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Doubt, Skepticism, and Controversy in Professional Development Scholarship: Advancing a Critical Research Agenda

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the epistemic development of the professional development research field. Through comparison with the closely related field of educational leadership research, it is argued that the professional development research field is ripe for epistemic development – indeed, that its epistemic worthiness is dependent upon it. While valuable contributions to critical scholarship have been made by individual researchers of professional development, the field lacks a coherent and coordinated critical discourse that parallels critical educational leadership research; moreover, mainstream assumptions that remain unchallenged impoverish professional development research. Three key, contentious, issues are highlighted as needing to be placed at the top of a critical research agenda for professional development: the search for causality; conceptualization; and the professional development process. Calling for greater conceptual clarity and definitional precision that should go hand-in-hand with a sharper focus on what the professional development process involves, the chapter problematizes not only the search for the “holy grail” of, and claims of a “consensus” about, what makes professional development effective, but also the narrow conceptualization of professional development that these imply. There is a need, it is argued, for more rigorous research and scholarship that confront what have been called “inconvenient truths” about professional development. The chapter concludes with a call for critical researchers of professional development to harness their combined efforts toward advancing a recognizable critical discourse that, by challenging weakly supported mainstream beliefs and assumptions, will unsettle the field’s “epistemic state” and advance its epistemic development.

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  1. Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Linda Evans

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    Nicole Mockler

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Evans, L. (2022). Doubt, Skepticism, and Controversy in Professional Development Scholarship: Advancing a Critical Research Agenda. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Teacher Education Research . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59533-3_18-2

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    Doubt, Skepticism, and Controversy in Professional Development Scholarship: Advancing a Critical Research Agenda
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    30 September 2022

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59533-3_18-2

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    Doubt, Skepticism, and Controversy in Professional Development Scholarship: Advancing a Critical Research Agenda
    Published:
    23 July 2022

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59533-3_18-1

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