John Elliott

John Elliott
University of East Anglia | UEA · Centre for Applied Research in Education

D.Litt, FAcSS

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108
Publications
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Publications

Publications (108)
Article
Full-text available
This paper focuses on the nature of the legacy that Lawrence Stenhouse bequeathed in the field of curriculum development and research, particularly in relation to his idea of ‘the teacher as researcher’. In the process, it explores the contemporary relevance of this legacy to those who are currently attempting to rethink and re‐enact the relationsh...
Chapter
This paper constitutes an attempt to produce a critical commentary on this volume that is informed by a ‘classroom action research’ tradition, which originated in the work of Lawrence Stenhouse and others at the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia in England. It involved a series of projects, which engag...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to articulate criteria for assessing the quality of lesson and learning studies as forms of practice-based educational action research that are grounded in the practical experience of those engaged in such research. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores the implications of Stake and Schwandt’s distinct...
Article
This article addresses the conceptual question “what is lesson study?” as an issue that arises in the context of the globalisation of lesson study as a method for improving teaching and learning beyond its presumed origins in the Japanese education system. To what extent can adaptations of the method in different national settings be interpreted as...
Article
This paper tells a story about the design, development and impact of a post-graduate Masters-level module aimed at (1) enabling groups of teachers within schools to develop innovative approaches to teaching and learning on the basis of their own Lesson Studies and (2) creating a school network of excellence for Lesson Study in the area as a context...
Book
Full-text available
Environment and School Initiatives" (ENSI) was an international network, offering a platform for cooperation among practitioners, researchers and policy makers in the fields of Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development. Innovative environmental projects, Action Research, Quality Criteria for ESD schools, Teacher competencies...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discern and discuss links and connections between the ideas and insights contained in the articles published in Issue 6.2, in a way which portrays the key features of lesson study in an international context, its conceptual relationship with the ideas of Lawrence Stenhouse, and its analytic potential to effe...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to pull together articles published in the journal over the last five years in terms of their relevance to the main themes and issues that have shaped its development. Design/methodology/approach The idea is that the paper enables teachers and researchers in schools and higher education institutions to access...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – This editorial review takes its agenda from issues about the meaning and use of variation theory in the context of Lesson Study, which have already been raised in previous issues of the journal. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a way of resolving such issues by locating variation theory in a broader framework of pedagogical theory....
Article
Curriculum aims often remain unrealised aspirations. This is because the values and principles implicit in them fail to get articulated in forms that can effectively inform and guide the practice of teaching. Ideas such as ‘learner-centred education’, ‘independent/autonomous learning’, ‘self-directed learning’, ‘enquiry/discovery learning’, ‘collab...
Article
The paper by Sarkar Arani et al. focuses on an attempt to analyse a lower secondary science lesson in Singapore in order to reveal the “cultural script of teaching”, the beliefs and values that are tacitly embodied in the structure of a lesson, its major features, patterns of interaction between teacher and students and between the students themsel...
Article
I was influenced by my own experience of watching live dance performance that included projected images on a large screen at the rear of a performance space. As a viewer I had been perplexed. I could not come to terms with what I was seeing. Whereas I was fully aware of the exciting potential of montage or the juxtaposition of one image with anothe...
Article
Introduction The VARIATION FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF TEACHING AND LEARNING PROJECT (VITAL) was funded by the Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau over three years from 2005 to 2008, and based in the Centre for Learning Studies and School Partnership (CLASP) at the Hong Kong Institute of Education under the leadership of Professor Lo Mun Ling. The p...
Article
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of lesson study for the development of a science of teaching cast in the form of John Dewey's “laboratory model” of learning to teach. Design/methodology/approach – The early sections compare the “laboratory” with the “apprenticeship” and “rationalist” models of learning to teach, whi...
Article
The article will review some of Bridget Somekh’s action research projects as attempts to build networks of trust and reciprocity across a range of educational stake‐holders. It will also examine Bridget’s wider role within the education action research movement as a whole, looking at her achievements as a facilitator of networks of action researche...
Article
Full-text available
This paper looks at the western notion of ‘teacher as researcher’, as originally developed by Lawrence Stenhouse and his associates, in the light of what Confucius had to say about education and learning. The paper demonstrates that the Confucian account of education and learning is similar in many respects to the notion of the ‘teacher as research...
Article
This article examines the ethnographic case study in education in the context of policy making with particular emphasis on the practice of research and policy making. The central claim of the article is that it is impossible to establish a transcendental epistemology of the case study on instrumental rationality. Instead it argues for the notion of...
Article
This paper explores the progress of educational programme evaluation over three decades through the lens of a group of evaluators primarily from the UK and the US who met periodically from 1972 to 2004 to review the state of the art of educational programme evaluation—what it could and could not do—in relation to the complexity of programme initiat...
Article
