Researching as a Practice-Changing Practice

Abstract

This chapter explores how educational practice was formed, re-formed and transformed through practices of researching in our case study sites. We position research in this chapter within an emerging tradition of researching practice from within practice traditions, where we take seriously the movement towards educational research becoming the domain of those who inhabit the practice itself. In focusing on practitioner research in this way, we challenge, or offer a supplement to, the long-standing domination of externally driven research. Hence, the chapter is located within the realm of a developing practice tradition that contributes to educator-driven, educator-directed and educator-led arrangements and which, in turn, we argue, nurture informed and strategic change. Teacher practitioners organise themselves in deliberate and strategic ways to ask critical questions of their practice and to act on these answers to re-form and transform practices in a cycle of critical reflection, planning, action and critique. As we observed it in the schools we studied, this critical and self-critical research enabled teacher-researchers and leader-researchers to understand the lived-ness of their practice. In our study, we observed different kinds of researching practices that were sometimes in dynamic tension with one another in a school site. We outline these and also show how practices of researching in our case study sites were differentiated from, but also contributed to, practices of leading, professional learning, teaching and student learning. We argue that researching practices occurred in the case study schools as part of a strategic, deliberate approach for educational change and note how it contributed to site based education development in these sites.