Title:

Learning From And With Our Pupils As Practitioner-Researchers

Authors affiliations and papers

Caitriona McDonagh, University of Limerick Aware Teaching, Learning and Research.

Bernie Sullivan, University of Limerick

Abstract:
(Your abstract must use Normal style and must fit in this space)

Our work as teachers focuses on helping our pupils to maximise their own potentials for learning. Our professional commitments are informed by our values of social justice that holds as sacred the right of all to learn, regardless of social or academic positioning, as well as our educational values to do with the right of all to exercise their originality of mind and critical judgement in order to learn in ways that are appropriate for them.

We work with young children with so-called ‘special educational needs’. Some of these children come from the Traveller community, a community that is educationally marginalized in Ireland (1). Through studying our practices, we have been able to crystallise our initially tacit concerns into explicit concerns about how our children were not learning because they were systematically disadvantaged by the traditional socio-political contexts of education that banish children who are ‘different’ to the educational margins (2). In trying to teach our children so that they could learn, we concluded that our traditional pedagogies were contributing to the marginalisation, and we needed to develop new pedagogies that were grounded in the pupils’ ways of learning. Our research, as adults involved in professional learning and mindful of the new challenges of educational theory and practice (3), involved generating evidence to show how we could support our claims that our new ways of working had implications for organisational and social change (4). Our evidence demonstrates the validity of theorising our practices as a new (for us) integrated model of professionals’ and pupils’ learning, rather than perceive teaching and learning as separate realms of discourse. At our presentation we will produce some of this evidence, using multi-media forms of representation. We also hope to explain how our research is impacting on our institutions, and on what counts as good professional practice in Ireland.

1 Kenny, M. (1997) The Routes of Resistance: Travellers and Second-LevelSchooling. Aldershot, Ashgate.

2 O’Boyle, M. and MacAonghusa, M. (1990) ‘The Alienation of Travellers from the Education System: A study in values orientation.’ M.Ed. thesis, University College Dublin.

3 Schoenfeld, A. H. (1999) ‘Looking Toward the 21st Century: Challenges of Educational Theory and Practice, in Educational Researcher Vol. 28, No. 7, pp. 4–14.

4 McNiff, J. with J. Whitehead (2000) Action Research in Organisations. London, Routledge.

.