Anne Edwards

University of Oxford | OX · Department of Education

The goals of this study were to investigate strategies that teachers may use to help students with their shyness at school and to explore potential effects of demographic variables (i.e., teacher experience, class size, grade level) on teachers’ strategies. Participants were a national sample of N = 275 teachers (from 230 elementary schools) in Nor...

Shy children can find engaging with classroom demands challenging, inhibiting their development as agentic learners. In the present study, seven Norwegian elementary school teachers with acknowledged success with shy students were observed teaching and then interviewed about their observed pedagogies. A shy child in each class was also interviewed....

We report on the support from senior leaders, outside agents and parents, experienced by Norwegian elementary school teachers while working with shy students. A national sample completed a questionnaire based on teacher interviews. A descriptive analysis examined experienced support; while a person-centered analysis revealed different profiles of t...

In this chapter Edwards outlines a Vygotskian cultural-historical approach to learning, to argue that it offers a future-oriented approach to working in and on practices that can meet the demands of twenty-first century workplaces. Emphasising the importance of learners’ agency as they interpret and respond to problems in practices, she discusses h...

The use of research evidence is increasingly seen as critical to improving practice across many areas of public policy. At the same time, the role of relationships and relational work have become far more widely recognised in many fields of professional practice. This paper brings together these two developments by focusing on the relational featur...

Childhood shyness and associated psychosocial difficulties can place pupils at risk of underperforming cognitively. Yet shyness is not regarded as a special need demanding a response from education professionals. In this article, drawing on data from a national study of how teachers support shy children, we trace how teachers negotiate this support...

The value of teachers’ engagement in and with research is long recognised and it is acknowledged that school–university research partnerships are one way of enabling such engagement. But we know little about how research‐based knowledge is negotiated into school practices. Here we draw on data from nine ‘research champions’, who are teachers in sch...

School shyness may have immediate and long-term detrimental effects. Drawing on cultural-historical understandings of motivated actions and conceptual and material tools, the study examined how ten school leaders in three Norwegian elementary schools interpreted and responded to the demands on the school in their work with shy children. Data compri...

In this short reflection on how research and policy can connect fruitfully, I briefly outline three key concepts that have arisen in my work on inter-professional collaboration in the caring professions: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency. I have argued that these concepts describe the work that is done at sites of interse...

Shy children can present challenges for teachers aiming at inclusive classrooms. Their educational attainments can be lower than their peers, they may have difficulties in adjustment to school and they can be at risk of meeting clinical criteria for social anxiety disorder. One recurrent finding is that they are often quiet across a range of school...

Shyness is not a recognised special educational need, yet studies reveal that shy children underperform academically and present psychosocial vulnerabilities. We present a Norwegian study of elementary school teachers who have experience in working with shy children. Framed by a cultural–historical understanding that concepts are tools employed by...

In this chapter, we show how Hedegaard’s ideas on recurrent demands in practices and the emergence of motive orientation have helped reveal the dialectical formation of teachers as professionals with purposes and commitments. To do so we have examined the unfolding of teachers’ agency as professionals in two studies: during their initial training a...

This chapter contributes to the advancement of scholarly knowledge in the context of the longstanding innovative work of Mariane Hedegaard. Specifically, we draw together the major themes that have emerged as members of the cultural–historical research community has engaged with Hedegaard’s wholeness approach to researching child development and pr...

This collection of papers examines key ideas in cultural-historical approaches to children’s learning and development and the cultural and institutional conditions in which they occur. The collection is given coherence by a focus on the intellectual contributions made by Professor Mariane Hedegaard to understandings of children’s learning through t...

Prevenir la deserción escolar requiere de un trabajo interprofesional que aborde de manera coordinada los múltiples factores individuales, escolares y estructurales que llevan a un joven a dejar la escolarización formal. Este estudio examina la configuración del trabajo interprofesional que se diseña e implementa en dos Departamentos Municipales de...

The starting point for the discussion in this article is Hedegaard's extension of the work of Leont'ev on the recursive interplay of person and society. Hedegaard locates the salient aspects of the social conditions in the dialectic of mind and society in institutional practices, with recurrent demands that participants find they need to orient tow...

Professionals are increasingly called upon to work with clients. We employ cultural-historical concepts to reveal how professionals and clients accomplish joint work on problems in services for families with young children. Professional–client interactions in day stay and home visiting services are considered, first focusing on how matters of conce...

