Responses to the Chapter: More Research is Needed – A Mantra Too Far?
Jim Scrivener, Willy Cardoso, Peter Medgyes, Mario Saraceni, Dat Bao, Tom Farrell, Tamas Kiss, Richard Watson-Todd, Scott Thornbury, David A. Hill, Brian Tomlinson, Rod Ellis, Rod Bolitho, Penny Ur and Adrian Underhill
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Introduction
From a ‘naïve’ teacher. Jim Scrivener.
An alternative view. Willy Cardoso
Killing the sacred cow? Peter Medgyes
Re-defining research. Mario Saraceni
A plea for action. Dat Bao
Reflection, reflection, reflection. Tom Farrell
‘50 shades of research’. Tamas Kiss
Thought-provoking if not entirely persuasive. Richard Watson-Todd
Making it useful for teachers. Scott Thornbury
Hurray! David A. Hill
Response to ‘More Research is Needed’ – A Mantra Too Far? Brian Tomlinson
Making Connections between research and language pedagogy. Rod Ellis
A teacher education perspective. Rod Bolitho
Yes, but… Penny Ur
My inquiry shopping list. Adrian Underhill
The following contributions are developments from the comments originally received in response to the chapter. I am most grateful to my colleagues for agreeing to submit their reactions, and for taking the time to write them. They offer an interesting and diverse cross-section of views on this important issue.
I think I always have been something of a "naive" teacher. By this, I mean a teacher who mainly relies on what I learn from the experience of my own teaching and my own observations of teaching and learning in others.
That is not to say that I don't read and think and get influenced by other people's presentations, publications, research etc. But it typically makes less impact on me than what I learn from my own practice. I do not often feel the need to take what I have read into class and "apply" it.
My teaching is not applying linguistics. Rather, it is about tuning in to people and attempting, moment by moment, to help create a space where learning can happen. I more often look at the literature to see if it can help me understand what I have already noticed myself.
Yes, of course, there are many ideas from others that wake me, excite me, shock me, challenge me, buffet me, but it seems that generally I absorb them and integrate them (or reject them), often in a slightly reinterpreting (or even misunderstanding) kind of way, rather than picking them up and swallowing them whole.
Over the years, I have observed teachers teaching using every kind of methodology. It all works. It all fails. I have listened to many ELT experts taking up similar or contrary positions on every topic. They are all right. They are all wrong.
I cannot prove or provide evidence to others that what I do is good or successful teaching, but I also do not seek to offer evidence or prove it. Partly this is because I don't believe that anything in teaching is provable. I don't believe that any solutions, approaches, techniques, ideas etc are bottlable and pass-on-able. They always change mid-air. What is good for my students may be a disaster with yours. All we can do, perhaps, is describe to each other what we do, argue it a bit and say “This might work for you”.
I remain convinced that teaching is more a live, personal, creative, intuitive, human art than a measurable science. I cannot determine the quality of a Toulouse Lautrec picture by counting the number of colours he used, or measuring the length of his brush strokes, though both these things may give insights about his techniques and style. I can learn to appreciate his work by observing and thinking. I feel that much the same can be said of teaching.
I can't know whether what I do might be valid or good for others but it seems that talking about it, sharing ideas and insights, getting feedback from others, making new suppositions etc are all very valuable sparks to new directions. These are all traditional, common “staffroom” ways for teachers to learn and move forward. If this is done in a continually questioning mode, a never-being-satisfied-with-where-I've-got-to mode, this can lead to an exciting inquiry-based way of growth that, rather than being built on occasional, single issue research-based steps forward is permanent, holistic and constantly looking at everything I do.
It can fairly be said that my naive viewpoint does not stretch much beyond the derided "I think it worked" or “it didn't work" statements, familiar in every staffroom.
And I want to say, as loudly as I can, that this is OK!
This is a reasonable and intelligent place for a teacher to be. And I retain a strong suspicion that the teacher who is constantly observing, listening, thinking and wondering “Did that work?” learns more than the one who researches narrow, susceptible-to-measurement "objective" aspects of classroom life or who attempts to "apply" other people's ideas.
I am not anti-research or anti-intellectual. I have no wish to belittle or dismiss the work of bloggers, authors, teachers, trainers, researchers, MA students etc who believe in the value of their work, their evidence, their numbers, their tables, their graphs, their proofs.
I simply want to point out that this is not the only valid place to be.
And it seems to me that there has been a growing tendency for the advocates of evidence, statistics and research to dismiss or ridicule (sometimes very rudely) any other way of valuing teaching or learning to be a better teacher, implying that without numbers and graphs our personal testimonies are worthless. Their future of education is measurable and provable.
To insist that the only or best way to move forward is to dive into the sea of data and be encoiled by the dull tentacles of statistics is wrong.
Yes, the alternative carries a danger of blinkered observation, false intuitions, perpetuation of mistakes, wrong thinking, under-informed thinking, prejudiced thinking, foolish thinking – all real risks. … but, all the same, risks worth facing and seeing off.
So, that's my personal confession. I have tried to head off your criticisms by calling myself “naïve” from the start, rather than leaving it to you to do so. I'm sure you can still find other responses! But I hope that at least some of my thoughts may ring a bell for you.
And after reading this, you may understand why I hear many vital, timely trumpet blasts in Alan Maley’s careful, coherent and far-from-naïve article.
Jim Scrivener, Bell (Cambridge,UK) & Freelance. E-mail: jimscrivener@gmail.com
In this response, I would like to focus on Maley’s assertion that “there are surely many other routes to professional development which are arguably more effective and certainly less costly” [than in-depth inquiry through research projects, e.g. as part of an MA degree].
I readily agree that there are many less costly routes. However, how can we know they are more effective? We can consider that to some the alternatives proposed are indeed a more valuable form of professional development, that they help teachers ‘learn’ more about their craft; however, we cannot say teachers are applying that learning and much less that the application is ‘effective’, that is, that their students are learning.
Maley claims, “there is no demonstrable enhancement of teaching quality from the possession of a higher degree”. I would say that neither is there from any of the alternatives he proposes - in generalisable ways that is, if that is one of the concerns raised against research. There is of course the occasional inspiring anecdote in a blog, which can demonstrate increased teacher self-esteem, or a practical magazine article on how to use technology to motivate learners, and so on. But they don’t demonstrate ‘enhancement of teaching quality’ per se. They only demonstrate the person has a motivation to write and share their ideas. The fact that the ideas are practical in nature does not mean they are more effective than abstract theories from research.
Maley also highlights learning from self-reflection, which is almost an unchallenged idea these days. The assumption is that self-reflection can generate practical professional knowledge. Many problems arise from this assumption (which is indeed a very old problem in philosophy). Space is limited to discuss this issue thoroughly, but just look at how many explicit considerations of epistemological stances there are in TESOL materials, methods, conference papers, etc – little to none. So by saying that self-reflection can be hugely effective, and that research cannot, there is an underlying problem which is rarely addressed, that of what valid knowledge is, how it is evaluated and legitimized – and by whom.
