A significant part of the research process has involved me refining my broad interest in ‘teaching professional values’ into an appropriate doctoral focal question and research design, a process of ‘becoming clearer about the intellectual puzzle, about what exactly it is [I]
want to describe and explain, and about the more detailed questions [I] will need to address’
(Lewis, 2003:48). Having opted to locate the research within my own teaching practice, it was vital to clarify an appropriate focus, question, approach and method for the research, which enabled me to be clear about the focus of study within the whole unit of ‘my teaching practice’, and which framed the focal question in a way that gave focus and direction to the research and clarity to the logic of enquiry (Punch, 2009).
Early attempts at describing the focus of the study were loosely framed as an investigation into ‘how qualifying youth work education supports students in their exploration and development of professional values’. Having chosen to locate the research site within my own practice, framing it as a piece of practitioner research, I drew on the strong link between practitioner research and action research methodologies, assuming I would employ an action research methodology to explore my own teaching practice, as one example of how youth work education could support students to develop their professional values. This chimed with one of the themes emerging from the data – that of my impact as teacher on students’ learning and their experience of the learning process.
Reading in more depth around action research methodologies – particularly those of McNiff (2002) and Whitehead & McNiff (2006) – and subsequent discussions with colleagues about this approach enabled me to appreciate that locating myself as the centre of this investigation could prove problematic and unhelpful. This approach to research appealed to me as a reflective practitioner eager to improve my own practice, foregrounding, as it does, the experience, practice and understanding of the teacher in ‘living out their educational values’, with the potential to provide much data to explore the teacher experience of teaching values. However, it would have offered little opportunity to focus on exploring the students’ perspective of developing their professional values, and this was the area of primary interest to me, gained from previous teaching and learning encounters with students. I was also concerned that exploring my impact on the students’ learning journey might become indulgent and too self-referential and that I had not taken careful enough journal notes about my own experiences of class teaching to do this rigorously. On that basis, I decided not to pursue this avenue in this investigation. However, it is maybe an area of research to return to later, as I have very much appreciated and benefited from the accounts of practice by educators such as Stephen Brookfield (1986; 1995; 1998), bell hooks (1994; 2003) and Parker Palmer (1998) and their reflections and analysis of both their practice and their ‘self’ in practice. If, by researching and sharing my own experiences I could make a small contribution to this knowledge, I would be eager to do so.
Allwright (2005) challenges practitioner researchers to prioritise understanding (research) before action, arguing that much action research, designed as it is to ‘solve problems and improve practice’, focuses on the action of the practitioner without first gaining a full appreciation of the situation. He advocates that practitioner research should carefully research the issue or puzzle from many perspectives to develop an enhanced understanding
of the situation, rather than rushing to action in order to solve the problem, the nature of which might not yet be fully understood. In developing principles for practitioner research from his own practice, he writes: ‘One of our first big realisations … was that we needed to
bring understanding back to the foreground in our work, to insist that we were dealing with the notion of understanding, not problem-solving’ (2005:358). Armstrong (2008:450) echoes this
in her dictionary definition, suggesting a practitioner researcher ‘would reflect on the issues
related to the situation rather than begin from a position of trying different strategies to ‘fix’ the problem. The idea is to arrive a greater understanding….’.
This resonates with my professional interest to understand, as fully as is possible from one’s own perspective, how youth work students develop their professional values; and then to apply this knowledge to explore my own teaching strategies, curriculum design and educational philosophy, before moving to the stage of devising and testing out revised or new strategies and curricula. This approach is consonant with my philosophy of teaching and learning as I currently understand it: where I value and prioritise the teacher / educator task of understanding what students are learning from the educational encounter, in order to better support their learning – akin to Schön’s (1987) coaches and Brookfield’s (1995) critically reflective teacher.
Initial analysis of early data gathered from the pilot study of student journals and the first set of interviews evidenced rich material to support exploration of the students’ perspective of articulating and developing values. Two examples are offered below.
