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CRITICAL PRACTITIONER INQUIRY – CPI FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS OF TEACHER EDUCATION
Critical Practitioner Inquiry (CPI) is an approach that has been developed within the critical action research tradition. It started as an integrated part of the post-independence teacher education reform in Namibia and the attempts to brake with the racist apartheid policies in the 1990s. It was based on the educational efforts carried out by supporters to the liberation struggle in Southern Africa, particularly in the refugee camp for Namibians in Angola, called Kwanza-Sul.
[edit] In Namibia
CPI became an integrated part of the Basic Education Teacher's Diploma (BETD) programme that replaced the previous programmes in Namibia that were based on racist and ethnic grounds and the South African behaviourist notion of ‘fundamental pedagogy’. CPI is one of the professional themes giving direction to the BETD programme as it is supposed to develop a critical sense towards education and educational development. For that reason, CPI was initially strongly related to the foundation studies in the BETD where the narrow student perspective was supposed to be extended to a broader occupational perspective at an early stage in the programme, before the different aspects of CPI was attended to in connection with further studies in the programme, particularly the studies in Education Theory and Practice (ETP) and School-based Studies (SBS). However, the foundation studies are today replaced by an earlier start of specialised subject studies, which might hinder the creation of an early occupational perspective unless the teacher educators purposefully integrated it in their planned activities. A supportive unit is created at each college, called the Education Development Unit (EDU), where students and their teachers can get access to reference material, computers, production and professional support for their investigations into the conditions for teaching and learning at schools and colleges, even though the role of the EDU differs between the colleges, mainly because of a combination of perceived local needs and educational perspectives.
Students start their inquiries during the first year through the ETP and SBS by looking into the possibilities and constraints related to subject learning in schools. Each BETD student makes an investigation of a specific learning aspect in the student's specialisation (major) subject during the SBS studies. Back at college, the individual inquiries become the resource from which the specialisation studies are started towards the end of the first year in a generative way, replacing the static technocratic approach common in subject studies in Namibia. Considering that each student carries out his/her own guided inquiry creates a knowledge base related to classroom situations in schools, subject related learning aspects, and general educational perspectives addressed in the ETP studies, which continuously expands. These inquiries provide the teacher educators, if they chose to utilize the situation, with an opportunity to create a unique occupational knowledge base of education. Through this introduction to a critical practitioner approach to teacher education it is expected that the BETD students will develop a broad occupational perspective at an early stage in their studies that will be maintained through the continuing CPI studies in the programme.
The CPI activities during the second year of studies are integrated with the broad social conditions for schooling in the ETP studies. This is then linked to practical inquiries during the SBS placements that focus on specific conditions for schooling, such as the different social layers in the surrounding society and its relations to formal schooling, the role of parents, and the ideas that school principals and other administrators in the educational system embrace about the problems and prospects of formal education such as social issues related to school dropout, disengagement, and the clash between schooling as part of the modern society and the needs of rural families, with an attempt to challenge the common sense and taken for granted predispositions and to create a broad situational understanding of the conditions for schooling.
The last year of CPI studies include a major inquiry that has a developmental and action focus. Each student concludes the first CPI cycle by planning, carrying out, analysing, and reporting a piece of development work as part of the final examination of the BETD programme. These reports, that ideally combine the three years of CPI studies, are discussed at the colleges and constitute together with the students’ SBS portfolios, an important documentation of the students’ occupational wisdom developed through the three years of studies and an important resource for the future of the colleges and their own occupational development, for example as a basis for teacher educators own Critical Practitioner Inquiry, even today.
Parallel to the development of CPI in the BETD programme a continuous professional development of teacher educators took place through professional Higher Diploma and Master courses offered to all teacher educators at the colleges in Namibia as well as teachers and school principals at partner schools for the SBS during the first 9 years of the reform. During these first years of the reform efforts a total of 100 educators went through these courses or 40% of the teacher educators at the four colleges. These courses also followed a CPI approach in the sense that the course participants had to select an inquiry topic that was related to their occupational area, meaning that all inquiries were dealing with issues related to education in Namibia, most of them focusing on teacher education as it developed during these years.
[edit] In Ethiopia
The CPI approach is developed further through a Master course for teacher educators at different universities in Ethiopia during 2003 – 2005. In addition to being the first time that university lecturers in Ethiopia are asked to systematically start thinking critically about their own practice as teacher educators, the course develops the contextual inquiries of CPI including three contextual aspects of education: (1) analysis of practice with the aim to find out about the basis for this practice, a basis that is often taken for granted. The analysis of practice has both historical, contemporary, and future perspectives as it is related to the officially expressed and actually created dispositional knowledge amongst students, based on questions like “What is the intention, how is it carried out, and for what purpose?”; (2) The official policy context is another important aspect to look into in days of neoliberalism but also historically, especially in countries that have been heavily influenced by foreign hegemonic forces, even though not officially colonised. Such critical inquiries will tell us about the intentions hidden behind the on-going doublespeak and symbolic adaptations; (3) The third leg of contextual inquiries is to develop a scholastic perspective that will assist the practitioners in their inquiries with the aim to move away from cultures of blame and to create a reflective position towards their own practice and broaden the capacity for situational understanding.
With these contextual studies that all along are tested against the practitioners’ practice, they will develop a situational understanding that will guide them in their choice of focal point for their practical intervention. Each course participant reports their critical inquiries to each other and some have even transformed the course report into articles that are published internationally, as a way to make the preferential right of interpretations amongst educational practitioners acknowledges beyond their own ranks, but foremost to create a knowledge base amongst practitioners that will develop their own situational understandings.
[edit] For the present and the future
In present times when all nation states and educational systems seem to be locked into the global neoliberal matrix of external surveillance as part of a new managerial agenda, discourses of competition as perceived guarantee for quality, and human beings portrayed as consumers of own choices under the discursive images created by the corporate and political spin industry, it becomes even more necessary to maintain a critical sense to avoid being totally manipulated by external forces. Critical Practitioner Inquiry can play a significant role in teacher education and amongst teacher educators as a way to maintain the occupational control over practices and programmes as well as over our own minds, thoughts, and collective understanding.
[edit] Sources
Dahlström, Lars (2002) Post-apartheid teacher education reform in Namibia. The struggle between common sense and good sense. Department of Education. Umea University.
Dahlström, Lars (2003) Critical Practitioner Inquiry and the Struggle over the Preferential Right of Interpretation in the South. Educational Action Research. Volume 11, Number 3. 467-477.
Zeichner, Kenneth & Dahlström, Lars Eds. (1999) Democratic Teacher Education Reform in Africa. The case of Namibia. Westview Press.
130.239.158.83 (talk) 12:23, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Comment: The tone is not really encyclopedic. It reads more like a press release or conference handout than anything else, and the context is lacking. Yngvarr (c) 12:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Declined. Your article does not appear to be written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article. Entries should be written from a neutral point of view, and should refer to a range of published material. If you still feel that this subject is appropriate for Wikipedia, please rewrite your proposed article in the form of an encyclopedia entry, and make sure to avoid certain terms meant to show off the subject. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:21, 3 March 2008 (UTC)