, 1994) by the university teacher to locate stories of professional learning and change. These stories have then been subject to further comparative analysis to locate any meta-narrative, in this case one of unlearning. The paper has been given to participants for comment which have been incorporated.

English teachers have been subject to a highly technicised and narrow formal professional education designed to support effective 'delivery' of the national curriculum. Recent shifts to encourage more creative learning for school students has led to a renewed press for school- teacher professional development focused on new pedagogical approaches. This course was one such response.

Here, all journals show that what was happening in the course was not comfortable for any of the participants who together had to let go of things they did not initially realize they held as static knowledge. The university teacher narratives show an abrupt abandonment of the discourse of development and increasing speculations about what was happening in the course. Twelve of the school-teachers’ journals tell stories of how they researched and then tried out creative learning approaches in their classrooms; this required them to ‘let go’ of things they had been taught (predetermined lesson-by-lesson planning, assessment tasks designed at the beginning of the course, and all outcomes defined ahead of time) and things that they thought they knew (how students liked to learn, the purposes of education). Two teachers did not 'unlearn' and wrote stories of ongoing and undisrupted practice-as-usual. The analysis suggests that the process of unlearning was integral to shifts in practice and in knowledge-about-pedagogical practice.

The focus on unlearning as well as learning may have wider application and may assist the design of postgraduate practitioner-researcher programmes which seek to disrupt tightly-framed pedagogical and discursive regimes.

Author

• Patricia Thomson, University of Nottingham