My concern is that Maley’s alternatives (learning from fellow professionals, resources, projects and self-reflection) are also prone to fail the same criteria he puts forward to assess the usefulness of research to teachers: relevance, reliability, generalizability, accessibility and applicability – depending on who you ask, of course. Some teachers do find more relevance and applicability in engaging with research instead of reading blogs for example.
Lastly, I would suggest that Maley is taking a certain view of research which might not be so explicit in the article. There are in fact research approaches whose characteristics would not fall under Maley’s outline and critique, in fact these approaches are much nearer to what he calls Inquiry (e.g. ethnography, critical ethnography, action research [in its seminal purpose, not the TESOL reinterpretation], narrative inquiry, and other approaches derived from more post-positivist or post-structuralist perspectives). Perhaps, a way forward would be not to generalize the word research, and not to create an apparent dichotomy with Inquiry.
Speaking from personal experience, I think it could be productive if more teachers understood the many types of research methods and strategies available and were able to evaluate them against their beliefs in the nature, generation and validity of (their professional) knowledge, and in relation to their ways of being. If their own beliefs and ways of being are slightly challenged and taken somewhere else, where the teaching becomes better; then we could perhaps say that research does in fact contribute to teacher development.
Ultimately, I think the way we judge the ‘effectiveness’ of these actions depends on how we assign values to what we can and cannot see - it’s probably more a matter of values after all (and who has the upper hand on that?) before it being a matter of which are the more effective methods of professional development.
Willy Cardoso, British Council Philippines E-mail: cardoso.elt@gmail.com
Whenever the value of research for language teaching is considered, there seems to be general agreement that research has a beneficial impact on classroom teaching. Another assumption is that since few teachers are in the habit of reading academic papers, they need mediators to synthesise the research findings, single out their most salient features and make them digestible through the use of simplified language. The job of mediation can be carried out in the course of pre- and in-service training, as well as by dint of coursebooks and curricula that take the progress of research into account. This in turn is hoped to result in having examination requirements reshaped too. If research findings fail to find their way into the classroom, which admittedly is often the case, the agencies responsible for mediation are to be blamed. Apart from paying lip-service to the contrary, this top-down route from theory to practice has long been taken for granted.
Maley has the audacity to rock the boat by contending that research plays no more than a marginal role in the language teaching operation. It is sufficient to read the introduction to his paper to understand its core message. He argues that ‘research and the practice of teaching are quite different forms of activity, with no necessary connection between them’, and then subjects his iconoclastic claims to detailed analysis in the bulk of the paper. While giving partial credit to advocates of ‘classroom research’ and ‘exploratory practice’ for their bottom-up approach, he writes that their enterprise is still based on standard research paradigms and their most successful representatives are often hijacked into the world of academia.
With the mission of deconstruction completed, Maley sets about offering ‘other routes of professional development which are arguably more effective and less costly’. These include learning from fellow professionals, on-line and printed materials, involvement in projects and – above all – self-reflection. This leads him on to constructing the concept of ‘inquiry’, an undertaking whereby the practicing teacher seeks answers to problems emerging during his or her classroom work. In contrast to research, inquiry is of immediate value to the teacher, partly because it is local, pragmatic and personal. Inquiry looks at the whole picture and is highly intuitive as opposed to the narrow and clinically sharp focus of research.
In conclusion, what Maley attempts to do in this paper is to question the long-held view that research at its best and through adequate forms of mediation is bound to benefit the practice of language teaching. He forcefully pinpoints the contradiction between what researchers can supply and what language teachers would demand. Practitioners are much better off, he argues, if teachers strike out on their own through inquiry, rather than turning an all too attentive ear to advocates of cutting-edge research. If for nothing else, Maley deserves credit for his courage to reveal that the Sacred Cow is not so sacred after all.
Peter Medgyes. Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. E-mail: pmedgy@gmail.com
In his paper, Alan Maley raises some very important issues, underpinned by the central argument that (a) research is of negligible significance to language teachers, and (b) the notion of ‘inquiry’ might instead provide a more relevant and helpful set of investigative practices. Some of the points ‘against’ research are compelling, the fundamental fact underlying them all being the strong divide separating the two communities –researchers and teachers. Maley suggests that attempts to bridge the gap between research and classroom practice have had limited success due to the inevitable incompatibility of research procedures and aims with those of the classroom.
However, despite what may appear to be a rather cynical take on research, Maley believes that in order for teachers to have the opportunity to develop professionally, forms of investigation on their own practice can indeed play a significant role. But he feels that what is needed is a move away from the rigid parameters of the research paradigm and instead to engage in something fundamentally different and more relevant to the classroom context – something that he calls ‘inquiry’, a term deliberately different to ‘research’. He then proceeds to outline the distinction between the two concepts, and here lies the aspect of Maley’s argument that I wish to take some issue with.
Specifically, I think that his definition of what constitutes research may be a little narrow (e.g. that research aspires at theory building with a sense of certainty and projecting into the future but in a close-ended manner), and that its opposition to inquiry may not necessarily be helpful. Indeed, I believe that some of the characteristics of inquiry actually describe what research is, or ought to be and, in general, the distinction between the two is blurred, at best. There is no reason, for example, why research should not be guided by problem-solving, have local focus, seek a sense of plausibility, be conducted by insiders in a bottom-up manner, be open-ended or even intuitive. Rather than stepping away from narrowly-defined research, I think it might be better to try and re-define what research means, perhaps by emphasising its central essence, namely that of systematic investigation. For example, when, on the basis of critical reflection, a teacher questions aspects of their own practice and decides to experiment with a new method to see to what extent this yields better results, they are conducting a piece of research: they will have identified a problem, formulated an hypothesis, carried out an experiment, and evaluated its results. Suggesting, instead, that this constitutes inquiry, as opposed to research, may contribute to reinforcing the perception that the latter is reserved to a (small) community of ivory-tower-dwelling scholars engaged in little more than expensive hobbies, very clearly separated from the (large) community of practitioners interested in solving real-life problems. In fact, if we agree that much real research stems from an inquisitive approach to practice, then perhaps the solution to the very real problem identified by Maley may be not so much to construct and name an alternative paradigm suitable to practising teachers, but to actually re-define sterile, self-serving, tail-chasing, incestuous, costly and irrelevant academic activities that pass for ‘research’ as non-research.
Ultimately, I don’t think that the rift between what is commonly regarded as research and what we can call practice is caused by inherent problems within research itself. I think the problem lies in a system that encourages or even requires the machine-production of non-research that perpetually goes though well-rehearsed motions. One of which being the inevitable mantra-like statement that more of it is needed (when clearly the opposite is true). The recent emphasis, at least in the UK, on the importance of ‘impact’ in research is, if not a magic wand, at least a sign of the recognition that what Maley talks about needs to be addressed seriously and, one hopes, a step in the right direction towards the reconciliation between research and the ‘real world’.
