‘Tacit pedagogy’ in practice-based learning and innovation in one FE college workplace

This is the guide text and the slides for the paper I gave at the 13^th Journal of Vocational Education and Training (JVET) Conference Oxford, June 2019.

In the event my laptop didn't work so I had to improvise the talk, but this gives a good idea of what I meant to say!

Full title:   
The role of ‘tacit pedagogy’ in practice-based learning and innovation in one FE college workplace: the importance of informal interactions within and beyond specialist teaching teams.

Hello, in this talk I’ll be looking at an FE college not so much from the perspective of the content of its work, but as a workplace, as an environment for work, learning and potential innovation.  It will primarily reference literature on practice and on workplace learning.  My talk is based on a doctoral thesis study which compares the situation of practitioner teams in two workplaces in different occupational sectors, one of which, a General Further Education college in England, I focus on in this talk.  I will be exploring some of the ways learning and innovation can emerge through practice, and focussing mostly on informal rather than formal aspects of work, though it is also concerned with the interaction of these dimensions.  

A bit about me: I’ve worked for much of my career in adult and further education, for a long time as an adult literacy and numeracy teacher.  About 20 years ago I started getting involved with workplace learning when my college won a contract to design and deliver basic skills to employees of London Underground.  10 years ago I started teaching part-time on the post-compulsory sector teacher education programme at the Institute of Education, and now I teach and research there full-time.  I have been arguing for ome time that research in teacher education ought to be paying much more attention to the generic literature on workplace learning, of which there is a great deal that is relevant to the training and development of teachers, most of which in practice takes place in the workplace.  

I completed my doctorate at the Institute of Education earlier this year, and this talk is based on my doctoral thesis.

I start by setting the theoretical context for my study, looking at changes in our generic understanding of practice, learning and innovation.  I’ll then briefly outline the methodological approach used for the study and its main research questions, and describe the specific college context where data was collected.  The main part of the talk will be a presentation of some of the findings of the study, my interpretation of those findings, and I finish with some tentative implications, both theoretical and practical.  The presentation concludes with a list of relevant references. 

As in so many other areas of social science, in relation to our understanding of practice, learning and innovation, we need to challenge the long dominance of positivist epistemological assumptions about knowledge and its relationship with the world.  These assumptions still shape much of our thinking about work, learning and innovation, and are seen as ‘common sense’ in most economic and policy development communities.  Jensen and his colleagues in their discussion of workplace learning and innovation interestingly distinguish between modes of knowledge they categorise as ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’ (STI) and ‘Doing, Utilising and Interacting’ (DUI), and argue that DUI knowledge is badly under-researched, probably because it is more difficult to study – that is, to observe, record and measure objectively.

More recent researchers have argued that informal dimensions of knowledge, learning and practice are essential for a fuller phenomenological understanding of both workplace learning and innovation: in short, of the processes through which workplaces evolve and practitioners develop their expertise.

Some examples of these more recent practice-based accounts are given on the slide above, and these have informed my study and my approach to analyzing its findings.

Another important theoretical framework which informed my study was the ‘Productive Systems’ framework of Felstead et al (2009).  ‘Productive systems comprise the totality of social relationships entailed in processes of commodity production….it traces the overall configuration of social relationships within economic systems, stretching from individuals and small work groups through to global financial and political systems’ (Felstead et al 2009, p18).  In particular, the productive systems framework affords researchers a way of understanding how power works within and through the interconnected networks and hierarchies of which individual workplaces are parts.  In relation to the college in my study, it provides a powerful explanation for the limitations of its scope to act expansively and innovatively, due to financial constraints and externally-set targets and quality assurance criteria.

The college which was one of the focusses of my study is a medium-sized general further education college distinguished in two ways: it is rated outstanding by the government’s education inspection agency, and it has had a very stable senior management: only 5 principles in over fifty years.  Three groups of teachers were recruited for the study: specialists in Hair and Beauty, Motor Mechanics and Humanities.

