Reconstituting teachers’ professional knowledge: using Cultural Studies to rethink multicultural education

ABSTRACT

This article examines the utility of drawing on Cultural Studies to aid teachers in reassessing understandings and approaches to multicultural education; how engaging with notions of cultural complexity, hybridity and essentialism offers a critical tool box around issues of cultural difference that ultimately provides a better understanding of school communities in a global context. We revisit teachers involved in the Rethinking Multiculturalism, Reassessing Multicultural Education project from a decade ago who, at the time, expressed the greatest sense of impact of the professional learning they received in the project. We asked these teachers to reflect on that experience, and whether the theory employed in the training continued to influence their teaching practice. This is contrasted with current, more instrumentalised, approaches to teacher professional learning raising questions about the nature of professional knowledge, the relationship between theory and practice and the broader utility of Cultural Studies in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural Studies
• cultural theory
• multicultural education
• professional knowledge
• teacher professional learning

Introduction

Education and the usefulness of theory have long been preoccupations in Cultural Studies – and are most obviously conjoined in the work of Raymond Williams (1986). Yet, embedded in these concerns are challenging but often undeveloped questions about the relation between theory and practice in the teaching profession. These questions had, in fact, been raised by John Dewey. He lamented the way ‘scholastic knowledge is sometimes regarded as if it were something quite irrelevant to method’, and advocated for the ‘intellectual independence’ of teachers, in contrast to the ‘intellectual subserviency’ manifest in a willingness ‘to accept without inquiry or criticism’ any method which promises immediate, practical results, stressing the need for theory to inform practice (Dewey 1927, 21). Here we examine the utility of cultural theory for teachers in rethinking their approach to multicultural education; how engaging with notions of cultural complexity, hybrid identities and essentialism offers a critical reframing of ideas of difference and a better understanding of school communities and the broader global context. Drawing on interviews with teachers who acknowledged the impact of such knowledge on their practice after participating in the Rethinking Multiculturalism, Reassessing Multicultural Education (RMRME) project in years past, we now ask them to reflect on its long-term effect. To what extent does this theory still influence their practice? How have they applied it within contexts of schooling and what does it suggest about the nature of professional knowledge? Such questions allow us to interrogate what Dewey saw as the schism between theory and practice in teacher education, a situation exacerbated in recent times by more instrumental approaches to teacher professional learning that often foreground the practical skills of teachers over deeper intellectual enquiry.

Background to the study

The teachers¹ we asked to reflect upon these issues were part of either RMRME or an earlier pilot.² Both projects were conducted in partnership with the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education (DoE), together with the NSW Institute of Teachers³ in the case of RMRME. While RMRME involved various phases of research – a state-wide survey of teachers (Watkins et al. 2013) and focus groups with teachers, parents and students in its fourteen project schools (Noble and Watkins 2014), amassing data on understandings and attitudes towards multiculturalism and multicultural education – common to both RMRME and the pilot, was a programme of action research undertaken by practitioner-led research teams in each of the schools. This is our focus here, not so much the projects themselves but the professional learning the teams undertook in advance of devising and implementing their year-long action research projects that were designed around addressing an area of need in terms of multicultural education within their school. This professional learning was conducted over two days, a week apart involving reading and a series of lectures, tutorials and various activities led by us but with participation by the partnering organizations (Watkins and Noble 2021).

