Discovering Teachers’ Personal Beliefs in Poland: Research Intervention Using Activity Theory

Abstract

Teachers’ beliefs and personal theories have held a significant place in pedeutological discourse for a long time, and they are among the “pulsating” categories within the sphere of the so-called new professionalism. Insight into teachers’ beliefs and personal theories is not only an element of constructing teacher professionalism; these theories constitute resources which may open a new direction of developmental change in the school’s culture, or, by contrast, they may be a source of resistance, or limitation, and form barriers to development. In the education of teachers, we may observe disintegration of cognition, a dissonance between theoretical and practical knowledge.

The aim of the present paper is to show teachers’ personal theories and beliefs as important, yet frequently unused, resources in teacher education.

Methodology. The theoretical and methodological framework of the considerations in this article is formed by the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). The intervention-research methodology of Y. Engeström was used to analyze the processes of changing the teachers’ thinking which occurred during the sessions in the Laboratory of Educational Change.

The results are as follows: Discovering the teachers’ convictions and the basis for the success of bottom-up changes in the school’s culture, leading to an improvement in the quality of education. As confirmation of this thesis, examples (case studies), the article provides examples of bottom-up changes in education, achieved with active participation of teachers and the activity of the Laboratory of Educational Change, where teachers experience potentially new ways of working and experiment with them.

Conclusions. In order for teachers to “re-think” the school anew, undertake the challenge of opening the school’s culture to a new quality, and engage in the process of change, it is necessary to prepare the “grounds” for them to work with their personal beliefs and theories. This article presents the experience gained from the cooperation of teachers, aimed at creating a critical space for dialogue on the issue of learning processes, in order to foster understanding of complex situations faced by teachers in their day-to-day reality. What proved essential was providing the teachers with conceptual tools enabling them to participate in dialogue contributing to their re-interpretation and modification of their own practice.

The examples of projects described here showed that teachers, by creating a community of learning individuals, and by analyzing and participating in similar practices, worked out habitual agreement, team-based styles of thinking and acting, and developed a sense of agency. These days, examination of one’s daily educational reality, joint involvement and construction of knowledge, and confrontation of one’s own methods of work with those of others constitute a teacher’s “professional necessity”, a key to improving the quality of the school’s work, “a professional’s way of being”, “a mind’s habit”.