Practice-based Pedagogy Research Articles

Bridging Professional Practice and Academia: Using the Pilot Study as a Practice-Based Pedagogy in an EdD Program

Professional practice doctoral education is distinguished by its focus on practice-based pedagogies aimed at fostering students’ development as researching professionals—individuals who are adept at using evidence to tackle educational issues. To advance students’ research competence, the doctoral study should facilitate the integration of theoretical knowledge acquired in the program with their professional worlds, a process that can be considered as boundary crossing. Drawing upon the theory of boundary crossing, we used the pilot study as a practice-based pedagogy in an EdD course, which aims to link students’ professional practice with their developing scholarly practice. We explored how students encountered the boundary between professional practice and academia and how they navigated the tensions inherent in this boundary-crossing process. We found that the pilot study served as a boundary object, generating tensions at the boundary between students’ professional and academic worlds. In navigating the tensions, students utilized research as a mediating tool, leveraging productive dissonance, reflection, and idea sharing within Critical Friends groups. We draw implications about the use of the pilot study in professional practice programs to support students in their transition from practitioners to scholarly practitioners and researchers.

Creating a shared vision of preparing scholarly practitioners: an EdD faculty collaborative autoethnography

PurposeIn this collaborative autoethnographic study, four faculty members in a US-based Doctor of Education (EdD) program reflected individually and collectively in the authors’ community of practice through reflective journaling, self-reflection and discussion sessions to analyze the individual stories critically. This study aims to examine the influence of the authors’ involvement with an EdD program on the academic approaches to teaching, research and mentoring EdD students.Design/methodology/approachProfessional practice doctorates have emerged in response to the growing need for practitioners to use evidence for continuous improvement. Although the literature has highlighted faculty members as change agents redefining the EdD as a professional practice doctorate, minimal research has explored how their involvement in such design work may affect their academic practices.FindingsThe authors perceived the involvement with the EdD program as transforming the faculty practices in five ways (i.e. shifting the epistemologies, embracing practice-based pedagogies, engaging in practice-based research, mentoring scholarly practitioners and intentional community building) and creating a shared vision of preparing scholarly practitioners.Originality/valueThe authors draw implications for redesigning EdD programs through participation in a faculty community of practice, prompting faculty to shift their practices to better support scholarly practitioners and affecting their identity as teachers, mentors and program developers.

Consultancy Communities of Practice

The last two decades have witnessed an ongoing effort to re-design the education doctorate to prepare practitioners to conduct research as a key aspect of their practice. As part of the reform, Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) members have tried to ensure the delivery of a relevant practice-based curriculum that prepares practitioners to respond to local needs. This article examines how one U.S. EdD program uses a practice-based pedagogy, called the Group Consultancy Project, to develop students as scholarly practitioners, that is, educational leaders who conduct research to enact positive societal changes. The analysis draws from final consultancy reports and from the responses of 11 students in three consultancy projects. By examining how students learned within the projects, the study reveals that the consultancy model cultivated communities of practice that moved students from a practice community toward a community of scholars and researchers.

SJS-Who? Performance Ethnography and a Practice-Based Pedagogy

What is the performative force of practice-based pedagogy? Are there common perceptible outcomes of students engaging in practice-based research (PBR) in a learning environment? This essay utilizes an interview-based performance that is part of a course on performance ethnography to propose three observable features of practice-based pedagogy: intimacy, accountability, and reciprocity. In addition to articulating how PBR aligns with critical performance pedagogy and the performative paradigm, the reflection suggests how one approach to teaching performance ethnography may help to illuminate PBR’s broader methodological contributions.

Practice-Based Pedagogies for Counter-Memorial Performance: Teaching to Address and Shift “Plantation Energy”

This article discusses History, Memory, Performance, Place: Activating Davidson’s Submerged Histories, a practice-based course I developed and taught in spring 2020 and spring 2021 at Davidson College, a small liberal arts college twenty miles north of Charlotte, NC, established in 1837 by white slave owners. Drawing together dance, performance studies, and Black studies methodologies, the class centred the body through both practice-based research and critical engagements with power, history, and legacies of white supremacy on campus. Coalescing these three fields amplifies multifaceted practice-based research approaches to antiracist reflective and body-based engagements with history, place, and self. In the class, I brought together embodied creative modalities with archival, historiographic, place-based, theoretical, and dialogic approaches to knowledge production. I facilitated student development of practice-based research projects invested in building new and ongoing relationships to Davidson College’s violent history and its pervasive continuities felt by members of the community in the present. This article considers how practice-based research can be integrated into critical performance pedagogies to contribute to campus historical reckoning projects. Outlining the course methods and integrating student reflections and projects, the article discusses how a process-oriented conception of performance, combined with a “counter-memorial” approach to pedagogy and practice, can underscore ongoing embodied work required to address what one student defined as “plantation energy” on campus.

