Abstract

As the organisers of this conference have acknowledged in their decision to focus on ‘principles’ rather than ‘theory’, the relationship between insights acquired through direct experience and those acquired from beyond the school or classroom context remains a perennial topic of debate within teacher education. While the importance of practice is taken for granted, disputes about the place of research-based understandings have focused not only on when and how they should be integrated with practice but also, more fundamentally on whether they are necessary at all.

This keynote address will begin by acknowledging the different positions adopted in these debates and set out the rationale for seeking an integrated approach, before focusing specifically on ‘practical theorising’ (McIntyre 1995), as a means of achieving integration. Central to this approach, is the idea of engagement with research-based insights ­as an active process in which beginning teachers are encouraged to subject all ideas offered to them to critical scrutiny. This obviously means testing them in their own practice, against the distinctive criteria valued in school, such as their feasibility or their appropriateness for specific pupils. But it also means interrogating their underlying values we well as evaluating them in relation to academic criteria such as their coherence with research evidence.

Practical theorising has proved highly influential (underpinning more recent conceptions of ‘research-informed clinical practice’, for example) and has much to commend it, not only in the respect it accords to knowledge of different kinds, established and validated in different ways, but also because it clearly acknowledges beginners’ need to test out both the advice that they are given and the assumptions about effective teaching that they bring with them. Yet, it also raises profound problems, particularly in the burden that it appears to place on beginning teachers in contexts in which it can be extremely uncomfortable to engage in conversations that reveal different ideas and assumptions about how to proceed.

The keynote will examine original and subsequent critiques of practical theorising, focusing particularly on those that have arisen in the past few years or that have been magnified by recent trends in education, including:

· various forms of research engagement within schools that call into question ideas about universities’ distinctive expertise;

· greater prescription of practice in some schools, as a result both of the expansion of the Academies programme and of appeals to ‘evidence-based’ practice;

· schools’ interest, at time of teacher shortage and attrition, in preparing teachers for their particular context, rather than for the wider profession; and

· the introduction of government-mandated ‘core content’ – justified with (selective) reference to particular kinds of research.

The keynote will draw on a range of recent research to elaborate both the challenges and the new possibilities for practical theorising that these trends present and will conclude by demonstrating some of the tools that can be used to facilitate a process that might be regarded as the worst means of seeking to reconcile theory and practice – other than all the others that have been tried!

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