Exploratory Practice: rethinking practitioner research in language teaching

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2003 7: 113Language Teaching ResearchDick Allwrightteaching

Exploratory Practice: rethinking practitioner research in language

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Exploratory Practice: rethinkingpractitioner research in languageteachingDick Allwright Lancaster University

This paper is an introduction to the rest of this Special Issue ofLanguage Teaching Research devoted entirely to Exploratory Practice(EP), a form of practitioner research. It is also an introduction to EPitself, telling the story of the development of its practices and itsprinciples over the last ten or so years. Readers already familiar withEP may wish to go directly to the other seven papers in this issue, forillustrations of EP in practice, for research about EP, and for a morethorough review of the relevant research literature (see especially thepapers by Miller and by Perpignan).

The case for EP presented below is based on a perceived need forpractitioner research to be rethought: to be refocused on understanding,and ultimately on a concern for the quality of life in the languageclassroom, for both teachers and learners. The paper includes, in SectionVII, a brief introduction to the other papers in this volume.

I Introduction

Practitioner research is ‘here to stay’ for language teachingresearch, if only because of its practitioner development potential,but we need to rethink it. We seem to have got some veryimportant things very wrong.

� First, we have been seduced by the prevailing ‘wisdom’ thatparticipant research must essentially aim to improve theefficiency of classroom teaching, typically by isolating practicalproblems and solving them one by one.

� Secondly, we have largely accepted that such ‘improvement’ willbest be achieved by the practitioners involved (the teachers)

© Arnold 2003 10.1191/1362168803lr118oa

Address for correspondence: Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language,Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YT, UK; e-mail: [email protected]

Language Teaching Research 7,2 (2003); pp. 113–141



addressing their classroom problems as mainly technical ones, tobe solved by the development of ‘better’ teaching techniques.

� Thirdly, this implies that we accept that language teaching andlearning can therefore be reduced to a relatively unproblematic,asocial, matter of cause and effect relationships.

Many people in our field would probably strenuously reject such‘behaviourist’ notions, but many people in our field neverthelessdo seem generally to act as if this is what they actually believe.

Considerations of space preclude discussing further the abovepropositions. Here I can only present the rethinking that hasproduced Exploratory Practice (EP), starting with a new set ofthree proposals:

� First, we should, above our concern for instructional efficiency,prioritize the quality of life in the language classroom.

� Secondly, instead of trying to develop ever ‘improved’ teachingtechniques, we should try to develop our understandings of thequality of language classroom life.

� Thirdly, we should expect working helpfully for understandingto be a fundamentally social matter, not an asocial one. Simplecausal relationships are most unlikely to apply, but allpractitioners, learners as well as teachers, can expect to gain, to‘develop’, from this mutual process of working forunderstanding.

Working for understanding life in the language classroom willprovide a good foundation for helping teachers and learners maketheir time together both pleasant and productive. It will also, Ibelieve, prove to be a friend of intelligent and lasting pedagogicchange, since it will automatically provide a firm foundation forany ‘improvements’ that investigation suggests are worth trying.

The papers that complete this special issue of Language TeachingResearch illustrate the range of the EP-related work done invarious parts of the world (but mostly in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).This introductory paper presents the practical and intellectual storyof the development of EP itself, as a continuously cyclical processof global and local thought and action. This paper does not attemptto situate EP in the relevant bodies of literature. For that thereader should go to the papers here by Miller and Perpignan.

114 Exploratory Practice



II Thinking globally, acting locally: a cyclical view

By presenting my three propositions as universalistic claims Ideliberately started at the most ‘global’ level. But the Friends ofthe Earth movement says: ‘think globally, act locally’, because welive our daily lives ‘locally’. We should therefore consider therelationship between our global thinking and our local practice. Weneed global principles for general guidance, but then we must allwork out their implications for our local everyday practice. Thissuggests the following crude loop diagram:

Think globally, act locally, think locally.

That is:

� By thinking ‘globally’, away from particular contexts, we try toidentify the fundamental principles behind what we want ourlanguage teaching research to achieve – principles like bringingpeople together instead of pushing them apart, that it is worthworking for any time, anywhere, just because people are people.

� Then we can ‘act locally’, in the light of those principles, meaningthat we work out their precise implications in our immediatecontext (Miller’s doctoral work in Rio de Janeiro, in this issue,and 2001, is an excellent example here). Wherever we are on theglobe, then, we need to find a practical way of respecting ourglobal principles.

� We then find that the thinking we do to find principled ways ofacting in our local situation generates more thinking about ourprinciples. Whether or not it challenges our original principles,it will necessarily feed the development of our ‘global’ thinking,and may help us approach new contexts more confident that weknow what we want to achieve, and why.

So, local action intelligently conducted will contribute in turn toour thinking about our principles. But we humans can act and thinkat the same time. So we can expect a constant interplay betweenthe three, not a simple linear sequence. In particular, it is not atall obvious that we typically start with ‘thinking globally’. Weprobably get our most deeply held principles, not from a major

Dick Allwright 115

Think globally, act locally, think locally.



effort of context-free thinking (however hard we may try), butfrom the sum total of our experiences in particular contexts.

We may want to approach new situations armed with our globalprinciples, but it may be our actual ‘practices’, the things weconsider most context-bound, that we carry around most easilyfrom situation to situation, and not our ‘principles’. Our principlesmay be far more context-bound than we would like to think.

Perhaps the best we can hope for, in respect of the ‘baggage’ wetake with us from situation to situation, is that the cyclical inter-relationship between the global and the local, in our thought andour action, tells a productive story.

