Teacher Leader ProgrammeUnited Church Schools Trust

United Learning TrustSheffield Hallam University

Dr. Albin WallaceGroup Director of ICT and e-Learning

The Reflexive Teacher Researcher

Values and Beliefs

“…very little research in the social and educational field is or can be entirely value free” (Blunkett, 2000)

“There is no telling it as it is. There is only telling it from a theoretically partisan point of view” (Carr, 1982).

“…accept the existence of different realities due to the influence of values on the research process” (Greenbank, 2003).

What values and beliefs influence your views on education?

What is your ‘positionality’?

Validity and Reliability

Validity• Are your findings accurate?• Can you find other cases to compare with?• Can you generalize?• Have you found inconsistencies?• Do the simple aggregate statistics stack up?

Reliability

• Are your findings trustworthy?• Are your findings authentic?

“whatever rules of method are stipulated, their application will still require judgement” (Smith, 2006)

Can educational research be ‘objective’?Should it try to be?

Theoretical Framework

“research that provides rich and theorized accounts of cultural practices that enable and encourage educators to experience them from the inside, as participants” (Lankshear and Bigum, 1999)

Question: What do you get if you cross a mafia boss with a postmodernist?

Answer: You get someone who makes you an offer you can’t really understand.

“The notion of a grand narrative of human, neat, precise, and complete, has been usurped by a multiplicity of competing narratives, messy, subjective and incomplete” (Chapman, 2005).

“Even if you decide to eschew grand theories, that itself is a theoretical choice. In this sense, there is no escape (nor should there be) from theory” (Silverman, 2005).

“an eclectic mode of engaging with theoretical perspectives” (Wellington et al, 2005).

Who and what has influenced your own theories about education?

Epistomology and Ontology

Epistemology: theory of knowledgeOntology: theory of reality

“…deep learning involves, first and foremost, activity and experience, not facts and information” (Gee, 2005).

“I believe very strongly that education is about the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next.”(Gibb, 2010)

“Knowledge stands to opinion as the world of reality does to that of becoming, and pure knowledge stand to belief and reason to illusion as knowledge stands to opinion” (Plato, 427 BC).

“Harder aspects of knowledge are those aspects that are more formalised and that can be structured, articulated and thus ‘captured’. Soft aspects of knowledge on the other hand are the more subtle, implicit and not so easily articulated” (Kimble, Hildreth and Wright, 2001).

“estrangement of the familiar” (McClure,1999)

What do you understand by ‘knowledge’ and ‘education’?

“Things are going to slide,Slide in all directions.Won’t be nothing, Nothing you can measure anymore…”The Future, Leonard Cohen 1992

albin.wallace@church-schools.com