Practice-based coaching for project-based teaching: Understanding relationships between coaching practice and teaching practice

Only a limited amount of scholarship on practice-based teacher education has investigated the relationship between practice-based pedagogies of teacher education and teachers' subsequent classroom practice. This mixed methods study addresses this gap by investigating relationships between how coaches represent, decompose, and approximate practice and how teachers go on to enact those practices in K-12 classrooms. Quantitative findings illustrate that longer episodes of decomposition in teacher coaching sessions are predictive of teachers’ subsequent growth in observation protocol scores. Qualitative analyses reveal that longer episodes of decomposition typically involve opportunities for teacher learners to play a role in the decomposition process. These findings have significant implications for instructional coaches and teacher educators, those designing instructional coach and teacher educator learning opportunities, and future research into the practices of instructional coaches and teacher educators.

Putting the purpose in practice: Practice-based pedagogies for supporting teachers’ pedagogical reasoning

This study explores the relationship between practice-based pedagogies and teacher pedagogical reasoning. To investigate this relationship, this study builds upon recent research which revealed variance in the degree to which the foundational practice-based pedagogies of representation, decomposition, and approximation engage teachers in pedagogical reasoning (Grossman, Compton, et al., 2009; Kavanagh, Conrad, & Dagogo-Jack, 2020). This work investigates how and in what ways more nuanced pedagogies in practice-based contexts support teachers’ pedagogical reasoning. Findings suggest that the teacher educator pedagogy highlighting of instructional purposes may represent an effective way to support teacher reasoning about pedagogical dilemmas in a practice-based context for teacher learning.

Teaching Novice Science Teachers Online: Considerations for Practice-Based Pedagogy

The COVID-19 pandemic has required educators at all levels to pivot instruction online. In this article, we consider methods we adopted to engage novice science teachers in approximations of teaching, online. We describe the principles of our science teacher education program and provide a rationale for the core feature of our science teaching methods course: practice-based pedagogy. We then discuss adaptations we have made to engage novices in ambitious science teaching practices online, and the affordances and constraints the virtual context posed to these practices. We conclude with a discussion of considerations for online practice-based pedagogy.

Merging Systems Thinking with Entrepreneurship: Shifting Students’ Mindsets towards Crafting a More Sustainable Future

The major challenges confronting humanity are systemic in nature: climate change, pollution, poverty, and inequality. Entrepreneurship fails to tackle these challenges, and ‘creative destruction’ is mostly just leading to the destruction of the natural world that we inhabit. The present economic, financial, and productive systems can and should be transformed to lead and power a shift towards sustainability. If we are to reverse the course of destruction that current capitalist systems are creating, we need to introduce more of a systems perspective into entrepreneurial education. This article addresses how merging systems thinking and entrepreneurship can be used to nudge students towards sustainability. Through a single case study, we argue that a practice-based pedagogy that combines perspectives from entrepreneurship and systems thinking can be used as a catalyst to bring about local changes in business models by making the business case go beyond the individual organization and seeing entrepreneurship as being about creating more sustainable business systems.

