Too Close to Practice: Understanding the Tension Between Professional and Academic Knowledge in Professional Inquiry

• In Event: "Back to the Rough Ground": Practitioner Inquiry and Education as an Academic Discipline in the 2020s

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that society has changed in fundamental ways in recent years including the ways children and young people are viewed and power is shared between different sectors of society (James, Jenks and Prout 1998; Gallagher 2008b). There have also been fundamental changes in our understanding of effective teaching and learning (Lunenberg, Korthagen and Swennen 2007); many of which assume the collaborative involvement of children and young people. The ethnographic study presented in this paper provides insights as to why practitioners might adopt the attitude of ‘enquiring professional’ (Donaldson, 2011) in order to effectively implement research-led innovative curriculum, pedagogies and assessment ideas within classrooms.

Adopting the notion of childhood as a social construction as proposed by the ‘new sociologists of childhood’ (Christensen 2004; Qvortrup 2009), the project was underpinned by a belief in the necessity of listening to the pupils to fully understand classroom processes. Additionally, using Meade’s notions of ‘symbolic interactionism’ which proposes that individuals develop their identity through interactions with others (1934), the project sought to explore the interactions within the classroom which impacted on the development of the pupils’ understanding of themselves as learners.

Author

• Mhairi Catherine Beaton, Leeds Metropolitan University