Enhancing teachers beliefs, knowledge and practice about bilingualism and bilingual/immersion education through critical action research

A pilot project 2006
Hayley Read and Donald McLean, Richmond Road School

Project aims

The project aims to assist bilingual staff at Richmond Road School (RRS) to develop and apply critical research methods to identify, critically assess, and analyse existing strengths, gaps, and needs in bilingual/immersion, multicultural policy, and practice at RRS.

In particular, it aims to:

• Identify and critically assess/analyse teacher beliefs and knowledge about bilingualism and bilingual education.
  
  As teacher practitioners, working in bilingual classrooms at RRS, what are the current beliefs, philosophies, and theories about bilingualism, biliteracy, bilingual education, and education for diversity that underpin our current practice?
  
  
• Examine indicators of best practice in the research literature on bilingual education.
  
  What does research indentify as the key factors in the development of effective bilingual education programmes and/or teaching bilingual students in classrooms, particularly with respect to successfully achieving biliteracy (a key indicator of the academic success of bilingual students)?
  
  
• Develop understandings about the gap between the theory research and practice.
  
  To what extent do current teacher beliefs and practices match the research indicators of best practice highlighted in the relevant literature? To what extent scan RRS staff continue to build a critical community of practice that allows for greater shared, research-led understandings of, and alignment with, best practices in bilingual education? How might this form the basis for the review or revision of current programmes in order to further enhance the educational achievement of students in those programmes at RRS?
  
  
• Grow as practitioner researchers to develop research based teaching.
  
  As Māori, Pasifika, and Pākehā/Palagi practitioners working together in state bilingual education. How can we become critically empowered to reconceptualise our work and seek deeper understandings, explanations, generalisations, and theoretical development in order to gain autonomy over the research process and be able to use it for our own pedagogical aims and the academic, cultural, and linguistic imperatives of our communities and their children.

The proposal is for a one-year, small-scale, practitioner-led pilot action research project involving selected members of the practitioner team, in partnership with educational researchers, investigating and addressing central issues in creating meaningful links between known research, school policy, and their own classroom practice in multicultural/bilingual education. An essential goal is also the building of teacher practitioner research capacity—a key hallmark of RRS historically. This will allow teachers with RRS to critically reconceptualise, examine, and theorise their own work, as well as (re)develop a critical community of practice within the school.

  
Partnerships involved

A unique feature of this project is the nature of the partnership and relationships between the research practitioners and the research associates.

The practitioner team comprises the principal and bilingual staff from Richmond Road School, in partnership with a research associate team from the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland. Professor Stephen May, from the School of Education, Waikato University, is the outside consultant for the project. Other partners are senior staff of The A’oga Fa’a Samoa and Māori and Pacifica elders associated with the school.

Both teams are equal members of the research, taking a full part in it. Both also make up the Project Advisory Committee, which is jointly chaired by the principal of the school and the lead liaison researcher, John McCaffery. This partnership is designed to mentor and empower RRS practitioners to develop further the expertise in undertaking their own ongoing research agenda and dissemination and sharing, as a central feature of their everyday work in the school and the Aoga (Kincheloe, 2003).

• enhance teacher beliefs and knowledge about bilingualism and bilingual education
• identify the indicators of best practice in the research literature on bilingual education
• match research and theory with current practice
• develop the bilingual teachers at Richmond Road School as practitioner researchers.

Selected Publications

Download the full text of the project report [pdf,555 KB]

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