In this training we took teachers through a process of interrogating the language of multiculturalism, and the everyday assumptions that lie behind notions of culture and identity. To do this we framed a discussion of culture with a recognition of the dynamic global interconnectivity that shapes cultural practices – aligning with what Rizvi (2008, 30–31) calls the ‘epistemic virtues’ of ‘cosmopolitan learning’, ‘involving critical exploration and imagination’ and reflexivity regarding one’s own position and assumptions. We provided a language for teachers to think differently about culture, foregrounding understandings of transnationalism and cultural complexity (Ang 2011) to capture the dynamic, multiple and fluid nature of cultural practices and identities (Hannerz 1991), along with notions of essentialism, hybridity and cultural expediency (Werbner and Modood 1997). We weren’t so much interested in offering the ‘correct’ definition of culture, but to offer cultural theory as a mode of inquiry that encouraged teachers to think complexly and reflexively about what we talk about as ‘culture’. To exemplify this we used data from: the RMRME survey detailing the complexities of identities; our previous research demonstrating the ways teachers often used ethnic categories problematically in relation to their students and broader community (Watkins and Noble 2013); a reading from UNESCO (2009) unpacking cultural diversity in a globalized world, and various empirical examples of the constraints of thinking about culture and identity in purely national terms. We used these sources to ask teachers to think critically about the goals of multicultural education and the choices schools make, and to reflect upon their professional practice and the assumptions embedded in teacher knowledge. We were asking teachers, therefore, to not simply reflect as practitioners but as intellectuals, where theory is conjoined with practice, and used a reading by Timperley and Robinson (2000) to assess the limitations of professional practice when there is an absence of critical peer discussion. We weren’t asking these practitioners to become academics, but we were asking them to think differently about themselves as teachers. We also offered a model of action research which was less about pragmatic orientations to classroom innovation and more about a robust, theoretically informed practice, having them work in teams to formulate research questions and make connections between existing research and their aims, methods and data (Watkins and Noble 2021).

Following this, the school-based research teams embarked upon implementing their projects supported by NSW DoE multicultural education/EALD⁴ consultants who, in the case of RMRME, had themselves undertaken similar professional learning. The school research teams also had access to the Western Sydney University library to pursue further reading to inform and refine their approach throughout the year. Our role was to evaluate these projects through a macro-analysis involving pre and post interviews with the principals, pre and post focus groups with the teams, observation of project activities and document analysis. The teams embraced and applied the ideas from the training to differing degrees and with varying levels of success, each of which is documented elsewhere (Watkins and Noble 2021). Our concern here is the longer-term impact of this professional learning and, in particular, the theory that informed it. To gauge this, we returned to some of the teachers involved, those who, at the time, saw the utility of theory in rethinking multicultural education and who approached action research as a mutually informing process of intellectual enquiry and empirical explication. Seven of these teachers, working across four schools, had been involved in RMRME and another two in the pilot. Four of these teachers were working in the same schools: Gillian as an instructional leader and Deirdre performing various governance roles while both working as classroom teachers. Alice had similarly remained in the same school moving from English head teacher to deputy principal and Caitlin was working part-time after having had two children. Of the remaining three RMRME teachers, Isaac was now a principal, Patrick a deputy principal and Julie had moved to a part-time teaching role after also having had two children. The two teachers from the pilot had similarly moved elsewhere, Gerry remaining a classroom teacher and Jessica in senior governance roles with the NSW DoE.

Despite working in different roles with varying levels of experience and career trajectories, these teachers had much in common, sharing a similar orientation to knowledge and professional vision that guided their professional practice. With the exception of Alice, who had undertaken postgraduate study in Cultural Studies, none of the others had any experience with the cultural theory used in the RMRME professional learning and yet all found the interrogation of culture it offered as insightful for better understanding their school communities. In fact, it was not simply the theoretical content that they found beneficial, there seemed a synergy between the epistemological tenets of Cultural Studies and how they viewed their role as professionals.

