“They transformed our thinking”: An exploration of how, and under what conditions, working with historians and historical scholarship can contribute to UK secondary history teachers’ professional learning and practice development

Thesis aims: This thesis asks when, in what ways, and how, teachers’ engagements with disciplinary scholarship – research from the academic disciplines most closely related to the subjects they teach – can contribute to their professional learning and practice development. Engagements between schools and disciplinary scholarship are established, supported by universities, meso-level curriculum actors and policy makers, yet educational research into these engagements is not yet equally well-developed. This thesis contributes evidence to the particular need for greater evidence of (i) what engagements with disciplinary scholarship look like, and how they ‘work’, in local contexts of practice; and (ii) the micro-interactional professional learning mechanisms and processes involved in engagements with disciplinary scholarship. Research design: This is a dual-study thesis, informed by cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and dialogic theory, which develops two research studies to investigate the two distinct knowledge generation opportunities outlined above. Study One develops a novel dialogic Meta-Ethnography using teachers’ published accounts of their efforts to develop their practice using scholarship to explore engagements with disciplinary scholarship in local settings. Study Two analyses naturally-occurring data of synchronous and asynchronous discussions within a four-month teacher professional development programme where teachers worked with historians, tracing how scholarly historical concepts were taken up, used and developed micro-interactionally within participants’ talk, and the influences on this process. Findings: The contribution scholarship made to these teachers’ work was not confined to developing subject knowledge; scholarly historical concepts had surprising levels of flexibility for development into conceptual tools supporting practice development e.g. as templates for new forms of practice; new guiding principles; or newly understood problems of practice to work on. Engagements with scholarship could be powerful catalysts or enablers for local practice development efforts for these teachers, but they were also very difficult and challenging. What these teachers’ engagements with historical scholarship looked like on the surface was not explanatory of how they ‘worked’, supporting the orientation of the thesis to attend to underlying mechanisms and processes of professional learning. Dialogue – with others, and between different ideas – was an important component of these processes and mechanisms in the contexts studied in this thesis. Ideas from practice influenced these dialogic learning processes, but new insights could also emerge from them with potential to re/shape practice. Conclusions: Overall, engagements with scholarship may be best understood as fundamentally creative processes of professional learning, as opposed to linear, reproductive or acquisitive processes. We can interpret teachers’ work with historical scholarship as involving micro-interactional work on or with historical concepts, where ideas from scholarship acquire new functions, additional to their original role representing something direct about the past. These functions can support teachers to think differently about their practice; notice new things about their practice; and work differently on their practice. Dialogue may be an important enabler of this type of professional learning using scholarship. Difficulty may be an inherent part of engagements with scholarship, and these difficulties may not always be possible to mitigate, because uncomfortable discontinuities may form part of the underlying change mechanisms involved. These insights imply a need to support practitioners with practical tools and scaffolds to support work on or with concepts; dialogue; and surfacing and working on or with difficulty. They also imply a need to attend to building the enabling conditions for generative engagements with scholarship in practice, particularly for schools and teachers just getting started with such engagements, or who might be in more challenging circumstances.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Dickens, Siobhan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hofmann, Riikka

• Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
• Dialogic Methods
• Dialogic Theory
• Education
• History Education
• Meta-Ethnography
• Professional Development
• Teacher Professional Development
• Teaching

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/3be2d4fb-9b51-4b3f-af37-6519c3f6d44d/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0003-2168-7115

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/372291