Inquiry-based Professional Learning
RRP: AUD $65.00 + p&p.
Institution Price: AUD $85.00

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Inquiry-based Professional Learning

Speaking Back to Standards-based Reforms

By Graham Parr.
ISBN: 978-1-921214-48-6 B5 275pp
AUD $65.00 + p&p.

About

Standards-based reforms have been a distinctive feature of educational policy-making across the western world in recent years. The introduction of such reforms is inevitably accompanied by enthusiastic rhetoric from governments about the value of ongoing teacher professional learning. And yet systemic, on-the-ground support for this learning is rare and piecemeal.

Inquiry-based professional learning: Speaking back to standards-based reforms is a critical and creative account of a small group of literature teachers in a school in Melbourne, Australia, as they collectively grapple with these reforms and seek to address their particular needs as professionals. The book argues for a conception of inquiry-based professional learning that 'speaks back' to the logic of standards-based reforms, especially where such reforms control and prescribe teacher professional learning. It also acknowledges the professional and ethical challenges of teachers in their 'search for truth' amidst a maze of standards-based pressures.

Graham is a senior lecturer in Education at Monash University. Recent publications include Writing=Learning (AATE / Wakefield Press), a series of three co-edited books of professional learning cases written with teachers (DEECD), and the Report of the National Mapping of Teacher Professional Learning in Australia Project (DEEWR). In 2008, he received the Award for Doctoral Research in Education, presented by The Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE).

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Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • Foreword
  • Preamble
  1. Re-thinking teacher professional learning
  2. Inquiry as dialogue: Methodology matters
    1. Generating and (re)presenting dialogue
    2. (Some) knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies: How and why narrative matters
    3. Our masters stuff these things into our memory: Critical discourse analysis and why it matters
  3. Dialogic epistemologies of professional learning
    1. Toward dialogic professional learning
    2. Accounting for teachers' knowing
    3. Toward a dialogic research enterprise
  4. Building and sustaining ecologies of professional learning
    1. Representing the ecologies of teacher professional learning
    2. The 1990s in Victoria, Australia
    3. The 2000s in Australia and other Western countries
  5. Dialogue and counterpoint in inquiry-based professional learning
  6. Literary theory, professional learning and other gobbledegook
    1. Contrasting accounts of English-literature teacher professionalism
    2. Dialogic 'transgression': learning and teaching with literary theory
    3. How much turbulence can they cope with?
  7. Around and in the 'uncontainable edges'
    1. Part one: Control and chaos in teachers' professional learning
    2. Part two: Banking on/in traditional professional development paradigms
    3. Part three: Negotiating between contrasting understandings of professional learning
  8. Conclusions and recommendations
  • List of References
  • Appendices
  • Index

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