Discussions in this chapter are based in cultural-historical accounts of human agency, which emphasise the dialectical nature of the relationship between person and institutional practice and the importance of agency in that dialectic. This account of agency is located within wider discussions of self and agency and draws on understandings of schoo...

This chapter discusses in some detail Vygotsky’s dialectical approach to human learning and its implications for teaching. Topics include how people may create their own social situations of development in which they propel themselves forward as learners, the role of teachers in creating learning environments which contain both demands on and suppo...

In this chapter key ideas from cultural-historical accounts of human learning are used to make a case for teachers' professional learning as knowledge work. The relational nature of this knowledge work is explained in terms of the exercise of relational expertise, the deployment of common knowledge and joint, relational, agency when working on comp...

Practice Theory and Education challenges how we think about ‘practice’, examining what it means across different fields and sites. It is organised into four themes: discursive practices; practice, change and organisations; practising subjectivity; and professional practice, public policy and education. Contributors to the collection engage and ext...

Three core ideas are at the heart of this book: relational expertise, the capacity to interpret problems with others; common knowledge, which consists of knowing what matters for professionals in other practices; and relational agency, which involves using that common knowledge to take action with others. These ideas are based in cultural-historica...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on how partnership practices that build resilience in families work. Two broad questions are explored: first, what are the forms of expertise required in practices that effectively build resilience through partnership?; and second, how can some of the challenges practitioners experience when...

The relationship between the different mediational means for supporting students’ learning with digital tools in science group work in a Norwegian lower-secondary school is examined. Analyses of teacher-student and student-student interactions are located in cultural-historical theory and draw on Galperin’s conceptualisation of learning processes....

We trace the recent development of the Oxford Education Deanery as an expansion of an initial teacher education partnership to include wider school-university collaboration in professional development, and in research. The current policy pressures in England are described on both school-university partnerships for initial teacher education, and on...

This reflection on the eight papers in this special issue examines the theoretical stances and methodological resources to be found in them. It offers a definition of agency which emphasises commitment, responsibility, strong judgements, self-evaluation, connection to the common good and attention to what people do. Having examined how the papers r...

Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce in detail a research tool, which was first used to examine how the motivated actions of leaders in public services, such as Directors of Children’s Services, take forward their strategic purposes and subsequently adapted for revealing the strategic actions of Family Support Workers. Desig...

The chapter provides the rationale for a rethinking of the institutional conditions in which pre-service teacher education occurs. An intensification of a school-university partnership, the rethinking involves creating what the authors describe as a ‘multi-layered system of distributed expertise’ where partnerships focus on research and professiona...

Cultural–historical theory is grounded in the idea that learning and development are consequences of a person's meaningful interactions in societal practices. This article builds further on the idea by emphasizing the part played by the demands from practices in these interactions. These demands themselves may be a function of an intertwining of di...

Government policy in the United Kingdom offers new freedoms to the public sector that have enhanced the responsibilities of practitioners and make new demands on the systems tackling the often complex needs of vulnerable children and their families. Rapid changes such as these in national policy contexts require practitioners concerned with child p...

The Epilogue’s role is to connect the strands of a narrative and perhaps hint at future developments, and this is exactly what the research team has asked me to do. The book is, in many ways, an account of two parallel journeys. First is the change voyage for Education in Bendigo, which is given direction by the Bendigo Education Plan (BEP).

What do teachers learn ‘on the job’? And how, if at all, do they learn from ‘experience’? Leading researchers from the UK, Europe, the USA and Canada offer international, research-based perspectives on a central problem in policy-making and professional practice – the role that experience plays in learning to teach in schools. Experience is often w...

We draw on the analytic resources of cultural historical activity theory and the work of (Basil) Bernstein and Knorr Cetina to examine evidence from a study of inter-professional practices in children’s services in three English local authorities (local government systems). The study traced the horizontal (e.g. cross service) and vertical (e.g. bet...

The contributors to this collection employ the analytic resources of cultural-historical theory to examine the relationship between childhood and children's development under different societal conditions. In particular they attend to relationships between development, emotions, motives and identities, and the social practices in which children and...

There are increasing calls for social science researchers to work more closely with research users. References to engaging users in and with research are now common in research funding requirements, national research strategies and large-scale research programmes. User engagement has therefore become part of the rhetoric of educational and social s...