RMRME and cultural theory: ways of knowing

There is, of course, no single or homogenous epistemological framework in Cultural Studies. Typically, there tends to be too easy an alignment made between Cultural Studies and post-structuralism when, in fact, it draws on a range of theoretical, methodological and disciplinary traditions (Barker 2008). Similarly, much of what we identify as Cultural Studies draws on wider interests, evident in several disciplines and culminating in the ‘cultural turn’ across the humanities and social sciences in the later twentieth century. So, we want to foreground several themes that are central to Cultural Studies and cultural theory more broadly. First, and most obviously, there is the focus upon culture not as a neatly bound thing but as a question requiring the investigation of the relations between practices, social order, identity and meaning across the diverse spheres of social life. This is especially crucial in an age marked by increasing migration, transnationalism and the diversification of diversity, and what this means for understandings of ethnicity. In this conceptualization of culture, complexity, dynamism and multiplicity are foregrounded against assumptions of cultural homogeneity. Second, this interrogation of culture entails an interrogation of the idea of culture and associated terms such as multiculturalism and identity, not the provision of ‘correct’ definitions. Cultural Studies has long stressed the analysis of the construction of meanings around culture (Williams 1986), noting not just semantic variety but the specificity of historical and social contexts. While teachers don’t need to grapple with the complexity of culture’s intellectual genealogy (Bennett 2015), the unpacking of the ideas we employed is crucial, we will see, to the intellectual work of education. Third, this interrogation of ideas entails a scepticism towards categories, a recognition that the terms we use to describe the world are perceptual schemas rather than things (Brubaker 2004). This scepticism, allied with what we would call epistemic doubt, is fundamental to a critique of essentialism and the use of culture to explain social phenomena (Yúdice 2003). While Cultural Studies is often seen to be radically anti-objectivist (Johnson et al. 2004), we think it is more accurate to identify in cultural theory a broader, critical stance central to Western thought, captured by Dewey (1910, 13) in his instructions to teachers on ‘how we think’:

the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry – these are the essentials of thinking.

Dewey underlines the use of doubt, perplexity, scepticism and reflection in methods of inquiry, but he has the teaching profession specifically in mind, sharing with Cultural Studies scholars, such as Hall, an emphasis on the utility of theory, but with a regard for its situatedness.

Sixth, this approach to theory entails a particular orientation which, Hall (1992) explains, is:

Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But, also, as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect. Finally, a practice which understands the need for intellectual modesty.

While this focus on knowledge as constructed is often dismissed as relativism, a criticism levelled at Cultural Studies, it rather underlines the positionality of knowledge – an awareness of where it is coming from – and the constraints this imposes.

Seventh, the focus on knowledge as constructed underlines the nature of research as practice involving both the intellectual labour of theorizing, interpreting and reflecting, and their combination with empirical work (Johnson et al. 2004) which, we suggest, informs the development of a more intellectually robust framing of action research. Eighth, ‘intellectual modesty’ and epistemic doubt point to the importance of reflexivity, understood here not as personal or practical introspection, but critical ways of thinking that take into account social and historical contexts, especially important in a globalized world, that are best done collectively and in dialogue (Johnson et al. 2004, 52).

These dimensions of cultural theory informed the ways the RMRME project attempted to support teachers using theory in their practice. These lessons from Cultural Studies are particularly important because Education is not, in a sense, a discipline with its own methodological and epistemological frameworks, but is rather informed by a range of fields of study and a highly pragmatic ethos which, we would argue, do not provide teachers with the kind of critical intellectual orientation needed for making sense of questions of culture in the twenty-first century.

Using theory: ways of becoming

We were, in effect, asking teachers to be professionals, but in a way different to their training as practitioners: many teachers in the original project responded enthusiastically to this, though many were resistant (Watkins and Noble 2021). The teachers we returned to here were among the former. They all acknowledged how the project challenged them, but productively. Others, however, referred to how it took them out of, what Alice called, ‘their comfort zone’ which is, for most, ‘being in their classroom, … their space’. The teachers we interviewed here were comfortable with being intellectually discomforted. Alice said that the ‘critical Cultural Studies’ deployed in the training was productive: ‘[the] material that we engaged with challenged and made me in particular question when I was doing it in my classroom’, but I was also ‘being challenged myself in my own way of thinking about other people and other cultures’. Caitlin saw the training as offering teachers ‘a deep understanding of what they’re doing’ and she was ‘hungry to learn’. Many teachers reiterated the importance of theory in affording this ‘deeper’ understanding. Gerry referred to how ‘you’ve got to put yourself back into that mindset of actually reading academic stuff, because you’re so used to [doing what you do] … It is engaging’. Isaac was explicit about the value of theory, saying the training, ‘really stuck with me in the sense that professional learning for teachers has to be about building their knowledge and getting them to understand the theory behind why they do what they do’. Julie also thought the training helped develop the link between theory and practice: ‘if you’re grounded in the academic, you can do better’; theory gives ‘the reason, and then we build on it. And we make it purposeful in class’. She emphasized, not just the reading ‘mindset’ that Gerry mentioned, but the role of thinking, discussing and reflecting:

that floats my boat, you give us this theory, and we start talking, and we start going, ‘how do we see that in the classroom?’ But then we’ll make observations and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk to other people: ‘what are we seeing here?’ … you give us [something] to investigate so when you throw these theories at us, it excites us because we can look for something and then we start to use that to piece together our approach to teaching. I don’t see it as convoluted language or beyond us. I actually see it as exciting.

