Collaborative inquiry as practice development and research

Collaborative practice development for teachers can be understood as a spectrum where the most common models include teachers working together (with or without a facilitator) in order to improve collective practices; teachers supporting each other’s individual development through reflective work; and teachers or schools aiming to understand, support and improve practices through partnerships with researchers and/or universities. Each of these may involve a continuum of more or less systematic teacher inquiry, ranging from informal discussions about teaching and learning among teachers or between teachers and students to scholarly work intended for international publication, produced by one or several university researchers with teachers as co-investigators and/or co- authors. What collaborative research approaches usually have in common is an appreciation for teachers as agents with important local knowledge.

Fishman and McCarthy (2000) identify two “charter concepts” of collaborative teacher research. The first builds on the work of Stenhouse (1975) who emphasised the production of rigorous, rich and “illuminating” case studies which report systematic questioning and testing of teaching methods. The second, developed by Berthoff (1987), encourages teachers to resist research initiated by outsiders (such as university researchers, especially if the study is informed by positivist preassumptions) and instead transform and create knowledge through the process of writing about their teaching experiences, thereby giving shape (meaning and form) to their own understandings of teaching and learning (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004, p. 15). Although there are important differences between these two approaches, they share an emphasis on knowledge generated when teachers engage in dialogue, and the conviction that “teacher research must be based on teachers’ questions” (p. 15, italics original). Ghaye (2010) suggests that practitioner conversations need not be deficit-based, as perhaps implicitly assumed when the aim is ‘improvement’. Instead, it can be at least as fruitful to engage in appreciative reflection on successes, aiming for a better understanding of how significant and positive development has been achieved. Similarly, McIntyre and Black-Hawkins (2006) have shown that one key condition for successful school-university research partnerships is to aim at documenting and explaining what the teachers consider valuable practice, taking their own views as starting points (p. 186).

By its inherent nature, collaborative research involves conversation and interpretation. As pointed out by Driel, Beijaard and Verloop (2001), conversations about practice are not automatically helpful or productive. The authors identify four strategies which are potentially powerful: (a) learning in networks, (b) peer coaching, (c) collaborative action research, and (d) the use of cases (p. 137). On the basis of a metastudy on teacher learning, van Veen, Zwart and Meirink (2012) argue against strong conclusions about interventions or programmes that ‘work’ in professional development for teachers, pointing to the difficulty of synthesising results from a great number of different studies

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involving dissimilar settings, actors and methods. At best, what can be said about effectiveness is limited to general features, among which content is central: “it is important to focus on the daily practice” (p. 17), but whether the development work is done in the workplace or offsite does not seem to influence the results. Additional important features mentioned are largely consistent with the factors emphasised in the study by Driel et al:

active and inquiry-based learning, collegial learning, a substantial amount of time, cohesion with the school policy and or national policy and at the same time a congru- ence with the problems teachers experience in their daily life (van Veen, Zwart & Meirink, 2012, p. 17).

Nielsen (2009) asserts that in music education, a clear line needs to be drawn between practice development and research. The practice of music education and the practice of researching music education have different norms, demands, and criteria for quality which may or may not be related to each other (p. 29).97 Although this point is valid and important, I argue that some flexibility is required in collaborative research in order to keep research questions and methods relevant to both participants and researcher. Careful consideration of the researcher’s role is indeed central, especially when (as in this study) she represents both the community of music educators and the academic community. While the degree of collaboration can vary throughout co-generation of data, discussion about possible interpretations, and co-authoring of research reports, the researcher needs to take the final responsibility for academic rigor, including ethical decisions, during the entire project.