In this chapter I turn to the challenges facing researchers who attempt to capture the relational turn in expertise. In other words, what are the objects of enquiry and how do we get to grips with them as researchers? The chapter briefly reprises the main themes of the book; discusses the demands of a focus on the shifting intertwining of mind and...

In this chapter I examine what happens at the boundaries between intersecting practices where the resources from different practices are brought together to expand interpretations of multifaceted tasks. I develop the idea of common knowledge as a pre-requisite for mediating collaboration across the boundaries of specialist practices. I argue that c...

In this chapter I outline some of the versions of participation that can be seen in welfare policy. I then discuss how relational agency, and the Vygotskian ideas in which it has originated, can offer a way of thinking about how people engage with their worlds, which recognises their engaged agency and their contribution to the expertise that is di...

This chapter sets the scene for the arguments to be made later in the book, that a relational turn in professional expertise is occurring, and we therefore need to understand better what it involves for practitioners, clients and organisations. The core themes are introduced: as professionals operate across professional boundaries with other specia...

The main focus of the book is the middle layer of relational action that lies analytically between the system and the individual and which is connected to both. As I discuss expertise in this chapter, I move between the relational aspects of activities and the practices that comprise the systemic in order to understand how relational task accomplis...

In this chapter I examine what the relational turn means for how we think about self and agency in professional work. The main idea to be discussed is relational agency, which involves working alongside others on complex problems towards negotiated outcomes. Relational agency, as a joint and more powerful form of engaged agency, will be presented a...

In this chapter the focus shifts to what happens when attempts are made to move the knowledge that is being generated and refined in operational practices upwards across hierarchical boundaries in organisations. I weave together some of the themes set out in discussions of the relational aspects of professional practice in order to consider their i...

In this chapter I consider how professional work is currently being constructed and the implications of current developments for the relative importance of the specialist knowledge and the responsibility and trust which have contributed to the notion of professionalism. In doing so I shall pursue the argument pursued in previous chapters that the r...

The findings discussed here are based on five case studies and a small survey (n = 46) of how secondary schools are responding to demands that they collaborate with other services to intervene to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people. The case studies revealed a new space of action opening up around schools where practices were...

This article focuses on the conditions that are conducive to effective work on reducing children's vulnerability to social exclusion. It draws on three studies of practitioners who are collaborating to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people. Two ideas are discussed: distributed expertise and relational agency. Distributed experti...

ERODING WORK IDENTITIES We live in risky times (Beck, 1992; Friedland & Boden, 1994). The boundaries and certainties that shored up systems from nation-states to professional bodies for the past 150 years are dissolving, leaving individuals feeling exposed and unprotected by familiar and historically grounded practices. New forms of work combining...

In this paper, a keynote address at the 2008 SERA conference in Perth, I draw on three recent studies of inter-professional work and examine what is happening at the boundaries of schools and other children's services, as practitioners attempt to collaborate to disrupt the trajectories of children who are vulnerable to social exclusion. The rationa...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the problem of achieving “organizational justice” for children within integrated children's services. Justice is understood, following Byers and Rhodes discussion of Levinas as respecting the “unique and indivisible” character of a given child. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical material...

Shortlisted for the NASEN Special Educational Needs Academic Book Award 2009. Inter-professional collaborations are invaluable relationships which can prevent the social exclusion of children and young people and are now a common feature of welfare policies worldwide. Drawing on a four year study of the skills and understanding required of practiti...

For many college students, internships are the first places where education and work intersect; yet we know very little about what happens when students move, mid course, from sites of formal study to the workplace. Despite the lack of information, internships are popular with students, universities, and employers. Their prevalence has increased ov...

The English government is currently exercised by a breakdown in social cohesion, which is evidenced in the number of citizens who find themselves at risk of social exclusion, that is, disconnected from those networks which bind people into socially beneficial systems. One strand of the policy response is aimed at enhancing local social capital in o...

In its emphasis in working with users of research throughout the processes of pedagogic research, the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) has reflected a current interest across disciplines in user engagement to enhance research. The scale of the TLRP and the range of research genres encompassed by it have meant that it has provided a u...

This study addresses the challenges faced by organisations and individual professionals, as new practices are developed and learned in multi‐agency work settings. The practices examined in the paper involve working responsively across professional boundaries with at‐risk young people. The paper draws on evidence from the Learning in and for Interag...

We draw on evidence gathered from teachers who had responsibility for initial teacher education in their schools as part of training partnership arrangements with universities, in order to examine how they are working within their schools and with their higher education partners. Evidence consisted of questionnaire returns from 60 teachers, intervi...