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This slide outlines the methodological approach adopted for the study. 

 

The data was analysed thematically, using codes which were based on the literature of workplace learning and innovation but also codes that emerged from the data. A significance coefficient for each code was calculated from the frequency of occurrence and spread of occurrences across all the interview transcripts, and these coefficients were ranked so that the most significant were clearly identified as the basis of noteworthy findings.

 

The slide above shows the Research questions adopted for my study.

I hope there are enough copies of the sheet with some representative quotations from the interview and focus group data, to give a flavour of this particular context for practice and a sense of the practitioners who took part.

Some findings from the WBC data can be seen on this slide. The overall picture won’t be surprising to colleagues in this room, but note that the Productive Systems framework provides a convincing generic explanation for what was found: for WBC, there is little scope for variation or innovation within the horizontal ‘stages of production’. At the same time, the college management’s scope for innovation is highly circumscribed by the vertical ‘structures of production’, which act like a straitjacket: rising targets accompanied by increasingly reduced funding, and compliance-driven external inspection and quality control.  There was evidence that the college management wanted to organize the workplace to allow staff to work as autonomous professionals as far as possible, but came up continually against external constraints seemingly designed to prevent this.  The practitioners in the study repeatedly expressed their respect for their senior managers as highly competent, based on their record over a long period during which the college was recognized nationally as successful, and critically was not identified as being at risk financially, unlike many, if not most, other similar FE colleges In England. 

What is significant for this presentation is the difference found between the college and the other organisation in the study, which at present at least is far less restricted than WBC, both financially and in terms of its objectives – its ‘structures of production’ are looser and far less constraining, which allows it to give more autonomy, professional license, and time to its teams of expert practitioners, and to be far less dependent on formal procedures: all of which seem to support their practitioners to produce better work. 

 

The slide above presents three modes of practice observed in both organisations, though to different degrees, that the data suggests are important for both learning and innovation.     

'Writing up' denotes any form of representation: from the very informal - handwritten notes, jottings, drawings, lists, charts, scribbled equations, etc, to the highly formal: academic papers or reports for publication.  Peer review denotes any form of shared evaluation, however informal, of these representations.  It might include momentary conversations, but also formal written feedback or review documents, and every kind of feedback conversation in between.  Crossing boundaries refers to any incidence of ‘going beyond’ for this peer review feedback: the team, specialization boundaries, departmental or organizational boundaries.    The key point is that all these modes of practice ideally need to be present, or at least possible, from the completely informal, transient and casual, to the highly explicit and formalized.

The data suggests that the differences of degree observed between the two organisations in relation to these modes of practice is due primarily to the different ‘structures of production’ experienced by the two organisations.  The teams in WBC had little time for reflection, or informal thinking and talking about their work, let alone reviewing it or looking outside their organisational boundaries for ideas, except, for example, on the occasions when they decided collectively to come in and work informally on a Saturday (cf Orr’s photo-copier technicians having breakfast together outside of work time.)

The pressured political and financial environment of the college has the effect of reducing the scope of the organization as a whole to provide the cultural and material conditions that would tend to support and enable these practices, but it is striking how the teacher teams try to find ways to get around these restrictions in order to practice in these ways, even if it means working in their own time, or, as in one case, paying for their own training so that they could design a new programme of study in camouflage make-up.

The importance of these three modes of practice for innovation is demonstrated much more clearly and directly in the other organization, but is still evident in WBC, which, the data suggests, would in different circumstances, be enabled to be more expansive and innovative.  The differences observed in the two organisations are evidence that change and innovation in response to shifts in the external environment, whether these changes are physical, ecological, technological, social or political, is made materially more difficult for organisations and for practitioners by centralized, highly-specified, standardised and compliance-based systems of funding and accountability – this appears to be a particular theme of this conference….