The reader will have to decide if that is the case here.

III Some of my personal baggage: the origins of ExploratoryPractice

What follows is my personal professional story, as a university-based ‘academic’, of the first decade or so in the development ofEP. It illustrates, I believe, the complex cyclical processes describedabove. First the ‘academic’ story, then the ‘professional’ one.

1 Exploratory Practice’s academic origins

The academic origins of EP were first formulated (an attempt tothink/act globally?) in the Epilogue to my 1991 book with KathiBailey. This Epilogue was my ‘apology’ for the foregoing sectionsof the book. I had unintentionally made classroom research sodemanding that teachers would not be able to do it unless theyhad extra time and extra support (as on an MA course?), both forlearning how to, and also for fitting it into their classroom lives.

This Epilogue proposed the following statements of globalprinciple, limited to the language classroom context.

a) First, and foremost, I proposed that research should aim at thedevelopment of situational understanding. This principle hasretained all its importance over the years, overtaken by concernfor the ‘quality of classroom life’ only relatively recently (see Section V below). This principle contrasted with the statedaim of Action Research, for example, to produce practicalsolutions to isolated problems (see Nunan, 1989: 13–14). What




‘understanding’ might mean is developed in Section III.4 below.

b) I also proposed that in relating to language teachers, ‘academic’researchers like myself could best act as research consultants,not, as was usual, research directors. So we would advise, ifasked, on the conduct of investigations, but not control theresearch agenda. I was acutely conscious that we ‘academic’researchers had frequently handled our relationships withlanguage teachers and learners so badly that we no longerdeserved their co-operation, but if we were helpful, thenclassroom teachers and learners might be helpful to us inreturn, in respect of our own research agendas.

c) I simultaneously proposed that learners be fully involved ascontributors to what was necessarily a social investigativeenterprise, with their own research agendas, and with their owninterest in understanding language classroom life. For examples,see especially Perpignan, 2001 and this issue, and Slimani-Rolls,this issue.

d) Finally, I advocated working with ‘puzzles’, rather than‘problems’. This was partly to avoid the negative connotationsof ‘problem’, given that many teachers around the world fearedthat admitting to classroom ‘problems’ might endanger theircontracts, and partly to involve areas of classroom life that werenot obviously ‘problematic’ (the unexpectedly great success ofan activity with just one particular group of learners, say), butwhich they might well want to try to understand better.

An embarrassment now, in 1991 I presented everything in termsof delivering greater efficiency. Later I realized that ‘greaterefficiency’ was a goal I neither wanted nor needed to work for (seeespecially Sections III.3 and V below).

2 Exploratory Practice’s practical origins

The practical origins of EP came just as the academic ones werepublished. I was invited to the Cultura Inglesa in Rio de Janeiro(a major not-for-profit language teaching establishment withhundreds of teachers teaching thousands of students) to teach apractical course on classroom research, and to act as classroomresearch consultant to the Cultura for two months (see Allwrightand Lenzuen, 1997; Lenzuen and Samson, 1998).

Dick Allwright 117



Teaching a practical course on classroom research appearedperfect for me at that point, since I had specialized in that area fortwenty years already (though as a university-based ‘academic’).During the course itself, however, I realized it was a thoroughlymisguided enterprise. From visiting teacher groups around Rio, Isoon realized that it was hopelessly impractical to expect suchhighly competent classroom teachers to become my sort ofclassroom researcher, given their lives as part-timers with perhapstwo other paid jobs to manage. My sort of classroom researchwould make impossible demands on their time both between andduring classes, and would bring a major new learning burden –mastering the research techniques involved.

Another source of disquiet came from what the teachers weretelling me at these group meetings. It was me who was getting verypractical ideas for classroom investigations, from the very teachersI was supposed to be helping:

� Some of the teachers were telling me (sometimes despite theirreluctance to believe they were doing anything worth talkingabout) that they were already trying to understand what washappening in their classrooms, but by using normal classroomactivities (group discussions, for example) as investigative tools,not the sophisticated classroom research tools I was currentlyteaching. And those who had devised questionnaires, forexample, told miserable tales of how hard and unrewarding it was.

� The teachers were also telling me that, sometimes,‘understanding’ was itself sufficient. For example, one teacherhad worried about her learners’ apparent inability to stay inEnglish throughout group work, but instead of following the‘academic’ example of colleagues (the questionnaire writers) shehad simply asked her learners to discuss the issue in their groups.Having used a pedagogic activity to investigate the workings ofthat activity, she had a very interesting story. Impressed with herstudents’ seriousness, she felt she had learned a lot fromattending to their group discussions, developing both intellectualand empathetic understanding of their problems. They tooseemed more understanding of each other, both cognitively andaffectively. Wonderfully, when they next got into groups to




discuss something, they tried much harder than before to keepto English. So, a practical ‘problem’ that needed to be solvedhad become an issue of understanding that virtually resolveditself.

� These teachers already knew how to bring their learners into thewhole enterprise of developing classroom understandings. Thelearners would also now be generators of understanding, not justconsumers of it (fourth-hand consumers of their teacher’s third-hand consumption of the ‘second-hand’ academic ‘knowledge’ inteacher-training textbooks?).

So my own professional experience in Rio was telling me howsome of the ideas in that Epilogue might actually work out inpractice.

