Beyond reproduction: the transformative potential of professional learning

Abstract

There is an often unquestioned assumption that professional learning and development (PLD) is unequivocally a ‘good thing’ (Stevenson 2019). However, this assumption belies a much more complex situation, fraught with challenges. Numerous studies have demonstrated that teachers can experience significant barriers when trying to access PLD (OECD 2014), including limited access to appropriate opportunities, having insufficient time to undertake the opportunities that are available and that even when teachers do participate in PLD activities, impact can be limited (McChesney and Aldridge 2021). These are important challenges and should not be dismissed. However, they tend to generate policy responses that focus only on identifying ‘what works’ solutions within a set of parameters that do not question ‘what matters’ (Biesta 2007). Professional Development in Education has done much over the years to seek to move beyond this debate about structural challenges and practical solutions, and to open up discussion about more fundamental questions such as who is PLD for, who should decide, and what should it look like? We have sought to open up a discussion about ‘transformative professional learning’: both what it is and what it might be. This work has assumed many forms over the years, but a significant moment was the publication of Aileen Kennedy’s (2005) article ‘Models of Continuing Professional Development: A framework for analysis’ which distinguishes between transmissive and transformative modes of professional learning. These issues have been reflected since in ongoing debates within the journal and highlighted in the recent special issue on ‘Non-linear perspectives on teacher development: complexity in professional learning and practice’ (vol. 47, issues 2 and 3). However, despite these discussions, much of the research relating to professional learning remains focused on transmissive models that fail to question the fundamentally reproductive nature of much PLD. These initiatives are often managerially imposed, embedded within performative structures and are central to encouraging cultures that value conformity and compliance over radical change. Although such approaches have often co-opted the language of transformation, the reality suggests that very little is being transformed. The danger is that the language of ‘transformation’ becomes accepted as a contemporary ‘common sense’ – over-used and under-analysed. The ultimate irony is that learning processes that claim to be about change play a key role in reinforcing existing structures and their linked inequalities. In this Special Issue of PDiE, we explore the potential of professional learning to be disruptive – to challenge current inequalities, dominant ideas, and established orthodoxies. We seek to understand how professional learning can be genuinely transformative, not only by opening up possibilities that may be beyond our current imagination, but which connect abstract and conceptual thinking with practical actions capable of bringing about real change – what Freire (1970) called ‘conscientization’. We consider transformative professional learning to be that which enables critical consciousness, what Mezirow (1981, p. 6) describes as an awareness and understanding of ‘how an ideology reflects and distorts moral, social and political reality and what material and psychological factors influence and sustain the false consciousness which it represents – especially reified powers of domination’. Transformative professional learning is therefore liberatory and emancipatory, but at times also ‘disorienting’ (Mezirow 1991). Our intention in curating this special issue is to provide an impetus for a more joined up attempt at challenging the dominant approach to professional learning which focuses on attempts to PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN EDUCATION 2023, VOL. 49, NO. 4, 581–585 https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2023.2226971