This was put to the test when we talked to teachers about our interrogation of ideas to emphasize a complex view of culture. For Jess, these ideas became part of her ‘background knowledge’. Caitlin admitted that, ‘some of the words went over my head’, but key ideas remained: ‘the takeaway was that the idea of culture doesn’t necessarily have to link to ethnicity … multiculturalism doesn’t have to mean sort of another culture adapting to this culture’. Patrick similarly said that ‘the key message I got from the training was that multiculturalism is a complex term and culture is an incredibly complex term. I developed a more sophisticated understanding of culture and multiculturalism’. He felt this provided a ‘cultural literacy … to help you navigate your way in a multicultural Australian society in a globalized world’.

Several discussed the idea that once we recognize cultural complexity, we had to be wary of ‘essentialising’ cultural differences. Deirdre found the idea of essentialism, ‘a very, very, very useful tool when we were doing the project’; she found herself ‘thinking, is that too stereotypical?’ Many of the teachers translated it into their language, cautioning against ‘stereotypes’, ‘labelling’, ‘pigeonholing’, ‘tokenism’ and putting people in ‘boxes’. Yet it amounted to what Patrick described as ‘a sharp tool kit’, giving them skills for ‘unpacking’ issues. Alice agreed: ‘to sort of question, challenge and interrogate what we were saying about kids because that’s the issue’. The training ‘reinforced that question and that challenge [to] step back and be careful … [be] much more conscious, not just accept things on face value and accept the stereotype’.

Central to the training’s critique of essentialism was using previous research on Lebanese boys (Noble, Poynting, and Tabar 1999) and RMRME data on teachers’ self-identification (Watkins and Noble 2021), to explore cultural hybridity. Isaac underlined this:

I remember the hybridity in terms of the different, I’m going to say invented cultures, but it wasn’t. And you talked about a project you did with some Lebanese boys … they’re the things that stuck with me, the students who said that they were Lebanese, and they created their own little Lebanese sort of identity … we talked … about [it not being] … fixed culture.

Several, like Gerry and Patrick, explained that these examples led them to reflect on their students’ expressed identities and Gillian felt that, the theory was ‘the catalyst because it really started to make us think about that essentialism, it really started to make us think about the way that we were seeing the students and maybe making assumptions that we shouldn’t be making’. This reflection upon cultural complexity meant that they began to see multiculturalism differently. Caitlin said that the experience ‘shaped my idea of multicultural education’. She realized that multiculturalism wasn’t about ‘identifying the culture’, especially if this foregrounded ‘stereotypes’. It meant her team avoided a ‘blanketed approach’ which saw South Asian parents as a homogenous ‘group’. Deirdre similarly talked about how she learnt not to see incidents at school in terms of ‘cultural issues’ and it made Jess contemplative about the ‘White Australians’ who thought they had ‘no culture’, because this is what migrants and refugees had. As Julie said, ‘we can’t just do culture’: multiculturalism wasn’t just about ‘an acceptance of different races and you know how to teach different races’ or being ‘politically correct’.