Vygotsky is an original. It is a disservice to him to either find his significance solely in developing Soviet conceptions of man or to render him by gloss translation into language of functionalism or to see only his kinship to George Herbert Mead, to whom he has an interesting resemblance. (Bruner, 1962, p. vi). INTRODUCTION. Bruner's description...

Evidence from two studies of social exclusion based in England are drawn on to suggest that responsible agency can be seen as a feature of resilience. I argue that this agency, or capacity to act effectively in the world, is developed relationally and is evident in people's thoughtful actions in their worlds, but is also contingent on the affordanc...

Recent attempts at preventing the social exclusion of vulnerable children in England have been driven by notions of resilience which centre primarily on changing children so that they may be better able to cope with adversity. Drawing on the concepts of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we suggest that the idea of resilience should be exp...

Background This article is concerned with professional learning within multi-agency settings. Since the publication of the government document Every child matters in 2003, professionals involved in working with children and young people have been moving into newly organized services that are required to deliver improved services for vulnerable chil...

Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is a useful framework for examin- ing learning to become a professional. This is particularly the case when professional practice is seen to be developed within specific institutional settings. However, new forms of practice are being required which call for a capacity to work with other practitioners and...

The paper draws on recent research on student teachers’ experiences of learning to teach in English primary schools. It identifies the opportunities and constraints provided by a view of mentoring which might be described as the induction of student teachers into a local community of practice. The constraints are addressed by a consideration of the...

This research report was published by the Department for Education and Skills before it was split into the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), in June 2007. Select additional link for full text. The Children's Fund was set up in 2000, in part as a catalyst to move f...

Professional practice is usually seen as developed and enacted within specific institutional settings. However, new forms of practice are being required which call for a capacity to work with other practitioners and draw on resources that may be distributed across systems to support one's actions. In this paper the concept of relational agency is d...

In this paper we argue that interventions aimed at preventing social exclusion need to be informed by detailed analysis of the formation, disruption, reformation and support of trajectories of participation in the opportunities for action provided. We draw on evidence we gathered on the lives of two women who used an inner city drop‐in centre to di...

This article is an attempt to tease out what is so often termed learning through participation. Drawing on the analysis undertaken by the Learning Outcomes Thematic Group, the use of the participation metaphor in TLRP projects is discussed. The conclusion arrived at is that its use appears mainly to focus on behaviour and engagement in practices. A...

The social exclusion of children and young people is the product of complex sets of circumstances. One attack on the factors that lead to exclusion in England is the Children’s Fund. The time-limited Fund requires multi-agency working and the participation of children, young people and their families in the development of preventative services. The...

The paper focuses on preventative services for children, young people and families. It argues that client-led service provision calls for flexibility from service providers, using the distributed expertise to be found across the professions involved and a high degree of interprofessional trust. All this, in turn, requires a systemic response from t...

The evidence discussed in this paper was gathered in a one-year study of how student teachers learn about learning in primary schools. In examining mentoring we pursued three research questions in order to increase our understanding of how mentoring processes were helping student teachers to work responsively in classrooms with pupils. The question...

We draw on two studies of student teachers as they learn about learning while interacting with pupils. We argue that the affective notion of relational agency needs to become more central to understanding pedagogy if we are to prepare learners for the demands of the knowledge age. Here relational agency is defined as a capacity to engage with the d...

In 2001 Erica Burman offered a strong critique of the individually oriented developmental psychology which, she argued, underpinned much of early years' practice. She proposed that this should be replaced by an attempt to understand how culture informs development. In this paper I attempt to continue the discussion started by Burman by looking at h...

Using sociocultural understandings of learning, the authors probe a rationale for training programmes which are extensively school based and involved school-based teacher mentors as supporters of student teachers' learning. They ask what it is that student teachers are learning while in schools and how that learning is supported. Drawing on evidenc...

UK government policies for social inclusion through engaging with the learning society aim at repositioning people as capable participants in their social worlds. These policies at first sight appear to be aimed at a sophisticated restructuring of social contexts as well as at an enhancing of individual learning. However there is a degree of concep...

Being an educational researcher is not an easy option. We are practitioners in an engaged social science which makes particular demands on us. These include responsibility to our field of study. In this address I argue that close-to-the-field research, that can do justice to the meaning making that occurs there, is an important part of the responsi...