Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
113141
I Introduction
Practitioner research is here to stay for language teaching
research, if only because of its practitioner development potential,
but we need to rethink it. We seem to have got some very
important things very wrong.
First, we have been seduced by the prevailing wisdom that
participant research must essentially aim to improve the
efficiency of classroom teaching, typically by isolating practical
problems and solving them one by one.
Secondly, we have largely accepted that such improvement will
best be achieved by the practitioners involved (the teachers)
Address for correspondence: Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language,
Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YT, UK; e-mail: r.allwright@lancs.ac.uk
Arnold 2003
10.1191/1362168803lr118oa
114
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
115
That is:
By thinking globally, away from particular contexts, we try to
identify the fundamental principles behind what we want our
language teaching research to achieve principles like bringing
people together instead of pushing them apart, that it is worth
working for any time, anywhere, just because people are people.
Then we can act locally, in the light of those principles, meaning
that we work out their precise implications in our immediate
context (Millers doctoral work in Rio de Janeiro, in this issue,
and 2001, is an excellent example here). Wherever we are on the
globe, then, we need to find a practical way of respecting our
global principles.
We then find that the thinking we do to find principled ways of
acting in our local situation generates more thinking about our
principles. Whether or not it challenges our original principles,
it will necessarily feed the development of our global thinking,
and may help us approach new contexts more confident that we
know what we want to achieve, and why.
So, local action intelligently conducted will contribute in turn to
our thinking about our principles. But we humans can act and think
at the same time. So we can expect a constant interplay between
the three, not a simple linear sequence. In particular, it is not at
all obvious that we typically start with thinking globally. We
probably get our most deeply held principles, not from a major
116
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
117
118
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
119
120
Exploratory Practice
that we had forgotten the prior need to get things right for teachers.
Education, he said, must first and foremost be good for teachers
lives, if it is ever to be good for learners learning. This very
challenging proposition proved enormously productive, because it
helped us see that EP must, in the same way, be more about life
than it is about work. In short, it must make a contribution to the
quality of life in the language classroom, before it can hope to
make a contribution to the quality of teaching and learning (the
work) there. But I risk making an unfortunate distinction between
work and life. Work is a part of life, or an attitude to it, not an
alternative.
Very recently I have encountered the same sort of thinking in a
very different context that of chief executives in the British
National Health Service. These chief executives are apparently, like
many teachers, so constantly bombarded with new ideas and
demands that they also risk burn-out. They talk about a sense of
loss they feel they are no longer doing the job they believe they
should be doing, but are constantly side-tracked onto other
priorities and many resign because they feel unable to provide
a satisfactory service. This is very familiar to me in my work with
teachers. More striking than any similarity of symptoms, however,
is the approach of the team the British Government brought in to
help. Frank Blackler (1995), of the Lancaster University School of
Management, and Andy Kennedy, of the Kings Fund, chose to
focus on quality of life rather than quality of work, and on
understanding, the first principle of the 1991 Epilogue, as the
mechanism whereby these Chief Executives might overcome their
sense of loss.
4 Understanding what we mean by understanding
So, EP is fundamentally about trying to understand the quality of
life in a given situation. Quality of life is a tricky enough notion
in itself, and we are still trying to work out our own understandings
of it, but in the meantime we need to say something about what
we mean by understanding.
Our main problem seems to arise from the irony that we believe
the profoundest understandings to be somehow beyond words. In
this connection I recall a New York teacher with an extremely good
Dick Allwright
121
reputation for her teaching, who, asked in public to account for her
classroom success, could only say she knew she was successful
because her contract was always renewed. That was all she could
say. And yet we have only words to try to express whatever
understandings we do have. Even worse, attempting to put our
understandings in words might be doubly counterproductive. First,
the words we find may serve to conceal, rather than successfully
communicate, the true extent of our understandings. Worse, having
found words, we may believe we have also found understanding,
and so the effort to communicate might inhibit any further effort
to understand.
But within the context of EP, and especially for classroom
language teaching, we need ways of using language, even a second
language, to develop and express our developing understandings.
This is clearly a very ambitious undertaking, not helped by the
thought that teaching and learning is itself a complex social process
that is typically, if not necessarily, mediated by language.
What EP can offer, however, is suggestions for linguistically
productive ways of developing classroom understandings, by
finding classroom time for deliberate work for understanding, not
instead of other classroom activities but by exploiting normal
classroom activities for that purpose. But any resultant statement
of understanding, like that of the teacher investigating group work
(above), is necessarily only a partial (if not actually misleading)
representation of the understanding itself, and of necessity a
situated understanding, valid, if at all, only for its immediate
situation.