3 Focusing on ‘quality of life’ rather than on ‘quality of work’

These Rio Cultura teachers, however, brought me something elsethat has been crucial to the development of Exploratory Practice,and to my own notion of ‘development’ and the contribution it canmake to a person. I slowly realized that I had uncritically acceptedthe received wisdom of the time (see, for example, Richards andNunan, 1990; Edge and Richards, 1993) that what teachers mostwanted and most needed was to become more effective languageteachers, more efficient ‘delivery systems’ of educational success,by discovering and adopting more efficient techniques. TheseCultura teachers offered a radically different perspective. I sawexcellent teachers under constant pressure to ‘enhance’ theirteaching with the latest pedagogical ideas, so battered by theceaseless demand for novelty that they were at severe risk of ‘burn-out’, of becoming ‘cosmically tired’ of the job they were doing so well.

Of course there are teachers who could teach ‘better’, probablyall of us could, but to me that was no longer necessarily the mostimportant matter to attend to, and even where it might be, it wasno longer obvious that ‘better’ teaching techniques would suffice.I remembered a visit to Lancaster, many years ago, by MichaelJoseph (then of Loyola College, Madras, now of the University ofthe North, in South Africa). After listening to us for about a weekhe said we were so obsessed with getting things right for learners

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that we had forgotten the prior need to get things right for teachers.Education, he said, must first and foremost be good for teachers’lives, if it is ever to be good for learners’ learning. This verychallenging proposition proved enormously productive, because ithelped us see that EP must, in the same way, be more about ‘life’than it is about ‘work’. In short, it must make a contribution to thequality of life in the language classroom, before it can hope tomake a contribution to the quality of teaching and learning (the‘work’) there. But I risk making an unfortunate distinction between‘work’ and ‘life’. Work is a part of life, or an attitude to it, not analternative.

Very recently I have encountered the same sort of thinking in avery different context – that of chief executives in the BritishNational Health Service. These chief executives are apparently, likemany teachers, so constantly bombarded with new ideas anddemands that they also risk burn-out. They talk about a sense ofloss – they feel they are no longer doing the job they believe theyshould be doing, but are constantly side-tracked onto otherpriorities – and many resign because they feel unable to providea satisfactory service. This is very familiar to me in my work withteachers. More striking than any similarity of symptoms, however,is the approach of the team the British Government brought in tohelp. Frank Blackler (1995), of the Lancaster University School ofManagement, and Andy Kennedy, of the King’s Fund, chose tofocus on ‘quality of life’ rather than ‘quality of work’, and onunderstanding, the first principle of the 1991 Epilogue, as themechanism whereby these Chief Executives might overcome theirsense of loss.

4 Understanding what we mean by ‘understanding’

So, EP is fundamentally about trying to understand the quality oflife in a given situation. ‘Quality of life’ is a tricky enough notionin itself, and we are still trying to work out our own understandingsof it, but in the meantime we need to say something about whatwe mean by ‘understanding’.

Our main problem seems to arise from the irony that we believethe profoundest understandings to be somehow beyond words. Inthis connection I recall a New York teacher with an extremely good




reputation for her teaching, who, asked in public to account for herclassroom success, could only say she knew she was successfulbecause her contract was always renewed. That was all she couldsay. And yet we have only words to try to express whateverunderstandings we do have. Even worse, attempting to put ourunderstandings in words might be doubly counterproductive. First,the words we find may serve to conceal, rather than successfullycommunicate, the true extent of our understandings. Worse, havingfound words, we may believe we have also found understanding,and so the effort to communicate might inhibit any further effortto understand.

But within the context of EP, and especially for classroomlanguage teaching, we need ways of using language, even a secondlanguage, to develop and express our developing understandings.This is clearly a very ambitious undertaking, not helped by thethought that teaching and learning is itself a complex social processthat is typically, if not necessarily, mediated by language.

What EP can offer, however, is suggestions for linguisticallyproductive ways of developing classroom understandings, byfinding classroom time for deliberate work for understanding, notinstead of other classroom activities but by exploiting normalclassroom activities for that purpose. But any resultant statementof understanding, like that of the teacher investigating group work(above), is necessarily only a partial (if not actually misleading)representation of the understanding itself, and of necessity asituated understanding, valid, if at all, only for its immediatesituation.

So, although EP work is unlikely by itself to produce generalizedunderstandings, the production of ‘situated understandings’,whether or not they are, or can be, fully articulated, would bedirectly valuable to the immediate participants and wouldrepresent a considerable achievement in itself. And, anyway, whatother people could learn from any statements of such situatedunderstandings might not come primarily from the findings.Learning about the investigative procedures involved may be moreuseful to others than any particular findings. This may be the majorvalue, for others, of ‘local’ thinking.

Such major issues in participant research cannot be adequatelyresolved within the scope of this paper, however.

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IV From global thinking to local action: Exploratory Practice, inpractice

My ‘global thinking’ for the 1991 Epilogue had needed thepractical experience of working with teachers. My ‘local action’ inRio, my classroom research course, was clearly out of touch withthe thinking I had tried to articulate for that Epilogue, and Ineeded to convert that local thinking, about my previous globalthinking, into practical local action.

Fortunately, my branch visits, as described above, were supplyingthe ideas I needed. Soon I was trying to turn them into a practicalalternative to the Action Research approach I was teaching. Butit seemed very wrong in principle to seek to replace one ‘recipe’for classroom research with another. Reducing the search forunderstanding life in the language classroom to a research ‘recipe’was repugnant and unnatural, whereas what I was hearing at thebranch meetings was attractive and natural. Worse, any list ofprocedures would surely be misinterpreted by people (especiallyteacher trainers?) with essentially ‘academic’ expectations of what‘proper’ research should be like. So I resisted reducing ExploratoryTeaching (as it was then) to a set of ‘practical procedures’.