Mario Saraceni University of Portsmouth. E-mail: mario.saraceni@port.ac.uk
This stimulating discussion confronts the paradox between the increasing quantity of research in TESOL pedagogy and the humble quality of teaching by comparison. Considering how much critical research has been conducted resulting in massive academic publications, pedagogical practices have not received a corresponding benefit. Alan Maley raises an important issue that taps into the heart of language pedagogy: sensible educators by now should be disturbed by the huge gap between the quantity of research and its impact on best teaching practice, which seems inadequate.
Maley unpacks the gap above by pointing out the philosophical divide between the two communities of researchers and teachers, which has a long history in the field. While teachers’ concerns are focussed on the need to optimise classroom practice, researchers’ interests seem rather diffused. Some study findings stop at the level of raising awareness to certain problems; others aim at a mere understanding of the process of those problems rather than proposing any remedial action. Many theorists are in the habit of pointing out what goes wrong with teaching without offering a clear procedure for implementing a more efficient pedagogy.
Speaking from professional experience, intellectual reasoning and extensive knowledge in TESOL, Alan Maley presents a wide array of scholarly voices that point to a shared concern: the need to make research outcomes more relevant to teachers, so that classroom life can improve. Being presented in a well-informed, respectful manner toward various interested parties in the field, Maley’s positioning should be perceived with an open mind as an honest appeal for rethinking the real worth of all research in language education, rather than being narrowly misinterpreted as an attack on any particular research community. This can be understood by realising that the chapter can be read diversely by different types of readers. Teachers might find in it a voice of empathy; researchers might become more aware of the pragmatic aspect of their study. Language institutions might see a source of support for their educational undertaking; academic publishers and research universities could perceive a challenge to the applicability of their theoretical contributions in the field.
As both a practitioner and theorist, who speaks in all fairness, I find Alan Maley’s arguments very well justified through encouraging a healthy connection between applicable theory and meaningful practice. The chapter suggests a more open space in the discourse that revisits the ecology of language education and alerts academic communities in their ivory towers to the need to evaluate the impact of research through teaching and learning success. Following this line of reasoning, I couldn’t agree more with Alan Maley’s emphasis on how research findings have been constantly neglected. Somehow I feel that there should be a third community of academic mediators whose task would be to connect the two domains, research and pedagogy, so as to ensure that the outcome of the former will benefit the latter.
Behind the scenes, power disparity is another key element in the scenario. While researchers employ teachers as research informants and as a vehicle for research results, teachers rarely use researchers as informants in the classroom for improving their teaching. For a long time, while requests have been made for teachers to act as researchers in their workplace, there is hardly any demand for researchers to come to the everyday classroom and test out the worth of their research findings in pedagogical actions. This is a situation well worth questioning, and Alan Maley’s humanistic appeal definitely deserves more of our collective attention.
Dr Dat Bao, Monash University, Australia. E-mail: dat.bao@monash.edu
I really enjoyed your chapter and I think you have opened up a useful debate. I think that practicing teachers have been researched too much ON and not enough WITH. I think we are also not preparing our pre-service teachers for the reality of what they will face in their first year--so, what use is academic research for them and for practicing teachers? I hear all the time from academics that teacher research does not have enough rigor--more rigor will lead to rigor mortis!! I have totally disagreed with Borg's recent work on teacher research for the points above and even the whole concept of teacher cognition. For me reflection is important and yes it is a cognitive act but it must be accompanied by a particular teacher attitude as well (open-minded, responsible, wholehearted) and I think most teachers possess these qualities but when teacher research is ON and not WITH the teacher, that is, not for the teacher's benefit and needs, then the result is purely academic.
One point I would like to note is the importance of reflective practice as it can be transformative for practicing as well as pre-service teachers. www.refletiveinquiry.ca. I know I am touting what I always do but I work for teachers and not academics and for their needs and I have seen many transformations over the years when teacher reflection is focussed on what they want to reflect on. I see my role as a bridge for these busy teachers and I can be a mirror (a la Fanselow) for them so they can become more aware of what they do and why they do it--I never tell them they should do anything!
Tom Farrell, Brock University, Canada. E-mail: tfarrell@brocku.ca
First of all, I should point out that I generally agree with the author on many issues he raised about research, and especially academic research. There is no doubt that research is understood differently within the many contexts it is practiced and the majority of research papers on TEFL/TESOL never have any impact on classroom practices. Who has the time, energy, and let alone financial resources to read the vast volume of research papers that come out every year, anyway? Global market economy and venture capitalism have no doubt reached academia and the ‘publish or perish’ adage is more relevant than ever, forcing academics to churn out paper after paper in the hope that someone, somewhere may read them. “More research is needed” added to the end of most academic publications is not a call for further investigation to the issues discussed, but more like a cliché used in the genre; a kind of ‘they lived happily ever after’ for the academic world.
Having said that, I must say that I disagree with the black-and-white-comparison of ‘academic research’ and ‘teacher inquiry’ presented in the paper. It appears that Alan Maley looks at academic research from a positivist paradigm where investigations set out to prove a hypothesis, research questions address variables, and studies are narrowed down to minute details in the hope that an examination of the parts will reveal the ultimate truth of a larger whole. No doubt, there are research projects that adopt this standpoint (and I wholeheartedly agree with their harsh criticism when applied in the context of education), but there are many other ways to academic research that aim to explore, probe, discover, or simply describe a phenomenon they focus on. In fact, there are so many shades of academic research (by designs, frameworks, paradigms, etc.) that a model built on extremes may not be too helpful to explain them.
The same applies to the use of terminology. I understand the reluctance of teachers taking up ‘Research’ – with a capital ‘R’ – as their understanding of what research is can be distorted by previous experiences, (mis)reading academic papers, or lack of information. Therefore, I believe it does not matter much if we call research ‘exploratory practice’, ‘inquiry’, or add ‘action’ in front of the word to emphasize its context specific and engaged nature; essentially they all describe the process in which something unknown – to the individual or to the profession – is discovered. What discourages teachers from embarking on a journey of professional discovery is the perceived notion of the need for ‘expert knowledge’ and personal investment (time, energy, resources), not the name.
No doubt, knowledge about research methodology may be useful for classroom practitioners – just as knowledge of teaching is useful for researchers should they want to understand the phenomena they examine. I strongly believe that teachers need to be involved in generating theories about learning and teaching. The current divide between ‘them’ and ‘us’, researchers and teachers, is not helpful and it is reinforcing the ‘semi-professional’ state of teaching, where decisions about future directions and policies do not come from the ranks of practitioners, but from external parties. When knowledge is generated at the classroom level and it is shared with others then teachers put themselves in a position to argue that they are the ones who own their profession and thus should be trusted with decisions that impact classroom practice. For that to happen, however, research (or inquiry) undertaken by teachers needs to have certain rigour to generate valid (not necessarily replicable or widely generalizable) findings.
