‘inquiry as stance’: teacher professional learning and narrative

Abstract

This article offers an insight into the professional development and learning of an experienced teacher and middle manager in a secondary school stimulated by engaging in an innovative, mixed-mode Master's-level course at the Institute of Education, University of London. At its core is the personal narrative of the teacher as a learner based on a journal kept as part of the ‘Leading Learning’ module of the Master of Teaching. The journal requires the learner to narrate a critical account of her involvement in innovative pedagogical practice and focuses on reflection as a scholarly activity which goes beyond self-referential considerations of development. The narrative provides a reflexive (as well as a reflective) account of the ‘impact’ of a professionally oriented Master's-level course inter alia based on notions of evidence-based practice, teacher agency, educational and research literacies and scholarship of teaching on the wide range of roles inhabited on a daily basis by the course participant as a teacher and leader of learning. The complexities, tensions and risks experienced are unravelled and problematised with reference to the conceptual framework of ‘inquiry as stance’. The rationale underlying the design of the course as well as its conceptual underpinning are interwoven by the higher education tutor, whose voice is deliberately subordinated to that of the teacher learner as evidenced by the first-person narrative of this article.