But people wanted to know more about ‘Exploratory Teaching’,and they wanted us to train them as ‘exploratory teachers’.Eventually we surrendered, and the practices we had experimentedwith (Samson, forthcoming) were eventually summarized in anordered list that was superficially very similar at first sight to manyother lists for practitioner research, but with some importantlydistinctive features (especially the focus on ‘understanding’, andthe integration of investigation into the pedagogy). Rather than re-present the list here, however, with all its inherentoversimplification, I am drawing from a very recent unpublishedattempt (2002, in collaboration with Inés Miller) to set out someof the potential practical implications of working within the‘exploratory’ framework.

So, what does it mean to adopt an Exploratory Practice (as it isnow called) perspective on trying to understand classroom life (orsocial life in any setting perhaps)? First, some words about therelationship between practices and principles. The practicesdescribed below will, I hope, serve to illustrate the principles that




will be presented later, but they have actually served also, as thesource of our statements of principle. By reflecting on our practiceswe have been able to better understand and find words for theideas behind our actions. We have of course been thinking‘globally’, to extract from particular ‘local’ experiences whatevermight be of more global relevance and value, but the very closerelationship to a great and growing quantity of local action, and oflocal thinking has always been crucial to our ‘global’ thinking. Andall that thinking constantly feeds into yet more local action, andso on.

1 Making a preliminary distinction

When trying to represent highly complex matters in writing weseem inevitably to be drawn into making apparently firmdistinctions between things that in our daily lives we see asintimately inter-related. The biggest artificial distinction here isbetween two sets of processes: (1) Taking action for understanding,and (2) Working with emerging understandings. The first focuseson the processes themselves, as practices, whereas the second setfocuses more on their substantive content.

The order of presentation below suggests chronologicalsequence, if only because it may seem obvious that you can onlyreflect on emerging understandings once they have started toemerge, and so only after you have taken some action forunderstanding. But at any point in our lives we all have some levelof understanding of the life we are currently living, and somedegree of puzzlement. That puzzlement arises, not from our havingno understanding at all of something that is happening, but fromfeeling that our current understandings are not entirelysatisfactory.

2 Taking action for understanding

So ‘taking action’ is not necessarily the starting point, butsomething had to come first, and this set does readily offerconnections to the principles of EP (see Section V below).

Taking action for understanding can involve, in our experience,any or all of the following component processes (and no doubtothers we have yet to discover):

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1. bringing puzzling issues of classroom life to consciousness;

2. thinking ‘harder’ with other practitioners (peers and/or co-participants) inside and/or outside the classroom;

3. looking/listening – attending more intensively to what is goingon, as it is going on; and

4. planning for understanding by adopting familiar pedagogicprocedures to help develop participant understandings.

Sequence is implied by the ordering of the four, but only becausethey represent progressively more and more ‘work’ of some kind,for the participants. For example, simply ‘bringing puzzling issuesto consciousness’ might be the work of a few moments alone athome, but it may mean something much more complex (see Hanks,1998 and 1999; Lyra et al., and Kuschnir and Machado, this issue).Talking to others requires, on the other hand, finding time to talk(although finding lesson time to get learners to talk about whatpuzzles them might be relatively easy), and then looking andlistening also require some preparation (see Gunn, this issue), andfinally taking active steps to adapt familiar pedagogic proceduresis of course likely to be more time-consuming still (see Gunn,Perpignan, and Slimani-Rolls, this issue). So starting with the mostdemanding of processes is not recommended, but instead startingwherever people feel most comfortable. Personally I get so muchout of group discussion, for example, that it seems hardly worthbothering to try to think alone sometimes, so I might start with (2)rather than (1). Alternatively I might go for (3), especially if I amuncertain about which aspect of my classroom life is most likelyto reward further investigation. For the power of discussion, afterjust one classroom observation, see Naidu et al.’s 1992 report ofhow what initially looked like a problem of huge class size turnedinto a challenge of heterogeneity.

3 Working with emerging understandings

Working with emerging understandings also involves at least fourcomponent processes. As already noted these put more focus onthe content of the process, rather than on the nature of eachprocess. They take for granted the first two principles, alreadydiscussed, that it makes sense to focus on ‘life’ issues, and to seekprimarily to understand, rather than to change. And they all, from




our experience of working with them, have made us moreconfident of the value of our principles. These processes are asfollows:

1. reflexively expressing and appraising personal/collectiveinsights;

2. unpicking and refining common notions of ‘change’;3. discussing potential personal or collective moves; and4. sharing personal understanding processes as a way of

‘supporting’ others and of inviting others to join the EPcommunity of practice.

Again the processes are inevitably listed in a particular order, butnot necessarily in chronological order. The first mentioned –reflexively expressing and appraising personal/collective insights –could come directly after the last-mentioned ‘Taking Action’process – using familiar classroom pedagogic procedures asinvestigative tools, since we can hope there will now be data toreflect on and appraise. But, equally plausibly perhaps, we couldimagine the whole business of getting involved with EP starting inthis way, by people getting together to pool their current thinkingon classroom language learning and teaching.

This first process covers just one person acting alone, but ofcourse the work could involve many people, bringing them alltogether for mutual development.

The second process type here – unpicking and refining commonnotions of ‘change’ – could also offer a productive starting pointfor everything. EP questions the common notion of ‘change’, thatadvocates prioritizing a constant search for ever more effectiveteaching techniques, not because we have no wish to help languagelearners and their teachers, but because ‘improvement’ seems alltoo frequently reduced to a scramble for ‘better’ teachingtechniques, to the exclusion of any attempt to take the logicallyprior step of trying to understand the circumstances under whichthe new techniques will be expected to bring about improvements.