So, although EP work is unlikely by itself to produce generalized
understandings, the production of situated understandings,
whether or not they are, or can be, fully articulated, would be
directly valuable to the immediate participants and would
represent a considerable achievement in itself. And, anyway, what
other people could learn from any statements of such situated
understandings might not come primarily from the findings.
Learning about the investigative procedures involved may be more
useful to others than any particular findings. This may be the major
value, for others, of local thinking.
Such major issues in participant research cannot be adequately
resolved within the scope of this paper, however.
122
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
123
will be presented later, but they have actually served also, as the
source of our statements of principle. By reflecting on our practices
we have been able to better understand and find words for the
ideas behind our actions. We have of course been thinking
globally, to extract from particular local experiences whatever
might be of more global relevance and value, but the very close
relationship to a great and growing quantity of local action, and of
local thinking has always been crucial to our global thinking. And
all that thinking constantly feeds into yet more local action, and
so on.
1 Making a preliminary distinction
When trying to represent highly complex matters in writing we
seem inevitably to be drawn into making apparently firm
distinctions between things that in our daily lives we see as
intimately inter-related. The biggest artificial distinction here is
between two sets of processes: (1) Taking action for understanding,
and (2) Working with emerging understandings. The first focuses
on the processes themselves, as practices, whereas the second set
focuses more on their substantive content.
The order of presentation below suggests chronological
sequence, if only because it may seem obvious that you can only
reflect on emerging understandings once they have started to
emerge, and so only after you have taken some action for
understanding. But at any point in our lives we all have some level
of understanding of the life we are currently living, and some
degree of puzzlement. That puzzlement arises, not from our having
no understanding at all of something that is happening, but from
feeling that our current understandings are not entirely
satisfactory.
2 Taking action for understanding
So taking action is not necessarily the starting point, but
something had to come first, and this set does readily offer
connections to the principles of EP (see Section V below).
Taking action for understanding can involve, in our experience,
any or all of the following component processes (and no doubt
others we have yet to discover):
124
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
125
expressing
and
appraising
personal/collective
126
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
127
128
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
129
130
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
131
132
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
133
134
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
135
136
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
137
138
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
139
IX References
Allwright, D. 1988: Observation in the language classroom. London:
Longman.
1991: Exploratory teaching, professional development, and the role
of a teachers association. Approach (Newsletter of the Cuban
National Institute of Tourism INTUR) III (2): 921. Also available
from the Linguistics Department, Lancaster University, as CRILE
Working Paper 7.
1993: Integrating research and pedagogy: appropriate criteria and
practical possibilities. In Edge, J. and Richards, K., editors, Teachers
develop teachers research. Oxford: Heinemann, 12535. Also
available from the Linguistics Department, Lancaster University, as
CRILE Working Paper 13.
2001: Three major processes of teacher development and the
appropriate design criteria for developing and using them. In
Johnston, B. and Irujo, S., editors, Research and practice in language
teacher education: voices from the field. Proceedings of the First
International Conference on Language Teacher Education,
Minneapolis, May, 1999. Minneapolis, Carla Working Paper 19:
11533.
Allwright, D. and Bailey, K.M. 1991: Focus on the language classroom.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Allwright, D. and Lenzuen, R. 1997: Exploratory Practice: work at the
Cultura Inglesa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Language Teaching Research,
1(1): 739.
Bannell, R.I. 1997: Its all right in theory, but what about praxis?
knowledge, action and Exploratory Practice. In Field, J., Graham,
A., Griffiths, E. and Head, K., editors, Teachers develop teachers
research 2, Kingston: IATEFL, 1837.
Bartu, H. 1997: Sense of achievement in Exploratory Practice. Networking
(British Councils Teachers Centres in Turkey) 3: 1314.
2000: Teachers sense of achievement in exploratory teaching. In
Mair, J., editor, Excellence in teaching: promoting, implementing and
sustaining effective practice, Proceedings of 5th International Bilkent
University Conference (School of English, Bilkent University,
Ankara, Turkey), 93102.
Blackler, F. 1995: Knowledge, knowledge work, and organisations: an
overview and interpretation. Organisational Studies 16(6): 102146.
Chan, K.-L. 2002: Individual differences in learner beliefs within a young
female prison context in Hong Kong: a case study. MA TESOL
dissertation, Lancaster University, UK.
Chen, D. 2002: Understanding professional development in the MALT
programme via Exploratory Practice a personal case study. MA
140
Exploratory Practice
Dick Allwright
141
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.