Gerry admitted he’d become ‘sceptical about multicultural programmes’: while some teachers were ‘protective’ of the multicultural day, he was ‘getting people to question, “is that really multicultural education?”’. Multicultural days as practised in Australian schools typically involve what is often a superficial focus on food, customs and stereotypical representations of ethnic difference. While they may be fun community events, they generally entail little interrogation of the kind of issues these teachers felt needed attention constituting, what we have termed elsewhere, forms of ‘lazy multiculturalism’ (Watkins and Noble 2021). Caitlin came to realize that the multicultural day was a ‘tokenistic kind of thing, … does it create awareness? Possibly? Does it make change? Probably not’. Patrick was critical of ‘people doing flippant things with multiculturalism … I don’t think anyone wants to have their culture summed up as being little more than a falafel’. Multicultural days, he said, ‘are great for school morale, but it’s a tack on’ unless it leads to ‘complex understanding’. For Isaac, the point was the need to avoid using ‘culture’ as an ‘excuse’ for struggling students, to ‘put a label’ on students which ‘embeds underachievement’. For many, these ideas translated directly to school context. Patrick talked about how in the training he thought, ‘how will this go with a group of 15-year-olds in a very multicultural high school in which there are sometimes racial tensions … how would it go if we started developing [in] these kids a more sophisticated understanding of what their own cultural background is, what culture means to them and what multiculturalism means in a school and national context?’.

The ‘tool kit’ we offered, therefore, was about connecting theory and teaching practice. This was significant in several ways. The theory was key to reformulating an approach to action research that went beyond the instrumental evaluation typical in education. This entailed developing what one teacher in RMRME referred to as ‘that research mindset’, a ‘frame of thinking‘ where ‘you have a problem, you refine it down, you investigate, you research and then you try and change practice’ (Watkins and Noble 2021, 84). This was echoed by Gillian: ‘that whole procedure of researching, and then getting the information together, and then acting on that information and forming the question … that’s something that is always the basis of my professional learning journey now’. The RMRME research model was, ‘really drilling down into what it was that we wanted to achieve’ through forming questions: it ‘was a very good learning process for me in how to approach problems’. The focus here is on reading, thinking and forming questions before ‘doing’. For Gerry, this was not simply about individual practice, but was a ‘collegial discussion’ amongst peers, not just assimilating theory. For Gillian, the ‘collaborative nature’ was crucial, because ‘you can’t do it on your own’.

This allowed for a process of reflection beyond the pragmatic, involving critical, personal and professional reflection. As Julie said, the process ‘was bringing to us … a point of reflection’; ‘[how] we need to understand ourselves as teachers and what we’re doing in the classroom’. The importance of this critical reflection was captured by Gillian: ‘we looked at ourselves a little bit differently after going through that process of reflection, you know, when you came out and interviewed us, and then when we went to the professional learning … just kind of putting those ideas together and having a bit of a hard look at yourself’. She elaborated that ‘essentialising’, ‘is something that I have in my head all the time, about the way that I relate to students and the school community’. RMRME, she said, ‘helped me to really not generalize about cultures’, and she saw this imperative against ‘seeing’ people in ‘cultural groups’ as a matter of ‘equity … It was the first time that I saw the thing more than teaching it as a concept in class. Like it was what it means to different people in different environments … I just thought to myself, you have a White woman’s awareness of multiculturalism’. This, she said, made her ‘want to reinvent what I am doing in the classroom’, a revelation which gave her ‘real enjoyment’.

Against the instrumentalising of professional knowledge

Together with asking these teachers about the impact of RMRME and the extent to which the theoretical insights they gleaned remained useful, they were also asked to reflect upon approaches to teacher professional learning. Such consideration is significant given the timing of RMRME and what has transpired within the profession since. Several years prior to RMRME, NSW introduced professional teaching standards for all new teachers.⁵ By 2012, the year in which the RMRME professional learning took place, national teaching standards were adopted within the state with the requirement that all teachers needed to complete 100 hours of professional learning every five years to remain accredited. Currently, this professional learning can be comprised of 50% that is accredited by the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) and 50% that is ‘elective’, the latter encompassing everything from legislative requirements around child protection and anaphylaxis – which are in fact mandatory – to what is termed ‘relevant further study’. What constitutes teacher professional knowledge, therefore, seems very broad. While allowing for the kind of intellectual enquiry that RMRME provided, much seems narrowly conceived, constrained by a bureaucratic managerialism that tethers teachers’ professional learning to school targets such as for literacy, numeracy and behaviour management, most of which are centrally determined. In fact, in recent years, the elective component of teacher professional learning has become even more tightly regulated. Previously referred to as ‘teacher identified’ professional learning, it appeared to give practitioners greater freedom to pursue areas of personal professional interest as opposed to that which is tightly aligned with school and systemic management goals. Such a move was critiqued by a number of the teachers we interviewed. Deirdre, for example, commented that,

It was definitely OK, the first three years, where you could choose your interest area. Now, in the past 18 months, that has changed, so I found that it was good at the start. I thought ‘Oh, it’s great’ but now I find it totally useless.