We also see, as noted earlier, that sometimes the work forunderstanding can itself deal adequately with the original‘problem’.

But some see us as quite simply against change, at odds with asocietal and professional perception that change is not only

Dick Allwright 125



inevitable but also universally desirable. Within the framework ofEP we therefore need to think hard about our relationship to‘change’, so this matter will return in Section V, in relation to oursecond principle.

The third type of process here – discussing potential personal orcollective moves – may need to wait until understandings have beenreached, but it could equally well be seen as a starting point –teachers talking together to find out ‘where they are’ in theirpersonal/professional development perhaps, and where they wantto ‘go’ next, all against a background of general interest in findingout if EP has anything to offer (see Bartu, this issue).

Alternatively, Action Research might look like the best possiblenext move, perhaps after EP has revealed a need for change (seeÖzdeniz, 1996, for the use of EP in the context of a demand forclassroom innovation). (For a developed argument differentiatingEP from Action Research see Allwright, 2001.)

The last type of process here – sharing personal understandingprocesses as a way of supporting others and of encouraging othersto join the EP ‘community of practice’ – could also be either a wayof getting started or of developing something already established.

Making presentations at in-house meetings would be oneexample, up to and including international conferences. We wouldadvocate offering posters and workshops rather than papers, aspapers seem to work better for ‘showing off’ than for recruitingcolleagues. Or, as in Rio, ‘sharing personal understandingprocesses’, could involve a programme of working with teachersover several years in extended workshop series (Miller andBannell, 1998). And such programmes might aim in the‘transformational’ direction of Critical Pedagogy, of course, asenvisaged in Bannell, 1997.

4 Back to the dynamic relationship between practice and principles

The above processes are of course subject to change withexperience. And this means change by anyone who cares to try them. There can be no ‘copyright’ on such things. ‘Change’could simply mean ‘technical’ development, of course, but it mightalso prompt a rethink of underlying principles, since using theprocesses is probably the most effective mechanism for the




development of the principles (Section V below).There is always the danger, of course, that someone may mistake

the practice for the principles and decide that they are ‘doing’ EPjust because they are making use of one or more of the componentprocesses, without regard for the principles. We cannot eliminatethat possibility, but we can try to be clear about our principles,which we must now present.

V Exploratory Practice as a set of principles

1 Exploratory Practice in one sentence

Local action and local thinking having produced a set of practicalinvestigative procedures potentially adaptable to any context, wehad simultaneously developed our thinking about our underlyingprinciples. After producing lots of minimally different lists of‘design criteria’ for participant classroom research (Allwright, 1993offers an early example), for a talk I gave in Brazil in 1997 I foundmyself formulating ‘defining characteristics’ for EP.

This was an attempt to develop the ideas in the 1991 Epilogue,and incorporate the ideas that had came from the experience (thelocal action, and local thinking) of trying to find a satisfactory wayof working with teachers in Brazil. The following ‘principleddescription’ of EP, in one convoluted sentence, emerged:

Exploratory Practice involves

1. practitioners (e.g.: preferably teachers and learners together)working to understand:

(a) what they want to understand, following their own agendas;

(b) not necessarily in order to bring about change;

(c) not primarily by changing;

(d) but by using normal pedagogic practices as investigativetools, so that working for understanding is part of theteaching and learning, not extra to it;

(e) in a way that does not lead to ‘burn-out’, but that isindefinitely sustainable;

2. in order to contribute to:

Dick Allwright 127



(f) teaching and learning themselves;

(g) professional development, both individual and collective .

2 Exploratory Practice as a set of general principles

From this we derived new statements of principle for EP, confidentthat they were solidly grounded in extensive local practice andthought. At first, if only to fit on an overhead, our principles camein very cryptic slogan form (‘Be relevant’). But that made themlook like ‘commandments’, rather than encouragements tothinking. So what follows adds a more discursive element.

Principle 1: put ‘quality of life’ first. In our previous statements ofprinciple we have typically put ‘understanding’ first, but all ourillustrations of language classroom puzzles seem, retrospectively atleast, to have been about the quality of life in a particular classroom,for a particular person or group of people. So, in practice, we havealways been centrally concerned with understanding ‘life’, but havenot often made that explicit. It now takes its rightful place as ourfirst principle.

We acknowledge, of course, that a concern for ‘measurableachievement’ is currently central for many people, and that generat-ing more ‘measurable achievement’ typically means finding quickpractical solutions to practical problems, taken in isolation as‘merely’ practical/technical matters. Even apparently straight-forward practical problems may be better treated in context, how-ever, as matters going beyond purely immediate concerns. In short,as matters involving ‘quality of life’.

Principle 2: work primarily to understand language classroom life.The proper aim of practitioner research, as we see it, is best put as‘working to understand life’, not trying to directly solve problems,but to step back from them and see them in the larger context ofthe life (and lives) they affect. This ‘stepping back’ can suggest thatEP is a force for conservatism, militating against change. We see it,however, as a fundamental change in itself, towards taking seriouslythe idea that only a serious effort to understand life in a particularsetting will enable you to decide if practical change is necessary,desirable, and/or possible. For example, in education a ‘problem’ of




poor performance could be regarded as a ‘technical’ issue, simplyrequiring more efficient teaching. But we suggest first convertingthe ‘practical problem’ into a ‘puzzle’ – something that demands tobe understood. This will naturally lead us to investigate the natureof ‘life’ in the classrooms getting poor results, in case the problemis more than a straightforward ‘technical’ one. Pursuing the example,we might then (in a move that might help to remove some of thenebulousness from the notion of ‘life’) consider investigating‘classroom life’ in three progressively inclusive ways, starting with‘quality of learning’ as the narrowest, then ‘quality of education’,and then the most comprehensive and elusive of all: ‘quality of life’,which may take our search for understanding well beyond theclassroom.