In my youth work I have realised the amount of power I have. I am representative of the youth and they treat me as guide, mentor and friend. I have a responsibility to them and to the other leaders. The work I do and the way I present myself have impact on the lives of my fellow leaders and youth. Power and responsibility are key, I must never abuse power but act responsible with it, ensuring I am using it to a positive means. However I do have to continually examine my motives, come from different perspectives and come to a informed decision. This decision should not be conveyed dogmatically either but conveyed in the most understanding and informative way. This is key; as my job as a Christian youth worker means I should be empowering others to take up leadership and responsibility. It would be easy to over-influence and similarly stand back (this balance is hard work). Robert, Group A, Advocacy Learning Journal 5
Yesterdays lecture was really really good for me as I have started to see the relevance of myself in relation to all the things that you ask us to talk about such as, in relation to the
world, to my power, to other people etc. It is an eye opener for me because I have thought that talking about myself for 6 minutes a time to be completely pointless but I start to see that the way I view myself directly effects how I view other people and ultimately how I treat them. Jake, Group A, Advocacy Learning Journal 5
Further reading also suggested this would be a valuable area of research. Cooper (2007/8:63) argues the need to ‘find more innovative ways of engaging students that encourages a far
deeper approach to learning, one that enabled students to consciously and deliberately construct their realities’. Young (2006:6), in emphasising the need for youth workers to
develop ‘the knowledge, skills and dispositions to engage with young people in the process of
moral philosophising’, charges youth worker education as follows:
The training and development of youth workers therefore needs to provide them with opportunities for their own self-exploration, examination of their own values, development of their own critical skills and enlargement of their own capacity for moral philosophy.
However, very little research has been done on the student experience of qualifying youth worker education and training particularly in the area of value development, with Susan Cooper at the University of St Mark and St John in Plymouth, a notable exception to this. In support of a focus on student perspective, Cooper (2007/8:57) quotes Fook, Ryan and Hawkins (2000:178) to underline the importance of gaining students’ perspectives of the teaching and learning process.
Students may make entirely different interpretations of taught material than those intended by educators, or of course, educators may communicate entirely different messages from those they intend… and there may be contradictions between espoused messages of educators and implicit messages embedded in the context. This doctoral investigation offers an extended opportunity to focus on, explore in depth, analyse, learn from and theorise the student experience of developing their professional values; and the possibility to use this enhanced understanding to posit teaching and learning strategies most suited to supporting this process, including an exploration of my own practice. As this opportunity would not normally be possible within the regular teaching cycle, I considered it would make a valid and profitable focus for this doctoral study.
The decision to make the student experience the centre of the investigation shifted the locus of my focal question from an action research exploration of my experience of teaching (‘how qualifying youth work education supports students to develop their professional values’) to a case study of the students’ experience of developing their professional values, requiring me to re-frame the question thus:
How do youth work students develop their professional values during qualifying education?
The focal question gave rise to a number of subsidiary questions:
1. what are the professional values of youth work?
2. what helps students to examine their own value positions and their professional value positions, to engage in a critical dialogue between the two and to assess the impact of each on their thinking- and action-in-practice?
3. what attributes and competencies are required to enable students to articulate, develop and implement professional values in practice and how are these attributes and competencies fostered in qualifying training?
4. how do students develop and ‘own’ their professional values in the formation of their professional identity?
This doctoral investigation, then, is framed as a practitioner research case study, seeking to make a contribution to ‘professional knowledge and associated understandings of professional
practice’ (Goodfellow 2005). The knowledge, understanding and learning generated from
this investigation will be used to evaluate and improve my own teaching practice – my curriculum design, the teaching and learning strategies I employ and the ‘I’ who teaches (Palmer, 1998) – and, through sharing with the wider community of youth work training and education agencies, I hope to offer learning which can inform and develop our collective practice of enabling youth work students to develop their professional values in qualifying training.