My thesis offers two theoretical concepts which I suggest help us to a more nuanced understanding of practice-based learning and innovation, which I see as evidenced by this study, and as a development in particular of Guile’s theory of ‘recontextualisation’, Gherardi’s view of innovation as arising from the ‘constant refinement of practice’ and Fuller et al’s idea of a ‘cause’ as a motivating factor for development and change in practice.

The first of these is ‘tacit pedagogy’.  This is proposed as a generic term for key aspects of practice ignored by positivist perspectives, due to their resistance to clear identification and codification, to being abstracted from their context, and to being ‘pinned down’ in a static model of practice.  These are essential elements of a dynamic and developmental account of practice in any domain or context, in which reflection, review and learning, mostly informal, is an integral feature and in which innovation is always a potential outcome.

The tacit pedagogy of a particular context clearly includes Jensen et al’s informal mode of knowledge and innovation (2007), but it also includes explicit STI knowledge too, because even formal, codified aspects of the context act tacitly, and have tacit effects on practitioners.  Guile’s account of ‘recontextualisation’, for example, highlights the regular team-working process in which one practitioner might propose a course of action in relation to a particular task or problem. This stage of the process corresponds to the ‘writing-up’ mode of practice referred to earlier – it is the offering of a representation of practice, in words or in some other appropriate form.  She may provide reasons for this proposal, and these reasons are then evaluated by her colleagues, who assess its reasonableness on the basis of their own understanding and expertise.  They may agree with it, or make amendments, or reject it and make an alternative proposal. This corresponds to the ‘peer review’ mode of practice identified earlier.  All participants in these negotiations are making use of knowledge which is tacit, embodied and affective, in addition to explicit knowledge, in coming to judgements on initial proposals and on giving reasons for possible amendments or alternatives to it. Soliciting critical review and evaluation from beyond immediate team members would constitute the ‘crossing boundaries’ mode of practice – this is valuable in terms of optimizing the resources of knowledge and experience brought to bear on the problem, but also to guard against teams getting stuck in a rut and reinforcing bad habits in simply repeating practice rather than continually reviewing and renewing it.

‘Tacit pedagogy’ therefore delineates a possibility space that is always present within practice: its outcomes are never wholly determined, and it is this indeterminacy which allows us to account for unplanned outcomes, both positive (innovation) and negative (accidents).

It is important to bear in mind that there is no implication here that that changes in practice and practitioner learning produced through these complex, fluid and uncertain processes are necessarily changes for the better.  Whether innovations and/or learning are beneficial or not and whether they are seen as practically feasible and sustainable, are political and ecological questions: change is always provisional, and further change or improvement is always possible.

I propose a second concept I propose is ‘entanglement’.  This idea is elaborated in detail by Barad (2007), who argues from the perspective of science that ‘the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties, but rather, phenomena.’    What is argued here is that phenomena are always distorted and fragmented by ‘rational’ thought, because though we are able to distinguish oppositions and paired distinctions, and though these help us, not just to engage with experience, but to share, shape and change it, experience is never reflected truly by these distinctions and mental bifurcations. Rather, the discrete elements of experience we perceive rationally are in reality 'entangled'. 

The argument, then, is that these dualities are not phenomenologically distinct; and that practitioners individually and collectively manage the ‘entanglement’ of these categories in practice, making different judgements to inform their actions at different times.  

I’m not suggesting that there is no value in making use of these intellectual distinctions: rather it is a reminder that such conceptual distinctions distort practice.

I hope to be able to test this conceptual framework using a similar methodology in different occupational domains and contexts for practice, as shown on the slide.

Particularly interesting to investigate would be practitioners working in what has been described as ‘digital crowdworking’ – situations where practitioners are self-employed contract workers, working remotely on collaborative digital projects, as this type of precarious employment becomes more common.

Thank you.  The last two slides are references.   I’d very much welcome questions, and can be contacted at j.derrick@ucl.ac.uk 

Twitter: @JayDerrickIOE