So EP can, by helping practitioners resist immediate andthoughtless change, act as a force for fundamentally long-lastingand profound change.

Principle 3: involve everybody. Since life in the languageclassroom is necessarily social, then the conduct of any practitionerresearcher carried out there will also be a social matter. So, forexample, learners will be involved not as objects of research butas fellow participants, and therefore as co-researchers.

Principle 4: work to bring people together. Apart from ourgeneral wish for social harmony, we also stress that there are somany forces acting to divide people in education (teachers fromresearchers, teachers from learners, and so on) that we need to dowhatever we can, whenever we can, to bring people together, in anatmosphere of collegiality.

Principle 5: work also for mutual development. And thatcollegiality will perhaps be best served if all involved aremanifestly working for each other’s development as well as theirown.

Principle 6: integrate the work for understanding into classroompractice. So, practitioner research must not become parasitic uponthe life it is trying to understand. The alternative is for it to beproperly integrated into that practice. The practice itself needs to

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be conducted in such a way that the work for understanding is anormal part of that practice.

� Practical corollary to Principle 6: let the need to integrate guidethe conduct of the work for understanding. This practicalcorollary reminds us to look for our investigative tools in ourexisting practices, rather than look for them elsewhere (inacademic books on classroom research like mine of 1988 and1991 with Kathi Bailey, for example). In the language classroom,as mentioned earlier, this can mean simply giving learners anopportunity to discuss whatever is puzzling you and/or them inthe time you would normally set aside for discussion anyway. Insuch a way the lesson need not be interrupted, the learning cancontinue, but the social understanding can also come too,through the standard pedagogic activities of the classroom.

Principle 7: make the work a continuous enterprise . Making space for work for understanding in the language classroom mayappear to be practically possible only on odd occasions. Takenseriously, however, it will be seen as a continuous, indefinitelysustainable, enterprise, if only to reflect the fact that any languageclassroom is a dynamic social situation, such that anyunderstanding reached on any one occasion may rapidly becomeirrelevant.

� Practical corollary to Principle 7: avoid time-limited funding.Although it may seem perverse to argue against funding (andfunding may not be an option, anyway, for many), we believethat accepting external funding and its associated problemsmakes it difficult to avoid compromising the other principles ofEP. It can be especially difficult to make the whole enterprise acontinuing one, as advocated in Principle 6, since it is in thenature of external funding to be time-limited, and managingwithout funding is even more difficult if you are accustomed tohaving it.

3 What’s new?

The above statements reflect some of the 1991 themes, but where‘understanding’ was primary we now have quality of life, leaving




understanding as the means, not an end in itself. The idea of a newrole for academics like myself, so important in 1991, now seemshardly worthy of explicit mention, best left implicit in the idea thatworking for understanding is essentially a social enterprise ofmutual development. Getting learners directly involved is alsoabsorbed in the same way into principles 3, 4 and 5. And workingwith ‘puzzles’ now seems best left implicit also, implied by the focuson understanding rather than problem-solving.

Most importantly, though, the 1991 Epilogue was written fromthe viewpoint of an individual academic classroom researcher, notfrom that of practitioners themselves. In contrast, the newprinciples, our new ‘global thinking’, come from more than adecade of action and thought by practitioners in a great variety ofgroupings and role relationships. It is time to reflect on this variety,and what we have learned from it.

VI Exploratory Practice as collegial activity

Principles 3, 4 and 5 call for everyone to be involved collegially ina mutually beneficial enterprise of working together towardsunderstanding something of common interest. Who stands to gainmost, most immediately, from any improved understanding willsurely be the teacher and the learners (rather than ‘academicresearchers’, say). Therefore they are the people, and the rolerelationship, at the heart of EP, and our natural starting point here.Next can come the teacher’s relationships with teacher colleagues,then within the hierarchy of the employing institution, withtraining and development people, with outsider researchers likemyself (in relation to school teachers, for example), and with othercolleagues in other institutions, perhaps via a teacher associationof some sort.

1 Collegiality between teachers and learners

‘Collegiality’ is probably not often used in connection withteacher/learner relationships, but it surely makes excellent sense towork for collegiality in the pedagogical relationship, for a sense ofa common enterprise. Unfortunately, proposals for practitionerresearch (Action Research for example) seem to isolate the‘professional’ as the source of topics to investigate and as the only

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people willing to work for understanding. In relation to thepedagogic relationship, however, it is relatively easy to argue forlearners first of all to be the source of the puzzles that areinvestigated, and then for them to participate fully in theirinvestigation, as long as respect for ‘integration’ (principle 6 above)means that the pedagogy is enhanced rather than impoverished bythe investigative work undertaken. Something similar to this canalready be found in ‘autonomous language learning’ work (seeHolec, 1988), but typically the topics adopted for investigation bythe learners are direct language (or target-culture) ones, notinvolving understanding the social processes of classroom languagelearning, the probable focus of work within the framework of EP.In principle, however, any teacher interested in working within theEP framework could get started by finding a way of asking theirlearners about what, if anything, puzzles them about what happensin their lessons (see also Slimani-Rolls, this issue).

