Re-imagining professional learning in early education

This project grew out of my desire to realise an emancipatory vision in my practice of teacher professional learning in early education. Most of the professional learning for early education teachers in New Zealand is designed to assist the implementation of policy, and with broad trends such as standardisation and evidence-based practice dominating political agendas, the space for alternatives is limited. There is growing concern by some with the continuing positivist influence on professional learning which prioritizes technical training over critical inquiry and dialectical debate. Despite this, there is very little research questioning these trends; or seeking ways to work differently with teachers towards social justice. The main aim of this project was therefore to examine professionalleaming and the inter-related themes of knowledge, the learner, and change from a critical pedagogical perspective, using poststructuralist feminist theory and the work of Foucault to do so. Action research was chosen as the methodology because this is most consistent with the critical pedagogical principles underpinning this project. In keeping with poststructuralist feminist theory and the work of Foucault, action research was reconceptualised within postmodernism and many of the normally accepted conventions of modernist research were therefore challenged and re-defined. There were no attempts made to produce certain and universal answers, or to prove the findings valid through methods such as triangulation. Instead, the aim was to present multiple perspectives, including the contradictory and uncertain. The researcher was not positioned as objective but as wholly present, and the subjectivities, contradictions and challenges experienced because of this were illuminated, not hidden. Moreover, a postmodern stance meant that findings were presented as partial, provisional, and local. To achieve the research aims I worked with seven early education teachers in New Zealand over a period of 2 Y:z years, meeting with them both individually and as a group. In group sessions we discussed and debated many educational issues; some raised by teachers and some introduced by me. These sessions were an opportunity to engage on a dialectical level with the discourses shaping beliefs and practices. Most of the data came from these fragmented and discontinuous conversations, and this data was used to examine how power, knowledge and discourse worked together to shape what was counted as nonnal and worthwhile for these teachers to know and learn. Because the goal of reconceptualised action research is to understand more about the social order so that this can be transfonned, data was used to inform social change during and not just after the project. Poststructuralist feminist theory focused the analysis more specifically on how the women teachers in this project negotiated and manoeuvred in and through the competing discourses to which they had access. Foucault's work on sexuality was used to consider how the problematization of teaching affected what teachers believed to be best practice, and how this shaped their becoming. Additionally, Foucault's work on power and the practices of the self became useful for examining how discourse was regulated, preserved and reproduced throughout this project, and how this sanctioned and silenced what could be spoken and by whom. Together, the work of Foucault and poststructuralist feminist theory offered a different lens with which to question and challenge teacher professional learning in early education. The main argument of this thesis is that professional learning for progressive social change involves much more than technical training. If teachers are to engage in the kind of critical inquiry and dialectical debate necessary for the work of social justice, then current professionalleaming opportunities need to be challenged. In this project, it was employing a Foucauldian analysis of power to the way I organised and managed time and space that brought the biggest shifts. For me, this involved redefining what I valued in terms of knowledge, the learner and change; and shifting what I prioritised in the time and space given to learning. As a result I more actively and intentionally sought to disrupt privileged truths and to create experimental learning spaces where learners could cross borders into the unfamiliar and unsafe. In these spaces both beliefs and practices were unsettled and learners were invited to become otherwise; and when they did, the change was transformational. The following pages share with the reader how this happened. Applying a poststructuralist feminist and Foucauldian analysis to teacher professional learning provided a way for me to re-imagine how teacher professional learning in early education might be a force for progressive social change. This thesis highlights the possibilities presented by such an analysis and challenges others to consider professional learning in early education differently.