PRACTICE AS A THEORY OF CHANGE: RESEARCH ON TEACHERS AND TEACHER EDUCATION

Abstract

Teacher practice research and “practical”/useful knowledge are central to teacher and teacher education reforms concerned with school change. The article examines this research through exploring its social epistemology; that is, to make visible the rules and standards generated about the objects and the processes of change in the research. The analysis is discursive and
focuses on teacher research. It argues (1)“practice” is an abstraction about the desired teacher and is not about something “real” that research merely describes. (2) Research is creates “data” as the facts to actualize the abstraction by making teacher into a kind of person. That kind of person is called “professional” whose tasks are to change others- the child, family, and
community. (3) The idea of change in the research is ironically about stability that conserves that very structures required for change. This conservatism is bound to theoretically principle of the research that school is a “system”, drawing on the biological analogy of an organism that develops and growth. (4) The paradox of the research is also embodied in its comparative system of reason and double gestures. The hope of making the professional teacher and
cosmopolitan child inscribes simultaneously fears of the dangers and dangerous populations to that future.