Tamas Kiss, National Institute of Education, Singapore. E-mail: tamas.kiss@nie.edu.sg
Like much of his writing, Alan Maley’s ‘More research is needed’ is thought-provoking, if not persuasive in this case (personally, I believe that provoking readers to think is a higher goal in writing than persuading them). As someone whose career path has led me to engage in many of the practices that Alan criticises (starting as a language teacher, but now primarily a researcher, most of whose work produces nothing that can inform teaching and learning), I’d like to start by saying why I find much of the argument in the article unpersuasive, before I move on to the value of the article in the way it stimulates thinking and admittedly a key point where I am persuaded.
One central argument in the article is that research has a “modest value” in that its products are of little use to language teachers. Although the article provides clear counter-examples to this argument (the best starting age for learning, the benefits of extensive reading, and the linguistic features identified in corpus research), it seems reasonable to say that the benefits for language teaching from research do not warrant the time and effort. This position, however, assumes that the goal of research is to provide directions for language teachers. If research and teaching are “fundamentally different enterprises”, why should research be expected to produce useful guidance for teachers? To draw a parallel, education nowadays is dominated by the ideology of economic efficiency where the goal of education is to train workers to be useful employees in the workplace, rather than other possible ideologies such as empowering learners to self-develop, fostering intellectual growth, or changing society. In previous articles, Alan Maley (e.g. 2010) has argued against the prevalent economic efficiency model of education with goals of immediate practical use in favour of an empowerment ideology with greater, though unknown, long-term benefits. Why, then, does he assume that research should follow an economic efficiency model in providing immediate clear directions for teaching, rather than be driven by curiosity with unclear, but potentially in the long term greater, benefits? For example, most corpus research did not have the explicit goal of informing teaching, yet its contributions to the content of language teaching are undoubted.
Whether applied linguistics research should aim to inform teaching is at best unclear. Even if it should not, the article enumerates many concerning issues about current research practice. Taken individually, some of the points may seem naive; taken together, they encourage the reader to ponder the purposes and practices of research.
As the article points out in proposing the alternative term inquiry, the word research carries a lot of baggage. This was highlighted for me when an ex-student, now a Thai secondary school teacher, came to ask my advice on conducting research that she needed to complete for promotion. She ended up conducting an interesting qualitative study on how parents help their children complete homework and submitted it to her regional committee. Her work was rejected because it did not include a t-test. Leaving aside the issue of whether conducting research is a valid criterion for promotion as a school teacher, her experience highlights the pernicious effects of the baggage associated with research. If Alan’s article persuades the wider community to replace teacher research with teacher inquiry, there would be a clear, immediate practical benefit. If the thought-provoking nature of the article stimulates readers to ponder the relationship between research and teaching, there could be even greater, if unknown, long-term benefits.
Reference
Maley, A. (2010) Towards an aesthetics of ELT. Advances in Language and Literary Studies vol. 1 no. 1 pp. 4-28.
Richard Watson-Todd, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand. E-mail: irictodd@kmutt.ac.th
I share many of Alan’s reservations about the applicability of research for practising language teachers, not least because of its inaccessibility, especially in the form that it takes in scholarly journals. As Alan notes, ‘The reason for this is clear – it is not written for the common reader (or the teachers); it is written for other researchers’. The inability of the two discourse communities – teachers and researchers - to communicate with one another was pointed out as long ago as 1994 by Mark Clarke, who characterized it as a ‘dysfunctional discourse’, in which ‘given the hierarchical nature of the profession and the higher status of theorists […] the voices of teachers are subordinated to the voices of others who are less centrally involved in language teaching’ (1994:12-13).
More recently, Nat Bartels has borrowed (from James Paul Gee) the term ‘colonization’ to describe this hierarchical relationship: ‘In language teacher education, for example, colonizing may be a product of the effort in the past 40 years by the language research community, through their dominant role in teacher education, teacher induction, and the production of teacher development resources, to convince teachers and themselves that language teachers need to know about language research and language theories [...] despite the almost total lack of investigation into whether teachers actually benefit from this or not [...]’ (2003: 751).
Perhaps it is worth recalling that the term ‘hierarchy’ derives from the Greek for ‘rule by priests’ (a point that Stevick indexes in his reference to ‘the temples of science’ in the quote that concludes Alan’s paper) and that priestly hierarchies have almost invariably evolved to combine – and accumulate - both mystery and power. As one website notes, with regard to the ancient Egyptian priesthood:
Though the priesthood had started out simply, with relatively few temples, in the later dynasties the temples expanded into the hundreds. With such growth, a large bureaucracy was needed to keep the temples in good standing; and thenceforth, the small priesthoods of the Egyptians grew from an estimated hundred priests into the thousands, and with it came a priestly hierarchy. www.crystalinks.com/egyptpriests.html
Imperial China, too, was dominated a by a class of scholar-officials, who ‘ruled autocratically, following Confucius’s view that “the common people, the lower class” should be maintained “in an entirely subordinate position”’ (Derber, et al. 1990: 22). They add that ‘this class possessed every privilege, above all the privilege of reproducing itself, because of its monopoly of education.’
I can certainly see parallels here, especially with the exclusive and self-reproductive nature of academic discourse – all academic discourse, not just in our own field. One way that this might be mitigated to a certain extent is if the editors of the journals that publish the research were to insist that the authors spell out the implications and applications of the research for language teachers – and that these implications and applications should satisfy the ‘sense of plausibility’ of reviewers who are themselves practitioners. As Clarke (1994: 20) writes: ‘It should be the responsibility of theorists and researchers to establish the “particularizability” of their work for teachers. The important question to ask is “To what extent can this information be made usable for particular teachers?”
At the same time, I think we need to be cautious about consigning all research to the trash can, simply because some research is irrelevant or impenetrable (and I know that this is not what Alan is suggesting). As a teacher trainer, I often have to defend my training stance on particular issues, such as the value of learner interaction, or the usefulness of explicit correction, by appealing – not to common sense, my own experience, intuition, my sense of plausibility, etc (because these can all be challenged by the sceptical trainee as ‘not counting’) – but to the accumulated research that informs our professional knowledge base. Without that knowledge base, ‘anything goes’, and our status as professionals, as opposed to peddlers of snake oil, is seriously jeopardised.
References
Bartels, N. (2003) ‘How teachers and researchers read academic articles’. Teacher & Teacher Education, 19.
Clarke, M. A. (1994) ‘The dysfunctions of the theory/practice discourse.’ TESOL Quarterly, 28/1.
