Taking curiosity seriously: the role of awe and wanda in research-based professionalism

Abstract

This article offers a rationale for research-based professionalism, especially in the contexts of schooling and teacher education. It also explores some of the problematic contextual issues facing those wanting to develop research-based professionalism – work overload, stress, excessive accountability, lack of adequate funding. Despite these problems, the article argues, the cultivation and pursuit of professional curiosity are essential if teachers and teacher educators are to convey the educative value of enquiry to those they educate. The pursuit of challenging questions also helps to guard against excessive, dogmatic authoritarianism in education. Curiosity is also the central driving force in research-based professionalism. The article is written in two voices – the personal and the ‘academic’. It draws on the author's reflective experience as a research co-ordinator in teacher education, trying to develop a research culture with colleagues in difficult national and institutional circumstances. These personal experiences are set against wider debates and issues about research-based professionalism. Wanda is a character the author created to illustrate the responses and reactions of colleagues, with whom she works, towards research-based work. Wanda is fictional, in that no one such character exists, yet she is also ‘factual’, in that the events and conversations illustrated through the character actually took place at some time, with someone, in the author's workplace over the period in which the article is set. The fiction is, thus, grounded in the data of the author's own ‘reality’, although some poetic licence has been applied in order to tell the story of Wanda with some theoretical coherence and validity.