Valuing student voice in practice-based education: Transforming the professional practice of teachers

Abstract

Practice-based education (PBE) is a pedagogy of professional learning which privileges the importance of learning through reflection in practice, contextualised and situated within professional craft knowledge, tacit legitimation claims and theoretically informed practice. It is "an approach to education that is grounded in the preparation of graduates for occupational practice" (Higgs, 2011), a workbased and workplace training. This locates PBE within wider debates around the role of reflective practice and professional craft knowledge. As such, PBE and related pedagogies often find expression within teacher education and the education of healthcare professionals. There is much congruency of these professional learning practices and contexts - both being characterised by boundary-crossing practices between the field of practice and the academy. PBE is deliberately characterised as professional education rather than the perhaps more mere utilitarian and instrumental training (Billett, 2010; Higgs, 2011). This distinction makes troublesome some recent UK education policy which seeks to privilege a discourse of "teacher training" as a policy technology aimed at reducing the value, priority and role of theoretical knowledge and the university. It is into this context - PBE valuing practice, reflective learning, workplace experience and clear links between the boundaries of the university and the boundaries of the occupational practice - that we position a need to capture and utilise Student Voice. We assert that Student Voice is a vital lens (Brookfield, 1995) through which professionals in training can understand their practice. As a pedagogic practice, we can understand PBE as comprising normative and relational elements and, as such, teacher learning fits well within a PBE paradigm. We assert that teachers' professional learning is complex and sophisticated. In discussing teachers' professional practice-based learning, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) wrote of knowledge for practice, knowledge in practice and knowledge of practice. PBE locates learning in all three of these domains and their interrelations. In this conceptualisation of the reflective practitioner (Schön, 1983), PBE embraces a "form of social practice which shapes the educational development of individuals, framed around a perspective, model or theory of education that encompasses interactive philosophical, political, moral, technical and practical dimensions" (Higgs, 2011, p. 9). It is a way of making sense of action; a way of learning from and in practice (Schön, 1983). Thus, professional practice prefigures and frames individual tacit knowledge and individual action and learning. Our argument here is that authentic Student Voice is a powerful pedagogic and relational medium through which we can provide educators, as professional practice-based learners, with a sound basis for reflective practice and intimacy with others. In presenting the two case studies here, we suggest that the incorporation of the Student Voice "lens" into PBE pedagogy helps to construct the meaning of practice and of professional reflexive identity.