Down the rabbit hole: Professional identities, professional learning, and change in one Australian school

This study takes researcher and reader down the rabbit hole of story with its unique approach to the phenomena of professional identity, professional learning, and school change. It examines the perspectives of 14 educators: a range of teachers and leaders in one independent Australian school and in the context of a teacher growth intervention. Set against the backdrop of the global push for teacher quality, and consequent worldwide initiatives in the arenas of teacher professional learning and school change, the study generates context-specific connections between lived critical moments of identity formation, learning, and leading. A bricolaged paradigmatic stance weaves together a social constructionist, phenomenological approach to narrative inquiry. Data were generated primarily from individual narrative-eliciting interviews, of the researcher, two teachers, and 11 school leaders. Extended literary metaphor and known literary characters operate as a symbolic and structural frame. Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Cheshire Cat, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, are analytical tools for the presentation and analysis of the perspectives of researcher, teacher, and leader participants. While the study set out to explore the ways in which educators’ experiences of professional learning (trans)form their senses of professional identity, it found that it is not just professional learning, but epiphanic life experiences, which shape professional selves and practices. School context, and the alignment of the individual with the collective, emerged as key factors for individual and school change. Transformation of educators’ identities and practices was evident in environments which were supportive, challenging, and growth focused, rather than evaluation driven. Identity formation, individual professional growth, and collective school change were revealed to be unpredictable, fluid processes in which small, unexpected moments can have far-reaching effects. The findings have implications for the theorisation of identities, and the research and implementation of professional learning and school change

Scholarship of the cyborg:Productivities and undercurrents

Changed and changing media are transforming the ways that educators and education researchers interact with knowledge and with the world. Journalists and researchers are no longer the guardians of social truths, but part of the democratised sphere of knowledge that Bunz (2014) calls the digital public. Social media, in particular, provides communication that is viral, digital, and immediate, encompassing voices that are at once plural and that come together with a sameness of experience (Bunz, 2014). Academics are being increasingly drawn into the polyphonic global mediascape, which brings with it both possibilities and challenges. Oakes (2018) challenges education researchers to engage in public scholarship in collaboration with policymakers, education professionals, activists, and community organisations. She notes the importance for researchers to translate their research for non-scholarly audiences and to utilise traditional and emerging media as ways to move research into the mainstream. Crandall (2010) contends that academic research has been transformed by networked and computing systems and by mobile devices. On the one hand, the fast immediacy of new media, in which anyone can have a say on a digital platform, provides possibilities for the academic: increased readership, amplified engagement with scholarship, and new professional connections. It also, however, produces noise, a constant media cycle of blame and crisis, and a relentless stream of contradictory and sometimes aggressive or abusive voices clamouring for relevancy and audience