2 Collegiality among teachers in the same institution

Teaching can be a lonely enterprise (‘the most private job done inpublic’, someone said, or ‘the most public job done in private’).Involving the learners in a collegial enterprise might offer one wayof combating this loneliness, but teachers are probably more likelyto turn to each other, not their learners, for company. Workingwithin the framework of EP is going to provide many occasionswhen talking to someone else is a good idea. EP could evenprovide a focus for collegiality, an excuse for stopping and askinga colleague for their thoughts on some matter. So there is a strongargument for workplace collegiality among teachers, both as a wayof fostering EP, and as a possible by-product of it.

Sadly, however, many teachers have difficulty developing goodcollegial relationships with fellow teachers. Rivalry among teachersseems to be the norm, in any one workplace, and at least aseniority-based hierarchy typically prevails, such that teachers feeluneasy talking to their immediate colleagues about their ownclassrooms. Inviting thinking about ‘puzzles’ (as for EP) ratherthan outright ‘problems’ (as for Action Research) may help, butexpecting it to suffice would be highly optimistic. The EnglishLanguage Teaching community in Bangalore (South India – Naidu




et al. 1992) faced this problem after they decided to meet inworkplace groupings. Very soon they changed their way of workingand met ‘on neutral territory’, just to avoid the destructive effectsof workplace hierarchies and rivalries.

3 Collegiality and the hierarchy within an employing institution

Employing institutions are therefore in a difficult position (seeSamson, 1995, and in progress) as regards the fostering of collegialrelationships throughout a hierarchy. Indeed, the very notion ofhierarchy is antagonistic to the notion of collegiality, if onlybecause ‘collegiality’ suggests ‘equality’ in some important sense.Also, any pressure on teachers, at one end of the hierarchy, toadopt the ‘latest’ pedagogical changes will come from theinstitutions, as employers and therefore ‘managers’, at the ‘top’ endof the hierarchy (whether this is relatively local, as in a privatelanguage school, or highly remote, as in a state educational system).Clearly it would be a very considerable achievement to both pushfor change and simultaneously persuade everybody you were allcollegially ‘on the same side’ (part of the problem for NationalHealth Service chief executives, presumably). So, it is going to befar from easy, and we already know of a ‘manager’ in a languageteaching institution who felt unable to openly advocate EP amongclassroom teaching, because any proposal from management wouldbe deeply suspect.

4 Collegiality between teachers and training and developmentpeople

Teacher educators, outside a teacher’s workplace, ought to berelatively well placed to offer a collegially sympathetic andsupportive environment for teachers wishing to develop their ownunderstandings within the framework of EP. Unfortunately,however, teacher educators who advocate teacher research seeminstead more likely to promote a highly intensive academic modelof research, as I did myself in Rio in 1991. They also seem likelyto promote the view that greater pedagogic efficiency is thepriority.

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5 Collegiality between teachers and academic researchers

Researchers in our field who are exclusively ‘academic’, pursuingtheir own agenda of building grand theory from empirical researchin classrooms, with only a very long-term notion, at best, of everbeing ‘useful’ to teachers, may be rare, but they do still exist. Inmy own academic work, for example, I am expected to publishunder my name only, in the field’s most academic journals.Therefore, if I am to ‘play the game’, I need my own academicresearch agenda, and cannot simply work as consultant topractitioners pursuing their agendas. Teachers have reason to besuspicious, then, of anything I do, however helpful, that gives meaccess to their classrooms.

And yet I still want whatever classroom research expertise Ihave to be available to teachers, on their terms, in response to thedemands of their research agendas. But my position as an‘academic’ makes that more difficult, partly because years of abusehave put teachers on their guard, and partly because, ironically, allthe abuse has not succeeded in eliminating the traditional‘deference to assumed authority’ from the relationship.

6 Collegiality in a teacher association

One way of getting away from the direct influence of academicresearchers, and simultaneously out from under a workplacehierarchy, if only temporarily, is to look for collegial professionaldevelopment opportunities in a teacher association. The largestEnglish language teaching associations do provide a forum foracademic researchers to talk to teachers, and vice versa, of course,but researchers seem to prefer talking to each other, and aretypically heavily outnumbered by teachers, so their influence can at least be filtered. Large teacher associations are alreadyorganized as hierarchies, also, but these are organizationalhierarchies dedicated to providing whatever service the member-ship wants. They are inherently more likely to be more benign,therefore, and perceived as such by teachers, than ‘managers’ in anemploying institution (Allwright, 1991). And, the smaller theassociation, the less the need for any sort of hierarchy at all (seeRao and Prakash, 1991).

But collegiality still needs work. As Bartu suggests (1997, 2000)




elsewhere in this issue it cannot be taken for granted, just becausethere is no obvious hierarchy to worry about, or only a patentlybenign one.

7 So what?

So, collegiality is multiply problematic, but crucial to the enterprise.So much we have learned, but what has actually been done, withinthe framework of EP, over the last decade?

VII Exploratory Practice, in practice

1 The story so far, and what is to come

The above discussion has traced the development of EP in termsof its principles and practices, as the products of a dynamic cyclicalrelationship between ‘global’ thinking, ‘local’ action, and ‘local’thinking, and as the source of the three positive proposals I madeat the start of this paper: to prioritize ‘quality of life’, to work forunderstandings, and for mutual development.

What follows here is just a brief general indication of the rangeof work that has been or is being undertaken within theExploratory Practice framework.

2 Open-ended voluntary work with teacher groups

For several years now a small group of Rio-based academicresearchers have been working on a regular (fortnightly) basis withgroups of ‘municipio’ teachers (see Miller and Bannell, 1998). Thisis an open-ended commitment on all sides, with teacher educatorswho are also local academic researchers giving their free time,endless goodwill, and their very considerable expertise (since theseare the people most centrally involved in the development of EP).This example is very welcome counter-evidence to any note ofpessimism in Sections VI.4 and VI.5 above concerning theprobability of teacher educators and academic researchers relatingappropriately to classroom teachers.

