Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation

Citation

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation. Teachers College Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is the sequel to the authors' Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge (1993) and runs to about 400 pages in three parts, each in a different genre: five essays by the authors, eight chapters by practitioners, and a readers' theatre script. The publisher's description states the thesis: inquiry should be understood as a stance, a challenge to the current arrangements and outcomes of schools, and practitioner researchers everywhere should ally their work with larger movements for social change and social justice.

Part I: Theorizing and Contextualizing Practitioner Research

The first part is a set of five essays by Cochran-Smith and Lytle that conceptualise inquiry as a stance and as a transformative theory of action that repositions the collective intellectual capacity of practitioners. As reviewers describe it, the authors define practitioner research broadly, to include teachers, administrators, university faculty, community educators and parents. They identify five themes of the past decade: equity, engagement and agency; new conceptual frameworks; the growth and reinvention of inquiry communities; the use of practitioner research to shape school reform and policy; and efforts to change the relationship of research and practice in universities. They distinguish five versions of teacher research, criticise the image of teachers and teacher knowledge in the No Child Left Behind era, discuss "working the dialectic" between inquiry and practice in research universities, and end with a call to the next generation.

Part II: Practitioners on Teaching, Learning, and School Leadership

The second part has eight chapters, commissioned by the authors and written by eight differently positioned practitioners in K-12 schools or teacher education. Reviewers mention, among others: Gary McPhail on the "bad boy" and the writing curriculum, and on why boys respond differently to writing tasks; Gillian Maimon on keeping a journal of close description of a child in her classroom; Kelly A. Harper on what affluent white children learned from books chosen to raise questions of race and injustice; Delvin Dinkins on his own position as an African American school administrator discussing race, class and achievement; Rob Simon on transparency in work with pre-service teachers; Swati Mehta on cultural hybridity; Diane Waff on her development as an activist educator through inquiry groups; and Gerald Campano on teacher research as a collective struggle for humanization.

Part III: Practitioners' Voices

The last part is a readers' theatre script that brings together the voices of twenty practitioners, in K-12 schools and universities, in a performance format. According to a reviewer, it presents related and contrasting perspectives and shows the personal, professional and political decisions practitioners face, and an earlier version was performed in 1993 around the publication of Inside/Outside.

Key Concepts

Part I: Theory

• Inquiry as stance: a worldview and critical habit of mind that carries across a career, in contrast to inquiry as a bounded classroom project or a method of steps for solving problems. In the authors' own later summary it rests on three foundational ideas: a theory of action grounded in the problems of practice, a counter-hegemonic repositioning of practitioners' collective intellectual capacity, and the claim that the knowledge needed to transform teaching resides in practitioners' own questions and strategies.
• Knowledge: the first of four dimensions; it rejects the split into formal knowledge produced by outside researchers and practical knowledge held by practitioners, and treats local knowledge generated by practitioner researchers as key to educational transformation.
• Practice: the second dimension; practice is understood as always contextual, theoretical and interpretive, not merely practical.
• Communities: the third dimension; groups of practitioners are the main way inquiry as stance is carried out, and they work to question their own assumptions about teaching, learning and schooling.
• Democratic purposes and social justice: the fourth dimension; inquiry works within and against the system, questioning the purposes of existing education.

Parts II and III: Practice

• Positionality: the practitioner's own place in the questions studied, a recurring concern of the practitioner chapters.
• Close description: the habit of observing and describing classroom life to extend what a teacher can perceive, as in Maimon's chapter.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear concept with theoretical backing. The authors' own account sets out three foundational ideas and four dimensions of inquiry as stance, which gives readers a structured way to think about practitioner research beyond a list of methods.
• Practitioner voices alongside theory. Part II shows the concept at work in classrooms and schools, and reviewers found the chapters distinct in content and tone yet all instructive. Elizabeth Radin Simmons, a school coach reviewing the book for the National Writing Project, began sceptical of a book by two professors, then handed one practitioner chapter straight to the teachers she works with and praised the practitioner pieces highly.
• Social-justice orientation. The book connects teachers' research with questions of equity, accountability and educational policy, which Jen Scott Curwood's review in Networks calls a valuable resource for pre-service teachers.
• Variety of form. The three genres give readers different ways in: argument, narrative and performance.

Limitations

• Contributors close to the university. Simmons notes that almost all of the practitioner authors have PhDs or teach at colleges and universities, which she first took to limit the book's relevance to teachers without such access.
• Written for the American context in a particular era. Much of the discussion of policy takes the No Child Left Behind period as its background.
• Not a how-to guide. The book argues for a stance and illustrates it; readers looking for step-by-step procedures for classroom research will need a method text alongside it.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the teacher development course, this is the scholarly account of teacher research. Brookfield's Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher and Sellars's Reflective Practice for Teachers are accessible guides to reflection, and Palmer's The Courage to Teach concerns the teacher's inner life. They are the better starting points. Schön's The Reflective Practitioner is the classic study of professionals' thinking in action, which is a closer relative of Cochran-Smith and Lytle's argument, and Hattie's Visible Learning for Teachers asks teachers to evaluate the impact of their practice with evidence.

Cochran-Smith and Lytle go a step further than reflection: they claim that practitioners generate knowledge and that this has political consequences. Read them after Schön and Brookfield, and set them against Hattie to compare two ideas of how teachers should use evidence.

How to Use This Book

The book suits graduate students, teacher educators, teacher-researchers and school leaders interested in practitioner inquiry. No special prerequisites are stated, but it helps to have taught or worked in a school and to have read something on reflective practice.

A practical plan: read Part I first, since it states the argument and the history that the rest depends on. Then read the Part II chapters whose settings are closest to your own, rather than taking them in order. Finish with Part III, which works well when read aloud by a group, and which a seminar can use to start a discussion. If you plan to carry out inquiry yourself, use the book for its stance and pair it with a method text for the techniques of data collection and analysis.