Contesting continuing professional development: reflections from England

Abstract

This paper argues the competing ways in which continuing professional development (CPD) is currently practised in schooling settings in England is a product of the complex social conditions within which teachers work and learn, and teachers’ efforts to make sense of these conditions. Specifically, the paper draws upon research into the teacher learning practices, and conditions of practice, of a group of 18 teachers from one inner-city comprehensive secondary school in the British Midlands. To make sense of competing approaches to CPD within the school, the paper analyses these teachers’ experiences in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social practices as contested. The research reveals competing approaches to teacher CPD in relation to the management of teachers’ CPD, the focus upon improving test scores and the modes of learning in which teachers participate. The paper shows how conflicting pressures and demands in the context within which teachers work, and teachers’ responses to these demands, contribute to contested practices in and across these domains, both arising from and resulting in what is described as a ‘hybridised’ habitus. The research gestures towards the need to cultivate conditions conducive to more educationally oriented, critical, situated and collaborative CPD.

Keywords:

• continuing professional development
• teacher learning
• Bourdieu
• social theory
• managerialism.

Notes

1. The GCSE is an English qualification conferred on students who have successfully completed a number of courses by approximately the age of 16.

2. ‘A-Levels’ are post-GCSE qualifications conferred on students in recognition of successful completion of selected courses by the end of their schooling.

3. Pseudonym for an examination board used by the school.

4. The Key Stage 4/Key Stage 5 junction is the point at which GCSEs are conferred.