Professional Learning as Relational Practice
Description
Given the emphasis on transforming professional work through the adoption of enquiry-based and trans-disciplinary approaches to service development, there is an urgent need for those involved in professional education to develop a robust understanding of how changes in practice occur. A more inclusive approach to the analysis of the processes involved across the varied and interrelated contexts in which they occur is thus very timely.
In this book, Jenny Reeves sets out to explore the gap between the experience of professional learning as an interactive, dynamic and socially contextualised process, and descriptions that are often individualistic, overly linear and largely context-free. She makes the claim that this disjuncture is the outcome of modes of enquiry that concentrate on limited selections of the available data.
Adopting a relational approach to describing practice-based professional development, including graphical means for exploring the spaces produced by the activity, provides a very different picture. It creates a basis for representing the complex movements, relationships and interactions between people and things that occur during professional learning. It also provides a productive approach to describing the exchange and creation of professional knowledge across different contexts over time.
By building a picture of the ephemeral spaces and connections that educating activities produce, mapping relational space allows those engaged in professional education to think rather differently about how professional learning and changes in knowledge and practice may be understood, supported and developed.
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Introduction
This chapter is about the first stage of mapping networked activity systems, relational mapping, which is a means of representing the relations, transmission points and relays that run between and across educating systems. I want to begin to develop the tool set for mapping by setting the operation of local educating systems within the wider context of educating as a field of activity.
There are therefore two main objectives of the chapter: first, to provide some delineation of the types of systems involved in educating activity and second, to begin the process of building representations of the operation of networked systems within this particular field. The chapter begins by exploring some of the general features of educating and the relationship this activity has to various discourses that are characteristic of educational contexts.
In so doing, it identifies four broad categories of educating systems that use socialising, schooling and developmental and contagious pedagogic strategies to shape the behaviour of learners. The first two strategies are characterised as assimilative, since learners are taken into the space of their educators, whilst the two latter strategies are characterised as invasive, in that the educators move into the learners’ territory. The case study that forms the background for extending this discussion is about the introduction of an organisational learning strategy into a local authority’s education service.
The account begins the analytical task by looking at how two particular local educating systems sought to establish frameworks for sense making that would alter the practice of teachers in schools and how these systems were materially connected to one another in contestation over practice. The case illustrates the conceptual and political work that was involved in attempting to shape practice through the use of an invasive, developmental strategy on the part of the local authority’s senior management team.
Last, the discursive analysis of the case study data is used to derive a horizontal section through this local network or a relational map–a map that shows some of the key discursive relays and relations between the activity systems that were germane to the progress of educating at this particular location. The relational map is based on the use of a number of conventions that will be built upon and refined in the next chapter as a way of mapping educating activity over time."
