Abstract: Principles of Practice: how to make University-School partnership work
Principles of Practice: A narrative account of how to make University-School partnership work
In this paper we will explore the process of developing Principles of Practice, a year-long online professional learning programme launching in 2020 that focuses on developing critical research literacy for international school teachers. A collaboration between the English Schools Foundation, Hong Kong, and Oxford Brookes University, UK, Principles of Practice is designed to offer teachers a space for depth-engagement with research in a way that encourages radical thinking about the nature of schooling. It obliges teachers to embrace lack of consensus as a profoundly positive aspect of professional practice, and it demands that teachers rethink schooling. Challenge and resistance are important parts of this process, and there is perhaps no better time to be asking uncomfortable questions about the future of international schooling. However, asking such questions is no easy task, which leads to a further pragmatic question: how does the Principles of Practice approach work in the everyday reality of institutional life?
To answer this question, our paper recounts the journey of developing this programme from two parallel perspectives. A representative of ESF will recount the development of the programme from within an organisation of international schools, while the representative of Oxford Brookes will tell the story of developing the programme from within academia. The intersections of these narratives will reveal what has made the programme work thus far, what challenges emerge along the way, and what is the radical promise of this particular example of school-university partnership for professional learning.
Inception
PA: to ask Jacques what intentions are
J: explain from human capital/HR perspective
PA: to describe theoretical underpinning and how this fits with Jacques’ intention
Practical Theorising in the process of programme design: adaptive expertise and championing lack of consensus. Discuss challenge of engaging with theory and practice: developing critical habitual dispositions in anticipation of experience of knowledge
Communities of practice
Cultural complexity
Discussion: Finding the same page
What else has helped? Peripheral participation (eg events we have shared beyond the course design that in turn feed into its development)
Critical challenge and third parties (eg working with ideas and suggestions from other academics and members of the institution)
The way ahead