Usher, Adam (2017) Creating teachers as scholars: Meeting the challenges of 21C globalized education. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

As the 21C globalized world becomes increasingly complex in terms of its interconnections and the need to engage in multiple contexts simultaneously, there is a welcome resurgence of interest in the notion of citizenship and in intercultural education. The basis of this research was to address the apparent disjuncture between current professional learning practice for educators and the form of practice that is necessary to produce purposeful and visible ‘glocal’ 21C learning in classrooms. It explored the nature and implications of the 21C global education paradigm for both teachers and schools and constructed a networked improvement community of practice across six high schools in Denmark. The research design was intended as potentially representing a model 21C professional learning theory-in-practice. It adopted a phenomenological approach to examine the perceptions of the teachers who were experiencing the phenomenon. It found that participating teachers saw the 21C education paradigm almost exclusively in the cognitive domain. They saw citizenship in terms of skills and knowledge rather than being in the affective domain and being characterized as a set of dispositions. As most teachers had adopted a script-based teaching identity rather than a learning design identity, their practice was based in knowledge transmission practices rather than dialogic ones. The result was that at the beginning of the research, the opportunities for professional learning based conversations in the schools were minimal. To address this and to seek a sustainable theory in practice, the research employed the Effective lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI) learning dimensions as a language to bridge the divide between the teaching and citizenship paradigms. It presents qualitative data that illuminates the effect that the project had in helping teachers to understand their classrooms as living communities in which they could simultaneously teach and model citizenship and engage in professional dialogue across the network to better develop their practice. Importantly, it highlights the challenge of global citizenship education; it recommends a theory in practice for schools to adopt in order to create in classrooms and in staffrooms, communities that model - not preach - fluid forms of enquiry, collaboration, and sense making of the type that is desired and required of citizens on a global community level.

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