Caitlin was of a similar view:

The professional learning is often put together by the executive. They try and relate it to the school targets and address it that way. It’d be nice to explore areas of interest or areas that have been identified as lacking knowledge in and then going to address yourself.

From a principal’s perspective, Isaac found it difficult to manage both the department’s requirements and the professional learning needs of his staff, ‘It’s a real sort of balancing act in terms of how far do you stray from the core priorities the school is being measured against, which are linked to the Premier’s priorities’. Julie summed up current approaches to professional learning as: ‘Very limited, and it’s almost irrelevant from an experience point of view’.

This relatively tight control over teacher professional learning calls into question the nature of teaching as a profession. While understandings of what being ’a professional’ involves may vary, in a traditional sense, it denotes occupations characterized by specialized knowledge, responsibility and autonomy (Furlong et al. 2000). In the case of teachers, particularly those in government schools, that autonomy is circumscribed. But such limitations on teacher autonomy are not simply a function of being state employees; the ubiquity of state-endorsed neoliberal reform (Davies and Bansel 2007) has even more so contributed to teachers’ lack of professional autonomy. As Evans (2008) recounts, given a similar situation in the UK, ‘Autonomy has evidently given way to accountability’. This accountability is not that of a teacher’s professional responsibility to students, but accountability in a managerial sense evident in the pervasive audit culture prevalent in schools (Thompson and Mockler 2016). This, of course, is not a recent phenomenon. The impact of neoliberalism, on educational policy and practice over the last 30 years is well documented (Davies and Bansel 2007) as is its effect on the profession itself leading to forms of ‘new professionalism’ (Furlong et al. 2000) and ‘managerial professionalism’ (Sachs 2001). Such a reconfiguration of professional practice is similarly manifest in teacher professional learning wherein, as the teachers above explain, it is tailored, or perhaps ‘Taylored’, to often narrowly conceived management goals. With a view to maximizing efficiency, principles of Neo-Taylorism (Crowley et al. 2010) now tend to govern the parameters of professional learning wherein much of it serves as a conduit for departmental policy and what is deemed necessary to know. Knowledge, therefore, is instrumentalised, prompting forms of epistemological closure, antithetical to theoretical exploration and critique.

In distinguishing between types of teacher professional development, Evans (2008) refers to functional and attitudinal development, the former being primarily procedural with a practical orientation and the latter focused more on intellectual enquiry. While acknowledging the need for the former, she derides its dominance in the UK, referring to its ’limited success’ in improving educational standards (Evans 2008, 31). Despite this, much professional development remains purely functional. Yet teachers are much more than functionaries tasked with implementing policy and mandated curriculum. As is evident above, they require a combination of specialized knowledge and the intellectual agility to attend to the complexities of contemporary schooling. While teachers require a knowledge of policy, its implementation is a hermeneutic exercise dependent upon teachers’ professional knowledge. Without the necessary interrogation of culture and productive critique of multiculturalism, for example, multicultural education may run counter to its inclusionary goals. Isaac, for instance, bemoaned the functionalist mentality of some of his staff:

I have people at work who just say, ‘tell me what you want me to do’. And I say, ‘but I can’t because your class is different, every class is different. What is going to work on Monday for you, is not going to work for someone else’.

