of how research is taken into school practices have included changes in school
policy for the support of beginning teachers and developments in carrying out
observations of teaching and giving feedback to established staff across several
schools.
The Deanery appears to have created a site where practices can intersect; where
what matters for each participant, their knowledge and expertise, counts; and where
interpretations of problems of practice, whether teaching or research, are expanded
so that the resources of the wider set of practices are brought into play. Because
teachers and tutors change responsibilities or move on, effort is needed to make sure
that common knowledge continues to be built and used. A relentless commitment is
needed; but this is not the work of the teacher educators described WOTE project. It
is premised in a shared set of values about what matters in education locally as the
glue that holds the practices together.
We have yet to assess the impact on student teachers, but would hope that the
growing valuing of educational research in and across schools is mediating
unwelcome aspects of national policies in schools and helping senior leadership
teams in creating the conditions for teachers’knowledge work and occupational
professionalism toflourish.
37.6 Putting Research into Action
This contribution to the collection has not been about applying researchfindings to
educational practice. Instead, it has attempted to indicate how a set of concepts,
rooted in cultural-historical theory and refined in a series of research studies, can be
used as tools to question and consider how the conditions for creating and
supporting teachers’occupational professionalism can be accomplished. In doing so
it has begun to indicate how the same conditions can support future-oriented
pedagogic research. Cultural-historical approaches to learning see concepts, such as
the three at the core of this chapter, as tools to use to make the world a better a
place. These tools get refashioned while used in different practices, making them
useful in any educational context where the intention is to create and support
thinking teachers and the research that informs their work. It is a distinctly
modernist agenda, but then so is Education.
References
Douglas, A. (2010). What and how do student teachers learn from working in different social
situations of development in the same school? In V. Ellis, A. Edwards, & P. Smagorinsky
(Eds.), Learning teaching: Cultural historical perspectives on teacher education and
development(pp. 30–44). London: Routledge.
Edwards, A. (2010).Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise.
Dordrecht: Springer.
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