Transformative professional learning: What do teachers say about how that happens?

  This paper draws on what teachers had to say in an extended research conversation when asked to describe an experience that had resulted in significant learning about their teaching work. Teachers were also asked to select and demonstrate evidence of the learning about which they spoke. The conversations took place immediately prior to the implementation of a national curriculum and the replacement of state based standards with a set of national professional standards for teachers. The study is theoretically situated in relation to the work of Dorothy Smith and the mode of inquiry she calls ‘institutional ethnography' which begins in the actual doings of people as they describe them and endeavours to discover the relationships that coordinate the social as it extends beyond people's ‘everyday' experiences. Teacher professional standards and the Australian Curriculum are part of what Smith (2005) calls ‘relations of ruling' in the sense that they are constituted externally to individual teachers and the context of their work but they impact on the locally produced texts and social relations that coordinate teachers' actual doings.    Initial analysis of the teachers' stories and their evidence revealed unexpected connections and implications that could not be adequately described by a set of coding categories. As a reflexive response to the data a method of dialogic analysis was built on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin to reveal the dominant, centralizing discourses and the subversive, heterogeneous discourses related to teachers' learning about their work in their localized context. From this analysis the social relationships that had supported transformative learning experiences for each of the teachers was mapped and compared to the dialogic analysis of a research conversation with the ‘leader' of learning in each teacher's context. Findings suggest that it is the pedagogy of the ‘leader' in each context that has the most significant influence on establishing and maintaining social relations that support transformative teacher learning.