Polyvocal professional learning through self-study research


Edited by: Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan and Anastasia P. Samaras Cost: £21.50


Publisher: Sense Publishers, Amsterdam Pages: 266 ISBN 978-9463002189 Reviewed by Tara Furlong


Tara has twenty years’ experience in adult education and training in the private and public sectors in the UK and abroad, specialising in integrated English language, literacies and digital learning. She has an ongoing interest in the relationship between multi-modal and contextualised, versus abstracted learning; and its mirror in social and literate practices and language across life spheres. She can be contacted on tara.furlong@designingfutures.uk


There is so much activity and literature recently recognising the value of practitioners engaging with and in research as part of professional learning communities, whether as Practitioner Action Research, Joint Practice Development, Lesson Study or any number of other options, that I was interested to read this book. The contributing editors sought to draw on their expertise as teacher educators (not literacies specialists!) who develop professional practice through encouraging and supporting self-study research, and to investigate others' self-study research across trans- disciplinary domains, contexts and cultures. These are a collection of very small-scale, qualitative projects utilising a hybridity of practices. A strength of the book is its incorporation of multi-cultural perspectives and the utilisation of arts to explore and express.


The second chapter discusses the use of artefacts, personal and professional artefacts, to open dialogues and beyond this to establish salient themes and ways forward that might otherwise not be revealed. The artefacts serve as a platform to query the evidence bases of commentary. While the book is not organised into sections, each paper found its authors paired to another's to act as 'critical friends' through the development process. In this way the papers themselves became abstracted artefacts, and peers' multi-perspectival feedback the base of collaborative editing to ensure domain-specific projects were readable by a wider audience. The editors' emphasis on 'polyvocal' reflects the value they attribute to this formative process with 'critical friends' on self-directed investigation, as they detail in the introductory chapter.


In the following chapters I found some very interesting methodologies behind literacy education practices. Chapter 3 for example storylines the challenges of a hearing teacher working towards drawing on existing literacy practices in her deaf learners to build second language written literacy. Introducing free creative writing time and projects increased participation and motivation, as she integrated learners' preference to draw on each other as resources into learning rather than formal reference tools. In addition to teaching and learning processes, learners' assertive feedback and commentary was recorded and drawn on as a developmental resource in the project toolkit.


In Chapter 7, self-portraiture around critical incidents symbolically identified items and themes which again were used for self-analysis in the context of development. Further tools across chapters included digital interactions and spaces, storytelling, doctoral supervisory methods, critical incidents questionnaires, multiple perspectives tasks, and NVivo, the qualitative data analysis software.


Chapter 10 incorporates a double helix of dual voice poems created from learner feedback and teacher critiques on one side against the teacher's analysis and responses on the other. Poetry is drawn on as a reflective tool in a number of projects as it allows many perceptions to be expressed and meaning may remain contested. Creating poems out of others' key vocabulary or expressions is another flexible method of interaction.


Many of the initial contexts were not research rich and may have had little established culture of educators conducting any form of research, let alone into their own practice. Enquiry methods may have left some of these comparatively junior staff open to challenge and competence queries. Furthermore, the use of the reporting style for these types of research reports formed another interesting area of discussion in the final chapter, where the authors consider how these forms of activity lie on a continuum between reflective (first person), through collaborative (second person), to large-scaler ‘institutional’ (third person) research. This appears to be used as a metaphor for reflection on research scales and processes rather than suggested as definitions in formal writing.


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