Derber, C., Schwarz, W.A., and Magrass, Y. (1990) Power in the highest degree: professionals and the rise of a new Mandarin order. Oxford University Press.
Scott Thornbury, The New School, NY. E-mail: thornbus@newschool.edu
I have just read Alan’s chapter again. A couple of months on it still makes perfect sense.
It is rare that one reads something which one agrees with completely, but I can truthfully say that I have nothing to add to what Alan writes.
I have spent much of my life taking part in one of the processes Alan discusses: interpreting other people’s research for teachers, and finding ways of making it relevant and applicable to their particular teaching situations. I have frequently seen myself as a kind of mediator, a translator even, between the unavailable books, written in their inaccessible academic style which often had the seeds of something worthwhile in them, and the teachers who came to my training workshops.
I was also involved in helping with top-down programmes of action (or classroom) research; helping teachers on courses find out something from and about their own teaching work. It was often very exciting, and the teachers sometimes found out very useful things about what they were doing…and that was good for them, but it was not easily generalizable, as Alan says.
I particularly like Alan’s example of Extensive Reading as being something which – based on academic research - clearly is a very real answer to improving all language learning, and which has been willfully ignored by most educational administrators and practitioners. So what’s the point of the research if nobody then listens to it and acts upon it?
In conclusion, I say Hurray! for Alan’s ( very well-researched….) paper. I hope it gets read and acted upon by all and sundry.
David A. Hill, Freelance Consultant in English Language and Literature, Budapest.
E-mail: futured@hu.inter.net
I agree with many of Alan’s points, for example, that ‘Researchers … enjoy a degree of professional esteem usually not commonly extended to teachers. And … more favourable working conditions … in terms of salary, promotion prospects, working hours, access to publication and availability of time.’ You only need to compare advertisements for academic and for pedagogic posts to see that this is true. Or to work in a university which appoints applicants with a good research and publications record as permanent University Lecturers and those without such a record as temporary University Teachers (no matter how experienced and capable they are). The Lecturers are on a much higher salary scale, teach far fewer hours, are given generous allowances of time for further research and publication, have good promotion prospects and after a few years are given research leave. Yet it is often the University Teachers who do most of the teaching on the TESOL and Applied Linguistics post-graduate courses (which are often disparaged as ‘vocational courses’ and yet attract the overseas income which allows the universities to pay their researchers higher salaries). And, if numbers drop, it is usually the University Teachers who are dispensed with first.
I would also agree with Alan that much applied linguistic research is inaccessible to teachers, in terms of resources, time, content and style. Many researchers understandably aim to impress their peers with their erudition (I have had an article turned down by an academic journal because ‘your writing is too clear’). If the intended audience for an article is academics familiar with the jargon of the field then the use of it can achieve precision in an efficient way. However if teachers do manage to find the article and the time to read it, they are likely to find it inaccessible. The good news though is that the situation is improving. At MATSDA (Materials Development Association) Conferences in recent years, for example, the themes have focused on the interaction between research and materials development (e.g. Applied Linguistics and Materials Development at the University of Limerick in 2012; SLA Research and Materials Development for Language Learning at the University of Liverpool in 2014). In their conference presentations and subsequent publications practitioners and academics have drawn attention to mismatches between practice and theory and have suggested action. And there are a number of researchers who are easy to understand in their presentations and publications and who do address issues relevant to teachers. Nevertheless, there are others who still persist in addressing the initiated few, even at conferences such as the RELC Conference in Singapore or the JALT Conference in Japan, which are dominated by and largely financed by classroom teachers.
Alan is also right in saying that most research on language learning is conducted by outsiders with their own research agenda and that their goal is to ultimately establish the truth rather than to solve problems and stimulate discussion and enquiry. Much of this research is not intended to be immediately relevant to language teaching and some of it is so removed from the classroom that it never will be.
Where I disagree with Alan is in his apparent dismissal of post-graduate research as being trivial and wasteful and of teacher research as being intimidating and likely to lead to a loss of self-esteem. What he says can be true if students and teachers do not get good advice. But I have found that they can gain inspiration, awareness and self-esteem if they are advised to focus their research on an issue that really interests them rather than on a result which is easy to measure, to set out to investigate their hypotheses rather than to prove them to be correct and to aim primarily to learn more about themselves and their field rather than to prove themselves in the academic world. But then they might not gain the academic acclaim which is vital for career progression.
Many thanks to Alan for opening up this debate and for giving us all an opportunity to reflect on our experience and beliefs.
Brian Tomlinson, University of Liverpool, TESOL Professor Anaheim University. E-mail: brianjohntomlinson@gmail.com
Research and teaching are very different activities, each with their own practices and usually carried out by members of different communities of practice. It is therefore, not surprising to find that rather than seeking fruitful points of connection there is a tendency for members of each community to reject the practices of the other as having no relevance to their work. I think this works both ways. Some researchers have little time for the practical knowledge that teachers have accrued from their experience of teaching and which necessarily informs their teaching, and conduct research directed at theoretical issues rather than issues of importance to language pedagogy. Equally some teachers/ teacher educators dismiss research as of no relevance to their work – as seems to be the case in Alan Maley’s article. Perhaps this rejection arises because the discourse of research is viewed as authoritarian and prescriptive, as Clarke (1994) suggested. Perhaps too it is because of the wish to resist the positioning of teachers as less expert than researchers.
To my mind, though, little is to be gained by asserting the primacy of ‘experience’ or ‘research. We can argue about what is of the greater importance for language pedagogy but surely a more profitable approach is to examine what both experience and research can offer. In other words, we need to look for ways in which language pedagogy can inform research and vice versa (Van Lier, 1994). This is the approach I have tried to adopt in much of my own research and in my publications. Sometimes I have conducted research with a view to testing and developing theory but, if I did so, it was also because I thought that the issues I was addressing were relevant to language teaching. I have tried not be authoritarian and prescriptive in my proposed applications to language pedagogy, influenced by Stenhouse’s (1975) feisty dismissal of research-led teaching. I have suggested that research can only offer teachers ‘provisional specifications’ - insights and ideas that they can explore in their own teaching.
Increasingly, I have adopted a different approach in many of my own publications (see Ellis, 1997; 2010). Like Pica (1994), I have taken as my starting point pedagogic issues that are important to teachers and teacher educators. For example, there is a widespread belief among teacher educators (as reflected for example in teacher guides such as Scrivener (2005)) that teachers should not correct students during fluency work. But in fact research has shown that teachers often do correct and, furthermore, it suggests that correcting during fluency work need not detract from students’ efforts to communicate and can facilitate acquisition. This research should at least give rise to rethinking the advice that some teacher guides mete out to teachers. But researchers need to take seriously what the guides propose. For example, they need to see whether the guides’ proposal that correction in fluency work should be delayed until after the students have completed a communicative task has merit. There is very little research that has investigated delayed feedback. In Ellis and Shintani (2014) we explored a number of what I call ‘interface issues’ in a ‘back-to-front’ approach, where we took specific pedagogical constructs or proposals as out starting points and examined them in terms of research. Perhaps, too, we need a book where experienced teacher educators, such as Maley, try the reverse approach and subject the specific findings of research to critical scrutiny from the perspective of their rich experience as teachers and teacher educators. What would Maley have to say, for example, about the research that indicates that correcting during fluency work has merit? Such a critical scrutiny is surely better than a blanket dismissal of research.