(Mekši) softver arhitekture - iskustva u nastavi unutrašnje arhitekture i dizajna na Tehnološkom Institutu Sligo, Irska

Of the many lessons that the pandemic has taught us and brought into our personal and professional lives, the recognition of human agility and flexibility is possibly the least recognised, but most valuable. Architecture courses, which traditionally apply practice-based pedagogy and foster studio-based learning, were the most reluctant to embrace the growing cohort of online and blended (or hybrid) model programmes. However, pandemic-induced circumstances found us, less than a week into lockdown, embracing the virtual world and carving our own spaces in its digital alcoves. After two and a half semesters of exclusively teaching architecture and interior architecture remotely across a range of practical modules (from Studio to Architectural Representation), it became apparent that architecture was finally given the permission to become fluid and be interpreted through the tools which we still refer to as digital, thus distinguishing and removing them from the realities of their seamless, quiet integration to our everyday, physical lives. On return to on-campus teaching, elements of the virtual practice became an established part of studio pedagogy, proving that remote learning is not only beneficial for providing access to knowledge, but also an instrument for conducting advanced layers of analysis, thinking and creativity. However, in bringing us together, the technology not only establishes itself as the (only) means, but also as a selector: qualifying participation based on connectivity and equipment quality.

“Am I doing it wrong?” critically examining mediation in lesson rehearsal

Drawing upon activity theory, specifically the rules for participation and the division of labor, we make a case for opening up the pedagogies of rehearsal to a broader range of collaborative interactions. By identifying a lack of theoretical clarity in the existing literature on rehearsal and providing an example of a more collective and multivoiced approach, we aim to advance theoretical considerations guiding practice-based pedagogies of teacher education.

The Qualitative and Quantitative Rise of Literature on Teaching English to Young Learners

When I started teaching English in the mid-1990s ‘young learner’ classes were an appendix to the adult business of out-of-school ELT. English as a subject or foreign language in primary mainstream education was tentatively being experimented with and introduced unsystematically and in different ways in various contexts. For example, in France, English was introduced into the last year of primary school in 1989 (M.E.N. 2001) and only reached 1st grade (Cours Préparatoire) in 2016, whereas Norway had introduced English in the upper levels of primary school in 1939 and officially into grade 1 in 1997 (Krulatz, Dahl, and Flognfeldt 2018). In addition, there was a dearth of literature focusing on teaching English to children and teenagers, as the ELT profession was largely based on adult perspectives on teaching and learning. My own MA in TEFL, in the early 2000s, only included one optional module on Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL), although I chose to focus my research and assignments for all of my six optional modules on young learners. The bibliography included the seminal works of Brumfit, Moon, and Tongue (1991), Brewster, Ellis, and Girard (2002), Moon (2000), Cameron (2001), and others. These works had a significant impact on many teachers trained in the CELTA and DELTA tradition, who then grudgingly ended up in the growing numbers of classes of ever-younger learners. These books also brought attention to, and paved the way for, more intensive research into how young children learn foreign languages. Twenty years later, as we witness the rise of early language learning, the young learner classroom has become a mainstream research interest, generating much-needed theoretical insights and practice-based pedagogy; and I educate future primary teachers of English with a whole bookshelf dedicated to TEYL. The ‘Cinderella area’ of scholarship (Copland and Garton 2014: 223), where research and informed discussion were scarce, has now come of age (Rixon 2016, Copland and Garton 2014).

Building Professional Competencies Through a Service Learning ‘Gallery Walk’ in Primary School Teacher Education

This article reports on a service learning project in a South African primary school teacher education programme, as experiential and practice-based pedagogy in a social studies methods course. We aimed to broaden understanding of service learning as a form of non-placement work-integrated learning for the development of teacher professional competencies. Student teachers drew on topics in the middle school social studies curriculum and incorporated Indigenous geographical elements with local community history in the design of a service learning ‘gallery walk’ for Grade 5 learners. Using a generic qualitative design, data were generated from students’ and teachers’ reflective journals, lesson plans, photographs and video recordings. It was analysed for common content themes and prominent discourse markers of students’ developing professional knowledge and competencies. The findings provide evidence of deepened student learning, particularly on the influence of context and curriculum differentiation and how their struggles with group work enabled the development of collaboration and co-operation required by professionals. In addition, the service learning prompted changing notions of citizenship and reciprocity of learning.

Experts at Being Novices: What New Teachers Can Add to Practice-based Teacher Education Efforts

ABSTRACT Understood as one approach to enacting a practice-based pedagogy of teacher education, core practices (CPs) have in the last decade become part of the discussion in general teacher education, and within particular content areas. CPs are viewed as practices that are essential to student learning and critical to novice teachers’ (NTs’) early career success. However, while these pedagogies may serve as an important scaffold to NT learning, their impact on NT practice is still mostly unknown, and efforts to develop practice-based pedagogies have largely been led by researchers, with little direct involvement by PK-12 practitioners. In this paper, we argue that more intentional and purposeful involvement of NTs in the development, selection, and refinement of CPs generates greater potential to support NT practice. Drawing upon observations of NT practice, interviews, and transcripts from meetings of our collaborative team of NTs and teacher educators, we illustrate how engaging NTs as knower-learners can contribute to the development of more responsive pedagogies of teacher education.