In response, Isaac favoured greater engagement with relevant literature to enhance professional dialogue. He explained how, ‘it’s well worth it because what it means is that teachers are understanding it, and they’re putting their own flair on it rather than someone coming in and saying this is the script you follow’. In other words, Isaac was encouraging the intellectual independence Dewey felt teachers required, reliant upon informed and thoughtful reflection and not merely experience. This is not always promoted within professional learning, though this was not a view all our interviewees shared. Patrick referred to how, ‘The profession is very focused on research now. It is like data-driven research … and the leadership is very, very interested in not just educational research, also psychology and leadership, you know leadership things like corporate leadership stuff’. Yet such a view seemed to confirm our concerns, with the promotion of research that was similarly instrumental and unlikely to engender the insightful critique Patrick himself offered of routinized practices of multicultural education drawing on his RMRME training. It is not only that teachers’ practice needs to be informed by research, they also need to be able to discern its utility by questioning assumptions that some research may reinforce. This is a process requiring an intellectual rather than instrumental orientation to knowledge, framed by categorical scepticism and epistemic doubt.

Yet, many of the teachers we interviewed were critical of the lack of engagement with theory by their colleagues and within professional learning. Alice explained, ‘if you have theory, something that is theoretical, a lot of people need it distilled for them into the practical because it’s not something they can engage with’. Julie saw this as an issue of leadership, ‘if someone presented theory, the automatic reaction of leaders in a school would be to dumb it down’. While leaders like Isaac, Alice and Patrick were not of this ilk, there was a general view that much professional learning was merely practical, lacking a conceptual register. Yet it was the latter that Julie prized,’ I view professional learning as giving me ideas that maybe make me want to reinvent what I am doing in the classroom’. Patrick expressed a similar view,

I want someone to sort of teach me something and to expand the way I see things … some people measure the success of professional learning on whether they’ve got resources to use in the next two weeks and others see it as part of being a lifelong learner and you’ve tucked away a little bit of knowledge that you’ll use at later stages.

Patrick’s perspective on teachers’ differing approaches to professional learning are indicative of two different professional cultures; one in which the practical is emphasized and the other in which there is a greater intellectual orientation (Watkins and Noble 2021) akin to what Hoyle (1975) terms restricted and extended professionality. One would assume moves to improve teachers’ professional practice by linking accreditation to mandated hours of professional learning was motivated by a desire to encourage the latter, but within the current context of neoliberal governance, managerialism has infused teacher practice and restricted professionality is perhaps now even more prevalent with emphasis on compliance as opposed to enrichment. This was noted by Gerry:

When people go into professional learning, it’s ‘how’s that meeting school outcomes or school targets?’ And maybe people start doing these things not because they’re necessarily interested in it but because they’re ticking boxes … so sometimes teachers get annoyed by that because rather than them saying, ‘This is what I want, this is the academic focus I want to have for myself, what I’m really interested in’, they’re told by the system or by the principal, and this is how it’s a contrived interest.

Gillian admitted that she engaged in professional learning that was more about ‘ticking boxes’ then extending her professional knowledge, undertaking the latter without receiving recognition, ‘I’ll do professional learning that I enjoy, which isn’t accredited, but then I’ll do an online course that may be pretty light-on, it’s got a lot of hours attached to it but it’s not of great value to me’. With committed professionals like Gillian making such comments it casts doubt on the value of current accreditation processes, a concern that Caitlin also voiced,

Teachers should engage in 100 hours of professional learning but what professional learning are they engaging in and are they just sort of including themselves in professional learning to get those hours up? I mean, is it like sort of doing your driver’s licence, you fudge it a bit?

Such fudging seems endemic within systems that foreground stringent accountability and minimize professional autonomy (Proudfoot 2021) but, the issue is, what it suggests about the nature of teacher professional knowledge, what is valued and promoted. Each of the teachers interviewed here acknowledged the importance of theoretical understanding for their professional practice. It allowed for a re-envisioning of issues of concerns within their schools, unattainable without the requisite conceptual tools, and yet, most agreed there were limited avenues available for them to access such perspectives. As Caitlin explained, ‘You went to university and it’s all practical thereafter and I think that’s the problem’.

