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Professional learning in and for communities: seeking alternatives discourses

Collaborative professional learning has grown enormously in popularity over the past decade or so, with common acceptance of the establishment of groups called, variously, teacher learning communities, communities of learning, professional learning communities and so forth. Their establishment is validated by research such as Cordingley et al.’s (2005) systematic literature review which concluded that professional learning is more likely to be effective if it is both collaborative and sustained over time. While there is much to be said in terms of the potential positive outcomes of collaborative professional learning, there are also potential drawbacks such as the imposition of externally-driven agendas and the capacity for dominant group members to exercise undue influence on the group’s activities and modes of operation. It is also perhaps no coincidence that the rise of in-house collaborative professional learning has occurred at a time of economic downturn, providing a cheaper way of ‘providing’ professional learning opportunities for educators and other professionals. However, the rise in popularity of collaborative professional learning opportunities conflicts with the concomitant rise of individual accountability mechanisms in the learning professions, often characterised by sets of professional standards and associated tools such as reaccreditation. These policy tools can easily serve to discourage collaboration and can lead to the pathologisation of the teacher (Kennedy 2016). While this tension between collaborative and individualised efforts seems to characterise modern times, Sanford et al. (2012) provide another lens through which this conflict might be understood. Writing about their attempts to ‘decolonize’ teacher education in Canada, they reflect and report on an initial teacher education programme founded on Indigenous principles which actively work against the individualistic, competitive and neoliberal discourse that frames teacher learning and development across much of the developed world. They describe this situation as characterised by ‘testing, examinations, and projects evaluated by predetermined standards, maintaining students’ belief in the ideology of competing for the top marks and working as individuals striving for personal success’ (2012, p. 19). This approach stands in direct contradiction to Indigenous pedagogical principles such as inclusivity, community-building and the recognition and celebration of individual uniqueness. Sanford and colleagues set about building courses based on these principles, in the process eschewing principles of competition, individualism and uniformity, and seeking to develop ‘community wisdom’. The article is an inspiring, challenging read, forcing us to consider an alternative to the Euro-American-centric approach so dominant in much of the world. In the context of Professional Development in Education, it forces one to think about how these principles might impact on continuing professional learning – imagine a world where the