Reworking or reaffirming practice? Perceptions of professional learning in alternative and flexible education settings

Abstract

The success of alternative and flexible education settings, serving young people for whom mainstream schooling has not worked well, rests on the practices of their staff. This paper explores interview and survey data on the professional learning experiences and perceptions of staff working in flexible learning programmes across Victoria, Australia. These settings are often associated with innovative educational practice, as well as a freedom to act outside of dominant neoliberal logics governing teachers’ work and limiting possibilities for ‘transformative’ professional learning. This paper shows staff engaged in a diversity of professional learning activities mediated through interactions with colleagues and responsive to locally determined needs. The paper focuses on three core components – ‘external events’, ‘internal stuff’ and ‘cross program’ – to explore what staff perceive to be valuable professional learning in supporting their practice. Themes of authenticity, collegiality and trust, as well as tensions between reworking and reaffirming practice are considered. The highly collaborative nature of professional learning and apparent privileging of internal ‘within sector’ knowledge is argued to bring possibilities for strong support for staff and expeditious cross-fertilisation of practice whilst also posing risks in terms of endangering innovation, flexibility and diversity. Areas of fruitful future research are identified.

Keywords:

• Professional development
• professional learning
• alternative education
• flexible learning programmes
• collegiality
• collaboration

Notes

1. Such as the Staff in Australia Schools Survey (SiAS) and The OECD Teacher and Learning International Survey (TALIS).

2. These are the dominant narratives about the lives of young people who attend alternative and flexible education settings. This is both a deficit and dangerous narrative, and I do not wish to suggest that the staff see or construct the students wholly in this way. As argued elsewhere, the role of counter-narratives (Baker & Plows, 2015) and counter-practices (Plows & Baker, in press) in the work of alternative educators is apparent and is crucial.

3. As Woods and Woods (2009, p. 3) note, traditional mainstream schooling (like alternative education) is diverse, ‘not a monolithic entity’. It is used here, following Woods and Woods, as shorthand to refer to dominant conventions of publicly funded school education as seen in Western countries such as the UK, United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

4. Further details on the study, its methodology and findings can be found in Plows and Te Riele (2016).

5. The study did not include staff in programmes that operate within schools such as Big Picture and Hands on Learning, or schools that operate under an alternative philosophy such as Steiner and Montessorri that are not directly aimed at ‘disengaged’ students or behavioural units or correctional facilities that young people are forced to attend.

6. The online survey also included questions adopted with permission or under the creative commons licence from the SiAS and the OECD’s TALIS.

7. http://dusseldorp.org.au/priorities/alternative_learning/program_database/.

8. One of the difficulties of conducting survey research in this sector is the significant challenge in gathering accurate data on the number of FLPs and details about their staffing or students. In Australia, MySchool provides this kind of information for Catholic, Government and Independent Schools.

9. ‘Non-teacher’ roles included: youth workers, social workers, education support, front desk support, pathways or careers workers and speech pathologists.

10. The selection of interviewees was not linked to responses to the online survey.

11. The content areas that staff privilege and perceive to be important for professional learning in this sector are not the focus of this paper. More details on these findings can be found in Plows and Te Riele (2016).

12. Staff were asked to report which of 16 listed types of professional learning activities they had participated in over the previous 12 months.

13. The ‘echo-chamber’ phenomenon was initially highlighted in an anonymous review of an earlier version of this paper.