Exploring Teachers’ Perceptions of ‘Enquiry’ and ‘Evidence’ within Policy and Practice

The successful candidate will take up a post as a PhD student in the School of Education, University of Aberdeen. The candidate will be supervised by Dr. Kirsten Darling-McQuistan and Dr. Archie Graham, and will be building on an existing research, which has indicated the need to explore relationships between theory, policy and practice and engage with teachers’ perspectives in the process of doing so (Biesta, 2007). The significance of engaging with teachers’ perspectives is to establish ways in which to bring research and practice into closer alignment. This will be achieved by reporting on and disseminating the teachers’ perspectives and experiences, with a view to empowering them as part of the process by situating their voices within current policy/research debates.

This project aims to explore the relationship between theory, practice and research within the context of the terms ‘Practitioner enquiry’ and ‘evidenced-based practice’, which have become key terms within educational policy (CERI, 2007; Donaldson, 2011). These terms are often employed, however without any theoretical or practical explanation: contributing to the misalignment of research, policy and practice.

Achieving the overarching project aims will entail a thorough and critical analysis of policy documents in order to establish when/how the terms ‘practitioner enquiry’ and ‘evidence-based practice’ began to emerge in policy, including analysis of the broader contexts and agendas framing their intended purpose within education. Such a process will entail drawing on insights from, for example, Critical Theory in order deconstruct the political systems in which educational policy is embedded.

This analysis will be coupled with a deep exploration of existing research and theoretical insights, which will enable further critique of these terms in order to identify, both the limitations and possibilities of ‘enquiry and evidenced-based’ approaches, in relation to supporting an expansive and complex view of education, which rejects ‘ends-focussed’, behaviourist approaches. This will entail developing a theoretical framework, which might embrace insights from Complexity Theory and Socio-cultural Theory, for example.

The successful candidate would be responsible for developing an appropriate methodology for conducting this research, which will entail engaging with teachers’ perspectives. It is envisaged that the methods used would be qualitative and may involve carrying out in-depth interviews with teachers. Within this particular research project there is also scope for exploring more creative data collection methods, which would provide wider and more nuanced avenues through which to express their experiences of ‘practitioner enquiry’ and ‘evidenced-based approaches’.

Biesta, G., (2007). Why ‘what works’ won’t work: evidence-based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research. Educational Theory, 57 (1), pp.1-22.

Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) (2007). Evidence in Education: Linking Research and Policy. OECD: Paris

Donaldson, G., (2011). Teaching Scotland’s future: Report of a review of teacher education
in Scotland. Edinburgh, Scotland: Scottish Government.