This work is run by these ‘academics’ in their own time, but itis not a way for them to get their academic research done. Rather,they are volunteer teacher developers, using EP both as the focusof meetings, and the way to get the meetings’ business done, so

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that the participants can better understand what is happening tothem, and what they are doing to each other. The teachers’ workis allowed and encouraged by their employing institution, ratherthan imposed.

In this issue this ‘municipio’ work is represented in Lyra et al.’spaper about what ‘puzzles’ teachers there, and what ‘keeps themgoing’.

A cautionary note about volunteer peer development work isrepresented in this issue by Bartu’s study of group decision-makingin Istanbul.

3 Exploratory Practice in a consultancy relationship

Since teacher education and academic research often go togetherfor university employees in language teacher education, we alsohave the possibility of an academic researcher working as consultantto a colleague (and therefore in some sort of ‘teacher educator’relationship to that colleague) and then turning the ‘consultancy’encounters into practitioner research, on the Exploratory Practice‘model’, with that colleague (see Miller, 2001, and this issue).

4 Exploratory Practice as an approach to ‘academic’ research

From the start, EP has been thought of as a form of practitionerresearch that would provide an alternative to academic researchmodels, but, increasingly, people with ‘academic’ research projectsto complete are finding the principles of EP helpful in guiding theirinvestigations. Beyond Miller’s doctoral work we also haveexamples of Master’s and doctoral level dissertation work in thisissue from Gunn, Kuschnir and Machado, and Perpignan (see alsoGunn, 2001, and Perpignan, 2001). Other major work done in suchacademic contexts includes Constantinidou, 1998; Wolters, 2000;Lamie, 2001 and Szesztay, 2001.

EP is also currently proving to be an appropriate framework fora Master’s level course and dissertation work at Lancaster and inLancaster’s MA level work in Hong Kong (see especially, work inLancaster by Hanks, 1998; Chan, 2002, Chen, 2002; Cheng, 2002;and in Hong Kong in 2002 by Chan, Chuk, Ho, Le, and Lee).

Finally, in this section, it is important to draw attention to therecently completed doctoral work of Wu (2002) who situates the




principled framework of EP in a very wide philosophical context,and shows how such thinking can illuminate a major developmentproject in his Chinese university context.

5 Exploratory Practice as practitioner research

EP was developed primarily as a form of practitioner research forthe language classroom. Such work is most directly representedhere by Kuschnir and Machado, reporting two separate EPinvestigations in one paper; and by Slimani-Rolls’ report on groupwork in a business school. But it is important to note that thedoctoral research reported by Miller, Gunn, and Perpignan, alsoall takes the form of practitioner research, with teachersinvestigating their own practices.

6 Research about Exploratory Practice

Every investigation inevitably makes a contribution to our thinkingabout EP, but three papers in this collection have as their primefocus the working of Exploratory Practice itself. First there is thestudy by Lyra et al. about what puzzles teachers in Rio, asmentioned above. Then we have Kuschnir and Machado linkingpuzzlement to Vygotskyan ideas about the social nature oflearning. And finally we have Bartu’s discourse analytic study ofdecision-making in her EP teachers group in Turkey, with itsimplications for other such groups in future.

VIII Concluding thoughts

1 Exploratory Practice: a ‘work in progress’

EP is still and must always remain in the process of development,as we learn from the different circumstances in which the frame-work is invoked.

We may hope that the principles will change less often than thepractices, but we already know that principles develop just likepractices do, and they all change in relation to each other. In themeantime, it may be worth insisting that the principles in SectionV define EP, if anything does, not Section IV’s sets of processes.Those sets merely illustrate some of the forms that work withinthe framework of EP can take (see also Wu, 2002).

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2 A stimulus to further thought, not a substitute for it

This paper, and this whole issue, are therefore not intended to savereaders from further thought about how participant research cancontribute to language teacher, and learner, development. On thecontrary, we hope to stimulate readers to even more thought, inthe hope that together we will be able to do more than if we remainisolated.

3 Back to ‘think globally, act locally’

I started with this slogan from Friends of the Earth and must nowreturn to it. I hope I have shown in this paper how the relationshipbetween the two key ideas of thinking and acting is, in practice,going to be a cyclical one of mutual stimulation, through themechanism of ‘local thinking’. Local thinking may start out withthe idea of putting some ‘global’ principles into practice, but if theprocess is worked through thoughtfully then local thinking is alsogoing to feed back into global thinking, and thus into the revisionof the underlying principles of the whole enterprise.

4 Back to the three propositions of my introduction, and aninvitation to join in the enterprise.

The ‘rethinking of practitioner research’ announced in my title wasintroduced at the start of this paper in the form of three proposals,which amounted to a plea for us to prioritize the ‘quality of life’in the language classroom, by working to understand that life, andby doing so as a fully social enterprise of mutual development. Ihope the foregoing pages, and the other papers that follow, willsuffice to convince the reader of the potential value of EP as aprofessionally, intellectually and ethically coherent way ofconducting practitioner research in language teaching.

There is now an Exploratory Practice Centre established to keepthe thinking going and to facilitate networking around the globe.We have a periodical Newsletter, an annual event and web site(http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/groups/crile/EPCentre/epcentre/htm)which carries the Newsletter and much more.




IX References

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Exploratory Practice: rethinking practitioner research in language teaching