Paper presentation: Ethnographic Evaluation of Teachers’ Practices: Making Teachers’ Reflections on Teaching Practices Visible

Description

This paper is a methodological paper regarding how to achieve insights into teachers’ practice. The paper demonstrates and proposes a method to elicit and make visible teachers’ reflections on teaching practices. This paper draws on a three-year Danish study investigating teachers’ learning in practice with empirical qualitative data collected over a period of eight months that includes class observations, teacher’s written reflection journals and two collections of semi-structured interviews the first that is grounded in their reflection journal and the second that followed directly after the in-class observation. Ten teachers of adults were informants in this study (Lund 2015; Lund 2016a; Lund 2016b). The approach of the study is of benefit for educational research as it serves as an example of the triangulation of methods which can be used as a way to investigate teachers’ practices bearing in mind the aspect of beliefs and actions as intervened (Kompf & O’Connell Rust 2015; Calderhead 1996; Richardson 1996).I argued that this kind of ethnographic evaluation allows for analysis of teachers’ thinking in combination with their actions in classroom. In other words, this research approach provides the opportunity to stimulate and nurture critical reflection of the teachers’ own practices. The questions explored here is: How do we make such experiences visible and able to be reflected on? How do we approach them; how do we elicit them? And how does one ‘assess’ them? In other words, how do we, in the end, analyse them? This is the aim of this paper.Keywords: Ethnographic evaluation, teacher beliefs, teacher reflection, critical friend, teacher thinking, teacher vocabulary

Period	13 Sept 2017
Event title	Ethnography and Education Conference Oxford
Event type	Conference
Location	Oxford, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International