Practice-Based Pedagogy in Mathematics and Science Teaching Methods: Challenges and Adaptations in Context

Research indicates that learning about teaching methods is not the same as learning to enact teaching methods. In our mathematics and science teacher education programs, we employ a practice-based pedagogy approach requiring novice teachers to learn, practice, enact, and reflect on their teaching. This approach draws on work highlighting core instructional practices (Grossman et al., 2009a), the Cycle of Enactment and Investigation (Kazemi et al., 2009), and ambitious science teaching (Windschitl et al., 2012). This paper addresses how we implement these pedagogies in our context, the challenges we have encountered, and the adaptations we have made to optimize these practices.

EFL TEACHERS' CPD EXPERIENCES: PERSPECTIVES FROM OMAN.

EFL TEACHERS' CPD EXPERIENCES: PERSPECTIVES FROM OMAN.

Navigating discourses in academia: challenging the status quo

PurposeThis paper aims to discuss the seepage of current national discourses into the fabric of university classrooms. The authors describe their experiences navigating politics and accompanying discourses in their undergraduate and graduate courses at a rural Midwestern university in the USA. Their narrative provides a socio-historical context in response to events related to the 2016 presidential election.Design/methodology/approachThe authors situate their cultural and linguistic identities within a critical race theory framework and unpack discourses of privilege that “other” students and families from nondominant communities. They highlight promising practices that challenge the status quo, creating opportunities for critical teaching and reflection.FindingsTeacher educators are called on to engage pre- and in-service teachers in practice-based pedagogies and inquiries around authentic issues that present possibilities for transformative social change.Originality/valueThis narrative addresses teaching in contentious times and reflects on transformative practice to engender critical hope.

Teaching politics after the practice turn

The ‘practice turn’ and its associated ontology, epistemology and methodology are now well established in political research. In this article, we identify and explore a corollary pedagogy. After outlining the principal components of practice theory, we compare case- and placement-based approaches to learning, designed to develop skills for use in practice. We introduce and describe our own rather different course, which we designed to develop an understanding of the nature of practice as such. We discuss its scope and dynamics, particularly with regard to power in the classroom, and identify broader opportunities and challenges for the development of practice-based pedagogy.

Practice into Pedagogy into Practice: Collaborative Postcards from Hong Kong

A collaborative postcard project completed by 22 students as part of a drawing course conducted at a university in Hong Kong is introduced. The project entailed inviting students into an art practice in which the author was herself engaged as a practitioner as well as a researcher. After introducing the educational context in which the project took place, the author provides an account – informed by ‘participant-observer’ feedback from students – of how the project unfolded and was experienced. In the second section of the article the creative and pedagogic efficacy of the project is considered with reference to the experience-centred and dialogic principles expressed in the educational philosophies of John Dewey, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt and Paulo Freire. The third section draws on insights from scholars working in a range of disciplines – cultural history, anthropology, sociology and psychology – to argue that a particular set of organisational and collaborative dynamics catalysed students’ levels of engagement, creativity and motivation. The article argues that the collaborative postcard project is an example of an experience-centred and practice-based pedagogy that is founded on dialogue, mutual generosity and experimental play, and engenders in students the ‘quality of mental process’ that is, for John Dewey, ‘the measure of educative growth’.

Making transparent the challenges of developing a practice-based pedagogy of teacher education

Much of the recent scholarship in teacher education relays the importance of preparing teachers to enact practice. However, scholars working in the fields of self-study and core practices have questioned the capacity of teacher educators to engage novice teachers in meaningful practice-based work. We use collaborative self-study to examine the first author's experiences of using core practices as a guiding framework with novice teachers of English language learners. Findings illuminate a developmental journey that many teacher educators will experience as they undertake this work to make both conceptual and practical shifts in their pedagogy of teacher education.