RESEARCH
Find out more about
The Education and
Training Consortium
at goo.gl/OsXo0r
David Powell is director of The Education and
Training Consortium and the Huddersfield Centre
for Excellence in Teacher Training (HUDCETT).
Researching teaching, learning
and assessment practices
How action research can help educators understand their work better by focusing on
day-to-day tasks – from the classroom to administration – and learning lessons from it
By David Powell
Action research is a practitioner-
oriented form of research that can
be applied in a range of educational
settings. There are diff erent forms,
though normally action researchers
examine their own practice or
collaborate with colleagues and
students to study an aspect of practice
that is of mutual interest and benefit.
Stephen Kemmis, professor of
education at Charles Sturt University,
Australia, advocates a particular form:
critical participatory action research.
It is concerned with “changing three
things: practitioners’ practices, their
understandings of their practices, and
the conditions in which they practise”
(Kemmis, 2009, p.463).
Having these three goals makes this
form of action research socially just, as
it promotes equality, and is personally
and institutionally transformative.
The term ecologies of practices
describes the possible relationships
between the five practices found where
we work: students and their learning;
teachers and their teaching; leadership
and administration; professional
learning, which includes continuous
professional development and initial
teacher education; research and
evaluation (Kemmis, Wilkinson and
Edwards-Groves, 2017).
Each of these practices consists
of their own “sayings, doings and
relatings”, also known as their practice
architectures, which “hang together”
and are shaped by “the arrangements”
of the site (Kemmis, McTaggart and
Nixon, 2014, p.31).
For instance, what a practitioner
says in a class, the activities they have
designed and use, and the relationship
they have with their students, are
determined by, for example, the
room set-up and the availability
of technology (Mahon, Kemmis,
Francisco and Lloyd, 2017).
SOCIALLY JUST
Kemmis and his team invite us to study
the ecologies of practices and practice
architectures where we work to better
understand our own practices, their
relationship with other practices
where we work and use what we
learn to make socially just changes
to our practices.
Currently 19 providers in the North
East of England and Cumbria are
applying these theories within an
Outstanding Teaching and Learning
Assessment (OTLA) project funded by
the Education and Training Foundation
(ETF) and managed by a consortium
led by Success North, a Centre for
Excellence in Teacher Training based
at Newcastle College.
These providers include further
education colleges, private training
organisations, an off ender learning
service, and adult and community
learning. Each provider has been asked
to set up a project team that represents
the practices of their site so that they
can begin “a conversation” (Kemmis,
McTaggart and Nixon, 2014, p149)
about changing an aspect of teaching,
learning and assessment.
The teams are likely to use
questionnaires, interviews and focus
groups to collect their data as they are
commonly used methods in action
research. It will be interesting to see
if any team chooses to “make video
recordings” to capture “better records”
of their practices and the arrangements
that shape them (Kemmis, McTaggart
and Nixon, 2014, p.224).
It is hoped each of these projects
will provide participants with a deeper
understanding of their practices and
what shapes and influences them, as
well as contributing “another brick in
the wall” (Wellington, 2000, p.137) in
terms of what we know about practices
in the FE and skills sector.
In the words of