Continuing Professional Development: Emancipation or Constraint?

1. Continuing Professional Development Emancipation or constraint? Hazel Bryan Chris Carpenter Canterbury Christ Church University

2. Method and context • Carried out as part of a Training Needs Analysis (TNA) into the development of Gifted and Talented children in Physical Education which was funded by the DfES (carried out by Leeds Metropolitan University and Canterbury Christ Church University in 2004-2005). • Semi structured interviews with 56 primary teachers (PE co-ordinators and non PE co-ordinators) and secondary PE teachers. Continuing professional development; emancipation or constraint.

3. Method Interview structure • Establish current conceptions of Gifted and Talented children in PE. • Establish current provision. • Establish conceptions about effective CPD. • Establish ideal situation and how this might best be achieved. Continuing professional development; emancipation or constraint.

4. Themes emerging in the data • Given to me • National initiatives are incontestable • ‘Putting things in place.’ • Relevant - up to date. • Training to take the school to the top • Working within the guidelines • knowledge is received. • Practice is ‘given’ to me. • Helps me know what levels the children are at.

5. Themes emerging in the data • show me • Case studies of what ‘works’ • I want to be ‘taken through things.’ • Venues – relevance • I ‘ll respect you if you can demonstrate it with my children. • I want to know ‘how’ to. • I want strategies. • I want examples and ideas. • I like watching others. • Training helps my confidence

6. Themes emerging in the data • I enact it • Little stepping stones. • Reflection is least effective • I learn with my friends • I collaborate • I enact confidently because it is someone else’s design. • ‘I like it because I could not evaluate my lessons’. • Gives me reassurance because I know I am doing it right. • Assumption of convergence?

7. Themes • Policy context • Implications of policy context on teacher identity. • Possibilities for professional learning Continuing professional development; emancipation or constraint.

8. Story Narrator privileges the hypothetical. Trafficking in human possibilities Tentative Divergent Discursive Exploratory Argument Privileges the ‘factual’. Settled certainties ‘Truth’ seeking. Bruner on thought Bruner 1986 Continuing professional development; emancipation or constraint.

9. Activist Identity. The open flow of ideas, regardless of their popularity, that enables people to be as fully informed as possible. Faith in the individual and collective capacity of peoples to create possibilities for resolving problems. The use of critical reflection and analysis to evaluate the ideas, problems and policies. Concern for the welfare of others and the ‘common good’. Concern for the dignity and rights of individuals and minorities. An understanding that democracy is not so much and ‘ideal’ to be persuaded as an ‘idealised’ set of values that we must live and that guide our life as people. The organisation of social institutions to promote and extend the democratic way of life. Entrepreneurial identity. Individualistic Competitive Controlling and regulative Externally defined. Designer employee (teacher) (Logical chain). Judith Sachs (2001) • Self and self narrative • Self narrative has no currency. • Democratic discourses give rise to the development of communities of practice. Continuing professional development; emancipation or constraint.

10. The allegory of the cave – From ‘The Republic.’ • Meno’s paradox. Continuing professional development; emancipation or constraint.

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