Teacher Professional Learning in an Age of Compliance: Mind the Gap
examines ways in which practice-based inquiry in educational settings,
in a number of different countries and contexts, can transcend current
ways of working and thinking such that authentic professional learning
is the result.
The authors contend that education policy, under pressure from a number
of quarters, is retreating into a standardized, audited, and
backward-looking arena, with the advances of more progressive
educational philosophy being rolled back.
In an age where practitioner inquiry and action research have often been
'hijacked' for the purposes of broad-based policy implementation, this
book offers a rationale for reclaiming the critical edge so fundamental
to inquiry-based professional learning. It examines the potential of
inquiry-based forms of teacher professional learning to contribute to
the growth of professional knowledge for and about teachers' work.
The authors intend that the book will assist in building new forms of
professional knowledge that go beyond the current compliance model -
engineered from less enduring materials - to inform a new model with its
foundations in a strong ethical and moral framework. They also believe
that this new model, if implemented, will help to reverse today's
conservative educational trends and make teacher professional
development a force for genuine progress once again.
They have consciously moved away from the celebratory tone of much of
the academic reporting of teacher professional learning, adopting
instead a genuinely critical edge. In covering a wide range of policies
and practices from across the international spectrum, they have allowed
themselves the freedom to engage in serious epistemological arguments
about the nature of professional knowledge, as well as how it is
constructed and employed.
