Power, Positionality, and Practitioner Research: Understanding Schoolteachers' Experiences of Professional Doctorates in Education

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

Abstract

For doctoral students in education, awareness of researcher positionality and its influence on the research process often forms an important part of defending the thesis. And yet relatively little is known about the professional dilemmas teachers encounter when carrying out doctoral research within the institutions in which they work. Acknowledging this gap in the literature is important because many students on professional doctoral programmes in education are senior members of staff in schools and colleges who study part-time. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to explore the tensions schoolteachers experience when carrying out practitioner research as part of a professional doctorate. The paper draws attention to the significance of teachers as invaluable members of the research community: a significance that has sometimes been underestimated within educational research.

The growth, internationally, in professional doctorates over the last 25 years is well-documented (see Hawkes & Yerrabati 2018; Wildy, Peden & Chan 2015), as are the forms, fields, disciplines and methodologies that such doctorates embrace. Factors said to influence the emergence of professional doctorates, include the growth of the knowledge economy; the marketization of education; the rapidly changing role of higher education and its internationalisation; and developments in technology. However, against the backdrop of competing discourses associated with globalisation and austerity, arguments relating to the supply and demand for doctorates in education are often positioned and justified by factors associated with economism rather than those associated with professional capital and capacity building. Acknowledging this tension, and the everyday realities of being a full-time teacher carrying out research, a further aim of this paper is to increase our understanding of researcher positionality and the role it plays in mediating the outcomes of practitioner enquiry.

Author

• Gerry Czerniawski, University of East London