Another alternative, of course, is for teachers to become researchers themselves. This is what has motivated the drive to make teachers action researchers. I am not convinced that action research is the answer for bridging the research-pedagogy divide. It certainly has a place in teacher-education programmes but it is unlikely teachers will be able to find the time to engage regularly in action research. Allwright’s (2003) solution was ‘exploratory practice’, which Maley refers to in passing. Allwright argued that teachers should address any ‘puzzles’ they have through their own teaching. Developing an understanding of these puzzles needs to be a joint enterprise between teacher and students and embedded in everyday teaching. But teachers can also gain insights about their puzzles from reading research, providing of course they have the time, and provided the research is accessible. And there I admit are real problems.
There is no need to create a false dichotomy between ‘research’ and ‘teaching’. Yes, teachers have a right to be sceptical about research which is often written about in a discourse that is not accessible to them. Yes, researchers have no right to dictate to teachers or to claim that their research-informed proposals are sounder than teachers’ experience-based ones. But teachers and teacher educators are unwise to dismiss research. Better to look for interface issues to the benefit both parties. Below I have provided a list of readings that have considered the relationship between language pedagogy research and that I think help to promote an interface.
Bibliography
Allwright, D. (2003). Exploratory practice: rethinking practitioner research in language
teaching. Language Teaching Research 7, 113-141.
Clarke, M. (1994). The dysfunctions of theory/practice discourse. TESOL Quarterly
28, 9-26.
Ellis, R. (1997). SLA and language pedagogy: An educational perspective. Studies in
Second Language Acquisition 19: 69–92.
Ellis, R. (2010). Second language acquisition, teacher education and language pedagogy. Language Teaching 43 (2): 182-201.
Ellis, R. & Shintani, N. (ed.) (2014). Exploring language pedagogy through second language acquisition research. London: Routledge.
Erlam, R. (2008). What do you researchers know about language teaching? Bridging the gap between SLA research and language pedagogy. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 2, 253-267.
McDonald, M., Badger, R. and White, G. (2001). Changing values: What use are theories of language learning and teaching? Teaching and Teacher Education, 17: 949-63.
Pica, T. (1994). Questions from the language classroom: research perspectives. TESOL Quarterly 28: 49-79.
Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development.
London: Heinemann.
Wright, T. 1992. Classroom research and teacher education: towards a collaborative approach. In J. Flowerdew, M. Brooks and S. Hsia (eds.) Perspectives on Second Language Teacher Education. Hong Kong: Hong Kong City Polytechnic.
Van Lier, L. (1994). Some features of a theory of practice. TESOL Journal 4.1, 6–10.
Rod Ellis. University of Auckland, New Zealand. E-mail: r.ellis@auckland.ac.nz
I am pleased to have the opportunity to comment on this article and am doing so largely from the perspective of a teacher and trainer with over 25 years of experience of tutoring at Master’s level. The many hundreds of postgraduate students who have taken courses I’ve been responsible or co-responsible for have been practising teachers seeking professional development or advancement. These courses were always resolutely professional rather than academic in nature and in name (M.Ed. in Teacher Training for ELT, M.A. in Professional Development for Language Education), with a primary focus on giving participants an opportunity to distance themselves for a while from their often stressful and always busy lives as classroom teachers, to think critically about what they do and why they do it, and to return to post with enhanced awareness of the issues that surround them, and renewed appetite for the challenges they face. Maley writes about the differing discourses that characterise teaching and research, and, along with my fellow tutors, I have always tried to ensure that our courses take place on discourse territory that is accessible and reasonably familiar, rather than alien, to teacher participants. This needs to be reflected in the transactional language of face-to-face course encounters as well as in the recommended reading that goes with study at Master’s level, though this is not always easy to keep under control.
On courses such as these, the crunch comes when the taught part of the course is over and participants are confronted with the need to write a dissertation. On an academic programme such as an M.A. in Applied Linguistics, teacher participants often struggle from this point onwards (at the very latest) as they are required to enter the alien discourse world of Research. On a professional postgrad programme, there is no need at all for a dissertation to follow the conventions of academic research, though it is sometimes difficult for a tutor to convince participants of this. Here, Maley’s preferred notion of Inquiry (sometimes also referred to as Investigation) is of great value. We always try to keep participants focussed on a topic that they can reasonably look into in the limited time available for the study and within the word limit, and to encourage them to work on something that will be useful and relevant to themselves and others in their workplace. In this sense, the dissertation can form a bridge from their studies back to their practice. I have always discouraged the kind of pseudo-research, underpinned by dubious quantitative methods, which appears to give findings face validity. The literature on research methods, in an attempt to cover all bases, all too often seems like a gateway into an entirely different kind of discourse, and I have had many a tutorial with participants who have found themselves sinking into a terminological and conceptual bog which they never needed to get into in the first place. It is relatively easy to establish a manageable set of parameters around the process of Inquiry which will help to make the teacher feel able to cope and to fulfil the requirements of the course. Terms such as ‘rigour’ and ‘measurability’ have no place in the lexicon of Inquiry and, ultimately, the only valid way of gauging the validity of a completed Inquiry is through the lens of the teacher concerned. It follows that there is no need for them to worry about the ‘limitations’ of their study (these are self-evident) and still less about the need to point out a need for ‘further research’. I have worked with many postgrad students who have struggled with the conventions of Inquiry and of professional writing, who have passed with a relatively low overall grade, but who have developed professionally and personally through their efforts and who have made invaluable contributions to their colleagues and home institutions after the course.
Rod Bolitho, Freelance Trainer and Consultant. E-mail: rodbol44@yahoo.co.uk
The basic claim of Alan Maley’s article – that research is only a very minor contributor to professional expertise of language teachers – is one that I wholeheartedly agree with. The reasons given in the article for this phenomenon – such as the sheer quantity, difficulty, and frequent irrelevance of research studies – are essentially valid. It is fairly obvious to most of us that the expertise of the practitioner stems mainly from experience, and how he or she has used that experience to reflect, develop, and improve, supported also by interaction with colleagues and feedback from students. Less important but still significant are opportunities for more formal learning: courses, conferences, webinars and the like, whose content may include occasional references to research.