Conclusion

The RMRME project wasn’t about turning teachers into academics. Just as one doesn’t have to be a linguist to teach language well, one doesn’t need to be a Cultural Studies scholar to develop a critical approach to culture. But we did want them to recognize teaching as intellectual labour which wasn’t in opposition to academic work. Caitlin reflected on this with some insight: ‘many don’t feel like they need to have that knowledge to that extent. And I think it diminishes the view of teachers as not being academic, you know, teachers can be academic, they can research things, they can be engaged’.

Significantly, teachers saw this in different ways. For Gerry, the value of the ‘academic’ emphasis was primarily understood in terms of the imperative to undertake action research that engaged with research literature. He was focused on the reading ‘mindset’ we’ve referred to above. Others focused on what one referred to as the ‘research mindset’. Reading and doing research are useful practices for teachers, but as those here indicate, it was reading and researching framed in a particular way: a model of action research informed by a ‘circuit’ of interrogation, theorizing, questioning and critical reflection that typifies Cultural Studies (Johnson et al. 2004, 95). This entailed critical thinking – on the back of reading and informing the research – in a deep and sustained way. It involved conceptual tools not typically found in teacher discourse and undervalued in instrumentalised approaches to teacher knowledge in current professional development. It also required participation in a collaborative process of interrogation, discussion and development. Importantly, it entailed forming questions – both in relation to the reading and to the action research – and, crucially, it meant developing skills of sustained, critical reflection beyond the pragmatic ‘reflexive practitioner’ model of educational practice. This reflection was theoretically informed and empirically grounded, and related not simply to evaluating classroom practice, but thinking about the positions and relations of teachers, academics, students and parents, the local community and the wider social and global contexts.

In contrast to the reduced, managerialist models of professional development currently shaping teacher professionalism, the RMRME process embodied what Johnson et al. (2004, 95) describe as a relationship of ‘double articulation’:

We make explicit and think about our assumptions, for these influence what we see and do. We also allow what we see and do to challenge our theories and provide a better basis for our thinking. This is why empirical engagement … is also critical for theoretical work (Johnson et al. 2004, 92).

RMRME was an attempt to provide teachers with the support to embrace this double challenge. It is through this that teachers can best acquire an ‘extended’ professionality resulting in the ‘intellectual independence’ that Dewey speaks of, beyond ‘subservience’ to the practical. This ‘independence’ can only be achieved through the collective labour of intellectual work; work undertaken especially by academics with teachers and departmental consultants. This returns us to the role of Cultural Studies. Both Williams and Hall, in different ways, insisted on the utility of Cultural Studies, and both emphasized the ‘intellectual project’ of Cultural Studies alongside its much-vaunted ‘political project’. For Hall (1986, 51; 60), Cultural Studies is premised on the valorization, not of ‘Theory’ as ‘closed paradigms’ which emphasizes abstraction for its own sake, but of theorizing as an ‘open horizon’, an ongoing labour which is situated, reflexive and has a usefulness in the wider world. For Williams (1989, 162), a key purpose of Cultural Studies lay in educational work that put this mode of inquiry into pedagogical effect, ‘taking the best we can in intellectual work and going with it in this very open way to confront people for whom it is not a way of life’. This is the challenge for Cultural Studies into the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan Watkins

Megan Watkins is Professor in the School of Education and Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her research interests lie in the cultural analysis of education engaging with issues of pedagogy, embodiment, discipline and affect and the interrelation of these to human agency. These interests mesh with her exploration of the impact of cultural diversity on education and the ways in which different cultural practices can engender divergent habits and dispositions to learning.

Greg Noble

Greg Noble is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His research centres on relations between youth, ethnicity, class and gender; migration, multiculturalism and intercultural relations; cultural pedagogies and Bourdieusian theory; and multicultural education.

Notes

1. This study has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee at Western Sydney University. The ethics reference number is H14395.

2. Rethinking Multiculturalism, Reassessing Multicultural Education was an Australian Research Council Linkage project conducted between 2011–2014. The pilot was undertaken in 2008–2009.

3. During the project the NSW Institute of Teachers became the Board of Studies, Teaching and Education Standards (BOSTES) and, since 2017, has been known as the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA).

4. English as an Additional Language or Dialect.

5. This occurred in 2004 with the establishment of the NSW Institute of Teachers.