With regard to modes of teacher inquiry, this study has its closest affinities with the thought of J. Elliott (2000/2007, 2007, 2009), whose work on action research emerged from collaboration between teachers and researchers (among others, Stenhouse) on curriculum development. J. Elliott builds on Gadamer’s interpretation of phronesis as hermeneutic understanding of self and others which guides judgment in particular situations. He recommends that teachers engage in reflective processes about their practices, relating practical situations to their own values and beliefs as well as to a variety of other relevant sources (Elliott, 1987/2007, pp. 108–109). His later theorising is explicitly influenced by MacIntyre’s work on understanding and reinterpreting traditions and the goods they embody.98 J. Elliott (2007) summarises his own lifelong work in educational research as participation in “conversional communities” (p. x). For him, educational action research always involves moral inquiry, i.e. the

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In action research, where practices merge in the person of the teacher-researcher, this issue can be particularly thorny. Still, Nielsen’s concerns seem predominantly influenced by realist-objectivist presuppositions. The criteria for quality in interpretive research projects as discussed in 3.2 are applicable to action research (see also J. Elliott, 2009; Wilson, 2013, p. 253).

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aspiration towards knowledge of the human good, and a focus on the development of educative action by teachers. This task, he writes,

cannot be accomplished independently of establishing a dialogue with teachers about their pedagogical aims, the practical problems they experience in realising them, and strategies for solving them. Such dialogue in itself constitutes a process of profes- sional development for the teachers involved. (J. Elliott, 2007, p. 7).

According to J. Elliott, the form of educational theory-building and development which is most helpful and credible to teachers is generated in collaborative projects which focus on studying concrete cases. In order to formulate relevant new theory about the goods of education, teachers will also need to “enter into a conversation with past educational thinkers through engagement with their texts” (J. Elliott, 2000/2007, p. 199).

In addition to the elements of teacher inquiry that have been included in this project, the way in which conversation was structured during group sessions was influenced by reflecting conversation processes developed in social work and collaborative family therapy from the mid-1980s onwards (see e.g. Andersen, 1991; Anderson, 2012; Anderson & Jensen, 2007; Hoffman, 2007; see also Willott, Hatton & Oyebode, 2012, for a critical review of empirical research). What these approaches have in common with interpretive methodology is the insistence on thoughtful dialogue as central for understanding another person’s meaning-making, intentions and experiences. Reflecting conversation processes were developed in order to counteract what was perceived as overly hierarchical relationships between social workers or therapists and clients, with the former occupying unrealistic expert positions with regard to the clients’ lives. Building on social constructionist thought, collaborative approaches focus instead on the richness of including different voices and on complex understandings as they are being carefully generated in nonjudgmental dialogue. “Therapists and clients become conversational partners engaged in a shared inquiry” (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2008, p. 364) where the client is understood as a key ‘knower’ in his or her own life.

The relevance of reflecting conversation approaches to the present project is their affinity with collaborative inquiry and interpretive research where accounts of lived experience are taken seriously (see e.g. Wasser & Bresler, 1996, on interpretation as a collaborative act; see also Forsman, Karlberg-Granlund, Pörn, Salo, & Aspfors, 2014). A pragmatic reason for adapting reflecting conversations to data generation in this project was that I had training and experience in this format and felt confident that I would be able to scaffold conversation and elicit rich data with support from the approach. A contextual reason was the connection to Kurkela’s assertions that (a) dialogue is central to the understanding of how conditions for good relationships to music can be created, and that (b) music school teachers can enrich their thinking about

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teaching and learning if they “talk things over and examine them together” and “think together” (see 2.4).99

In addition to the principles for data generation described above, principles for data analysis have been developed as an extension of interpretive methods developed in policy analysis by Yanow (2000). The intention has been to understand the meanings and values expressed in music school teacher practices as told by music school teachers themselves in dialogue with each other and the researcher, as well as in texts and artefacts related to their practices. In the following chapter, I will set out the research design and research process in more detail and extend the description of how systematic data analysis has been performed.

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However, the study parts ways with the potential relativism in radical social construc- tionist views where any and all interpretations are equally acceptable. As there are better and worse ways of creating conditions in which good relationships to music can be born, I argue, there are better and worse interpretations of music school teachers’ aspirations. During data generation in this project, structuring group discussions and interviews as reflecting conversation processes has foremostly been a way of answering what Schwandt (2000) refers to as “the fundamental question, How should I be towards the people I am studying?” (p. 203).

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