What does effective partnership between the Univer-sity and other institutions look like?
Partnership is central to the way the Centre works. There is a belief that useful knowledge can not be generated away from the practice community and therefore ways of working together are essential. Centre members are generating understandings of what this partnership needs to look like and how it is best sustained.
How can professional enquiry approaches be developed?
Professional enquiry through action research is a reflective approach that privileges evidence-based practice knowledge. It has been developed and used across projects in the Centre and is also evident in postgraduate modules. Centre members are keen to develop this approach, particularly across contexts, and disseminate outcomes from collaborations with practitioners across policy, practice and academic audiences.
What role does collaboration have to play in developing education research agendas?
Centre members believe that educational research is dependent upon genuine collaboration with practising teachers. There is a moral element to education research: the responsibility to provide the teach-ing and learning experiences which have the greatest warrant and to move away from sterile arguments and artificial barriers placed by some writers between research done by practitioners and research done by the academy.
It has been our aim, as researchers, to submit our theories, our tools and our understanding to the critical community of the Learning to Learn project and to welcome the productive dissonance of the teachers’ views. This creation of a space for calibration, critique and learning at the centre of the project has been its key distinguishing feature. (Wall et al. 2005)
To download a poster detailing our current theme, please click here.