I am not sure, by the way, that the belief that research is ‘pre-eminent’ as a source of teacher knowledge is in fact as widely held as Alan implies. It’s just that those who hold it are the ones who publish and speak at conferences, so they are the ones whose opinions are heard. I have the feeling that the relatively silent majority of the profession hold views that are far closer to those expressed in this article.
In any case, I do not see this situation as any kind of urgent problem needing radical solutions: it is, in my view, a natural and acceptable phenomenon. The fundamental structure of the acquisition of expertise in most of the socially-oriented professions is very similar to that described in my first paragraph above (Ericsson et al., 2006). We do not need to look for some kind of paradigm change, or a new way to develop teacher knowledge, but rather ways to enhance and enrich the processes that are already in place.
So this is where Alan and I part company. According to my understanding, the reason why teachers do not do research is not – or not mainly – that they have, as he suggests, reservations about the whole concept and implementation of ‘research’. It is simply that they don’t have the time, or any real incentive, to perform professional development-related work outside their daily teaching schedule. The substitution of Inquiry for Research will not, therefore, help. It still takes up time which teachers do not have, and demands attention which they cannot spare. Where action research has succeeded – including cases where it looks very much more like Alan’s ‘Inquiry’ than like formal ‘Research’ – it has normally been within the framework of some kind of course or external initiative, where time, support and incentives are built in.
So what teachers really need is not a better or different substitute for ‘learning from the research’, but rather time and incentives, ideally included in their job description, for professional development of all kinds. Such development would certainly include Alan’s concept of inquiry, but also conventional action research, in-school collegial sharing sessions, courses and conferences, reading of the professional literature. The last items would often include study of those (relatively few, as Alan rightly points out) research studies that are not only readable, valid and reliable, but also relevant, providing teachers with useful insights, understandings and practical ideas. There remains the problem of the enormous amount of published research of mixed quality that is currently available (and increasing daily). Hence the increasing importance of those I have elsewhere called mediators (Ur, 2014): professionals with substantial teaching experience themselves but possessing also the time and opportunity to read extensively, who are able to select, recommend and make accessible to busy practising teachers research-based books and articles which may be relevant and useful for their professional development.
Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P. J., & Hoffman, R. R.. (2006). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ur, P. (2014). Practice and research-based theory in English teacher development. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 3(2), 143-155.
Penny Ur, Oranim Academic College of Education. E-mail: pennyur@gmail.com
Alan’s chapter raises questions about the role of research in creating practical knowledge and developing professional artistry, concluding that though the research he refers to has value and legitimacy within its own domain, it does not fulfil this developmental role. The chapter ends by asking what other forms of research, questioning and inquiry may be more relevant to teachers in their professional learning and development. I want to take up that question and outline the qualities of an approach to inquiry which in my view provides a core discipline for learning from experience and developing professional artistry.
Such inquiry offers a framework within which to become learning teachers, learning trainers, learning leaders, in fact to maintain contact with what we already are – learning beings. None of the following qualities is new but taken together they contribute to a rich inquiry method. So, this is my inquiry shopping list:
Reflective practice
Of course this is a core component, looking at one’s actions, thoughts, feelings and experiences as if in a mirror. Looking at individual instances of experience, say with a group of learners, and also looking out for patterns that emerge over a longer period of time. There is also the term reflexive practice, which people define in differently ways. The meaning I give it is “looking at oneself looking at one’s experience” ie maintaining a critical look at one’s methods and ways of working, its lacks and its strengths, oversights and blind spots, which skew the questions one asks, the responses one hears and the conclusions one draws.
Seeing ones assumptions
Reflexivity requires a constant striving to surface one’s assumptions, always a striving in progress. You can start out noting and articulating your assumptions, but after a while you find that you are viewing your assumptions through the lens of your other assumptions. Human inquiry is messy, but the aim is not to eradicate assumptions or even to see them all, but to strive to make them more visible, so that they can be taken into account, and even suspected when not seen, so this too can inform our inquiry and sense making, to make it less likely we are misled by them or taken for a ride.
I am part and parcel of what I research
You cannot entirely separate researcher from researched. If I want to inquire into what might enable my students to feel a greater sense of internal motivation in my afternoon class, I cannot just put on a white coat and go to work on them. I have to ask “where am I in that question?’ since it is I who asked it. Also it is in my class that this apparent lack of inner motivation (also my assumption) takes place. “My question” and “their problem” may appear to be in different boxes, but both are contained in the same box at the next size up. Where we draw boundaries around things is a key issue in inquiry. The inquirer needs to be aware that in relational, messy, human settings there is no clear line between what’s going on around me and what’s going on inside me.
Multiple perspectives
I said reflective practice is like looking at ourselves a mirror, but in fact we need multiple mirrors to overcome possible distortions and to extend the perspective of each mirror. Even in hard science every act of measurement is based on a view, the view that decides what to measure. And the things that are not in that view get missed. As physicist John Archibald Wheeler said “Every act of measurement misses more than it measures”. If hard science is like measuring what happens when you throw a stone: its mass, weight, trajectory, shape, air resistance, gravity, wind etc, and putting that together to see if the stone lands in the bucket, then human inquiry is comparable to measuring what happens when you throw a live bird… there is no point in replicating the same hard measurement systems, not even if you fill the bucket with worms.
Human inquiry is about how people act, think, feel and speak in their settings. All observations (‘measures’) become fuzzy, laden with subjectivity depending on perspective. No single perspective is the truth. Therefore we need to build up pictures from multiple perspectives, none of which is the whole picture but all of which contribute to the complete picture, a bit like the way that a pointillist painting only comes together when enough of the different colour dots are present. So human inquiry needs multiple ways of knowing, textured knowing it is sometimes called, where multiple subjectivities, or fuzzinesses build up a picture that tells you something about a human setting that you can work with.
Extending our ways of knowing
Here are some ways of feeding those multiple perspectives by extending our ways of knowing. This is a very small selection, and only a few of these may apply to any specific inquiry. But just reading them can widen one’s view:
Audio and video recordings; Photos, drawings and diagrams; Accounts of what happened in learning papers, diaries, learning groups; Peer observation, feedback and dialogue; Anecdotes, vignettes, reflections in journal entries; Maps of the space: Visual representations of movements and locations and feelings and things (“tracks and traces”); Sociograms and maps of how group members see and relate to each other; Artifacts, bits and pieces of notes, memos, work in progress, a letter, report, design, recipe, documentary; art, novel, biography, stories, news cuttings, myths; Feedback post-its: immediate impressions, hot feedback, cold feedback; Interviews: casual or intentional; Free-fall and spontaneous writing; Email exchanges and correspondence; Notes on reading; Minutes of a meeting, agendas or notes as we prepare for a meeting; Our thoughts as we look back on what happened; Flipchart notes; Notes on bright ideas, theories; PowerPoint slides; Poems or music, expressive work of self or others, drawings, writings, cooking; Dreams, intuitions, hunches; Numerical data and their transformations; Attention to inner states; Telling experiences to others as stories in 1st or 3rd person; Role play, real play, psychodrama, constellations; Visiting other group members in their practice and offering feedback discussion; Using questionnaires, designed by yourself or the group, or from other sources, either to surface knowledge or to raise awareness of new areas for discussion; Mutual interviewing, Inquiring conversations…. Having conversations about what interests you in multiple settings (at work, at home, on the bus, in a café) with multiple kinds of people (friends, tutors, students, strangers, family members) both to hear what you say and think in different settings and the perspectives others bring, and how you react. Spotting your patterns and doing the opposite…. And so on.
