Professional Knowledge “From the Field”: Enacting professional learning in the contexts of practice

Abstract

Based on a qualitative case study that examined elementary teachers’ understandings of a professional development policy, we question the conceptual disconnection between professional learning and professional practices in some conceptualizations of professional learning communities. We analyse the research data using Actor-Network Theory and report that the teachers in the case study perceived a disconnection between the scenarios of professional knowledge creation and the scenarios of professional practice. Such disconnection is exacerbated due to an ambiguous treatment of the concept of professional practice in the policy documents that endorse the idea of professional learning communities. We conclude that a key element in the transformation of professional practices is the teacher’s awareness that his / her professional knowledge is enacted through his / her actions and practices, thereby concluding that professional learning is situated in the context of professional practices.

The enactment of professional learning policies: performativity and multiple ontologies

“…While we have detailed the specifics of the research project elsewhere (Riveros & Viczko, 2012), the scenarios of professional learning elaborated here capture a moment of insight to advance our purposes in this paper related to questioning the ontological manifestations of teacher professional learning in its heterogeneity. Importantly, we do not aim to make claims about the nature of professional learning based on these scenarios, but rather we offer them as examples of the multiplicity in the performances of professional learning.…”

“…In doing this, we want to shed some light on the use of a somewhat controversial terminology (Dall'Alba & Sandberg, 2006;Nicoll & Edwards, 2012;Popkewitz, 1994;Stronach, Corbin, McNamara, Stark, & Warne, 2002). We suggest the traditional emphasis placed on the "professional" aspects of teacher learning tends to privilege an idealistic image of teachers and their learning (Dall'Alba, 2009;Riveros & Viczko, 2012). This idealization works to obscure the multiple ways in which teacher learning is configured in the school.…”

“…This idealization works to obscure the multiple ways in which teacher learning is configured in the school. Indeed, current discourses of school reform have placed teachers and their learning as instrumental to achieve the goals of the school reform movement (Riveros, 2012;Riveros & Viczko, 2012). The appeal to "professionalism" in school reform discourses tends to locate learning processes in idealized subjectivities: the "professional" is presented as the authoritative agent of change in schools and he/she is reintroduced as the site where reform efforts ought to be focused (Popkewitz, 1994;Stronach et al, 2002).…”

“…The perceived need to align teaching practices with the goals of reform has given visibility to a number of contradictions and tensions between the realities of teaching practices and the realities of educational reform (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2005). One of such tensions was explored through an examination of the idiosyncratic ways in which a policy on professional development was enacted in a school in rural Alberta in Canada (Riveros & Viczko, 2012;Viczko, 2009). In this paper, we propose that these different ways to enact learning suggest the existence of multiple ontologies of teacher learning in schools.…”

“…In particular, we contextualize the saliency of examining policy enactment by reflecting on data collected in a study (Viczko, 2009) that examined how a policy on professional learning was enacted in a rural school in Alberta, Canada. We note that these policies were enacted in networked interactions that included human and non-human actors (Riveros & Viczko, 2012). The resultant practices revealed that teacher learning was not a unique event circumscribed to a specific scenario of "professional learning," but a multiplicity of practices that enacted multiple realities.…”