Local v universal knowledge
Local knowledge generated in one setting does not have universal generalizability to another. There are no ‘universal’ solutions to ‘local’ human situations. Therefore we need to be guided by knowledge and experience from the people in the local situations, to develop local knowledge that follows the contours of the setting and local circumstances. Having said this we may get inspiration and encouragement from other people’s inquiries elsewhere, from the ways they went about it and from the sense they made from it in their setting, without having to import their exact conclusions into our own setting. It is an essential part of the ‘code’ of inquiry to make our inquiry intentions, methods and conclusions available to others, in the interests of promoting a more inquiring and agentive society. This always has a political side to it in challenging power structures, and in some cases, sadly this can be troublesome.
Big picture
It’s OK to ask a question that is then extinguished by an answer. That’s helpful as far as it goes. But inquiry does not have the sole purpose of looking for answers and solving problems. It is also concerned with understanding, learning and developing our own wisdom, to intuiting and connecting with the bigger picture. The result of inquiry may not be an answer but a yield of more finely nuanced questions that better reflect the contours of the setting, that take us to a richer and bigger picture of the things we started out looking at. Inquiry is aware of and on the look out for the human tendency to reduce the unknown to what is already known. It expects the unexpected and is alert to the hidden connections between things.
A black belt at learning from experience (Francisco Varela)
Francisco Varela proposes that cognition science has a blind spot concerning our in/ability to access experience. He says in this interview
www.iwp.jku.at/born/mpwfst/02/www.dialogonleadership.org/varelax2000.html also quoted and discussed here
http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2294&context=lhapapers
“I maintain that there is an irreducible core to the quality of experience that needs to be explored with a method. In other words, the problem is not that we don't know enough about the brain or about biology, the problem is that we don't know enough about experience. We have had a blind spot in the West for that kind of methodical approach, which I would now describe as a more straightforward phenomenological method. Everybody thinks they know about experience, I claim we don't........... “
and he goes on to describe the process of learning,
“…where you become truly a black belt or a very competent observer of your experience, a describer of your experience”.
Without claiming to understand Varela’s view fully, I resonate with the challenge that we don't understand experience. And the metaphor of becoming a black belt at learning from experience is for me apt in its implication of the need for discipline, application, attention, elegance and personal presence in inquiry.
Playfulness
Inquiry is both sincere and playful. Sincere in its openness to the realities of people’s lives, aspirations, potentials and the pains and joys of living. And playful in its focus on outcomes rather than mistakes, on teasing accepted rules and making and testing new ones, and on the positive mood that emerges from playful play and that encourages divergent thinking, creativity, humour and openness to other perspectives.
Varieties of inquiry
There are many interesting varieties of inquiry around these days with names like subjective inquiry, mindful inquiry, exploratory practice, experiential inquiry, existential inquiry each developed by different people for different circumstances, and in the end all are ultimately defined by the user. Each has its own ways of squaring subjectivity with issues of validity and reliability, credibility and rigour, and with the qualities I have listed above. One of the approaches that resonates for me, and that fulfils the qualities in my shopping list is the approach to Action Inquiry developed by Bill Torbert. You can get a sense of it here www.williamrtorbert.com/
Action Inquiry a la Bill Torbert
At the centre of this model of inquiry is the notion that we are engaged in action inquiry when we inquire simultaneously across four territories of our own experience.
Territory 1: Outcomes and impacts
This is our impact on the world, on other people. It is what results in full or in part from our actions. In the case of teaching it could be the impact of my teaching on the students and their learning and the experience they take from it. It includes the impact of the psychological learning atmosphere I created. The outcome may be different from that which I think I am having or that I intended beforehand, and such deviations may be invisible to me. Part of action inquiry is developing ways to get a more accurate sense of the impact I am having on a class, staffroom, team, colleague, friend, partner etc. I do not know what it is like to be taught by me.
Territory 2: Behaviours and actions
This is what we actually do in the setting. How we think, feel, project, behave, act, including our qualities of presence, openness, connectedness etc. In the case of teaching it would be what I do during the lesson or programme and the ways I go about it. The ways I behave, and how I come across. This may be different from what I intend, or different from what I think I am doing. For example I do not see the atmosphere I am creating, though this is fully visible to my students. Part of action inquiry is trying get a clearer idea of our actions and how they feed through to the outcomes.
Territory 3: Mental maps and planning, our strategies
This is our plan of action, what we say we are going to do and our strategies for going about it. In teaching this can correspond with the lesson plan, the things I am going to do and in roughly what order, for how long, when to stop and move on, etc. The plan embodies tacit notions of how I will carry it out (Territory 2) and the hoped for outcomes (Territory 1), and it may even state precisely what I will say at a given moment. But this is not usually the way it works out. Part of action inquiry is to look for the alignment and misalignment between plan, action and impact.
Territory 4: Deep values and purposes
This concerns what we hold to be deeply important, the personal values that we may be only partly aware of. It is “what I am for”. And it is a mix of authentic personal values and introjected values from our education, role models and culture. In the case of teaching this is my view of learning and teaching, of how it takes place, of what’s important in working with people, and what teachers and learners need to do.
Now the interesting thing about this, as Torbert says, is what happens as we inquire into the four territories simultaneously. Does my planning (territory 3) reflect what I deeply value (territory 4)? Do my actions (territory 2) align with what I intended while planning, and in any case how is this reflected in the impacts my actions have (territory 1)? Or to summarise, do my impacts on the world align with what I am for? Or do my impacts contradict my deep purposes and intentions? And what do I rely on in order to know this? What feedback systems do I have for each territory on its own and for the integrity of the four territories taken together? How do my 4 territories of experience align and contradict?
Conclusion
This personal collection of desirable qualities constitutes a form of inquiry different from the kind of research that Alan discusses, and is intended as a response to his question about what forms of inquiry could serve us. If we want to encourage learning from experience and the development of professional artistry then forms of inquiry must be better integrated into training courses, in-service courses, staff rooms, course management, school management, organisational learning, school culture, and extended appropriately to include students, learners, parents, cleaners, caterers, and all the other stakeholders.
Adrian Underhill, consultant, teacher, speaker, autho. E-mail: adrian@aunderhill.co.uk
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.
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