This contribution constitutes an attempt to distil quality criteria for assessing educational action research from examples of action research that the author has directly experienced in the course of his career. As such it effects a reconciliation between the idea of quality as an object of direct and immediate experience and as an object of more...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The ESRC Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing Scheme (QUADS) invited research proposals which would develop new models of qualitative research archiving and data sharing which tackle in innovative ways the epistemological, ethical, methodological and practical challenges raised by the re-use and re-analysis of qualitative material; explore ways o...
Technical Report
Available online at http://www.tlrp.org/capacity/rm/wt/bridges/pesgb1.html
Article
Full-text available
We were all sitting there waiting quietly for the introductory session of a two-year, part-time advanced diploma course at Luton Teachers' Centre. In rushed a guy in baggy corduroys, blue fisherman's smock, long hair streaming behind. He was carrying large brown boxes, full, I discovered later, of weighty volumes we were to grow to love much later:...
Article
Educational Research is commonly regarded as a rational pursuit aimed at the production of objective knowledge. Researchers are expected to avoid value bias by detaching themselves from the normative conceptions of education that shape practice in schools and classrooms, and by casting themselves in the role of the impartial spectator. It is assume...
Article
This article is a retrospective critique of Becoming Critical by Carr & Kemmis. Into it are woven responses to other retrospective reviews of the book by Susan Groundwater–Smith, Susan Noffke, and Carr & Kemmis themselves. The basic argument is that Becoming Critical was overdependent on the work of Jurgen Habermas and was therefore vulnerable to t...
Article
Full-text available
El presente artículo trata de redefinir la relación entre teoría y práctica a partir de la concepción de la investigación en la acción. La investigación en la acción (IA) no se halla sólo orientada hacia la mejora de la práctica, del mismo modo que la investigación no se halla sólo orientada a la producción del conocimiento. El conocimiento práctic...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Police training had been declared byHer Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary to be "unfit for the 21st Century. The Home Office commissioned this team to reconcile of the training curriculum. We did so through consultation with more than 50 community organisations, the police service and the Home Office itself.
Article
Full-text available
This article examines some of the consequences of value for money audit systems on professional practices in general and those of teachers in particular. The article argues that value for money audit actually prevent professionals from evaluating their practices. This is because it confuses outputs with outcomes and fails to empirically validate th...
Article
Full-text available
This article reports the experience of a group of universitybased academics in supporting teachers' engagement in research in and across a cluster of secondary schools in the Norwich area. It takes the form of a discussion constructed from emails about the ways in which the academic context of their work shaped their interactions with teachers in s...
Article
The article examines David Hargreaves's ideas about the nature of 'evidence-based practice' and the future direction for educational research. The first section explores Hargreaves's attempt to free an 'engineering model' of educational research, aimed at the production of actionable knowledge, from a naive and crude positivism. It draws on McIntyr...
Article
The paper examines the UK Secretary of State for Education's proposed revisions to the national curriculum at the turn of the century. The author argues that the proposed changes towards a more flexible and less prescriptive curriculum framework are a direct attempt to address the significant problem of student disaffection, which is currently haun...
Article
This paper provides an overview of the OECD (CERI) programme on ‘Environment and School Initatives’ (ENSI). It describes the emergence and development of an ecologically‐driven agenda for school change, and its rationale, within a shifting policy‐context in which the environmental concerns of the public are being increasingly acknowledged. The prog...
Article
Full-text available
Incl. abstract and bibl. This article highlights seven issues the authors encountered when they took on a very difficult task, namely of seeking, through 'low tech' print-based distance learning materials, to promote the professional development of experienced but untrained teachers in Namibia. The authors attempt to do this through the advocacy of...
Article
The idea of quality assurance dominates educational discourse at the present time. This is reflected in the emphasis placed on test and examination results, inspections and school performance indicators. It is argued in this article that this is not simply an attempt to legitimate traditional conceptions of knowledge. It is also an attempt to const...
Article
The paper examines (a) the values and assumptions which underpin school effectiveness research, and (b) the problem of applying its findings in schools. It does so in the light of a number of critiques of this research emanating from both the USA and the UK. The author argues that the issues at stake between school effectiveness researchers and the...
Article
The ‘Environment and School Initiatives’ (ENSI) project is an OECD curriculum development project based on a ‘process model’. Eleven OECD countries, excluding the UK, participated in Phase 1 (1986‐8). The author carried out a comparative analysis of case‐studies of this phase, then sought to gain government support for the participation of UK schoo...
Article
The paper compares the British curriculum reforms of the 1960s with contemporary government‐initiated reforms, and argues that the central problem of pedagogical change persists because the latter adopted one of the two solutions to the problem which emerged from the former; namely, the objectives model of socially engineering change. The other sol...
Article
This article defends an approach to the clarification of values by schools which involves ‘reflexive evaluative enquiry or action research’ rather than an abstract or ‘armchair’ approach. An analysis is offered of the implications for this activity of the context of ‘market choice’ in which it must now be undertaken.
Article
Commercial publishers have been quick to respond to the opportunities afforded by the National Curriculum. This paper examines some of the new (or in some cases ‘updated') primary coursebook schemes, and asks what might be the implications for the primary curriculum, should such schemes be widely adopted in schools. It might be thought that these c...
Article
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Article
Policy discussions about the future of initial teacher training tend to focus on organisational scenarios. This paper in contrast attempts to outline a curriculum theory for initial teacher education. In its light the author argues for a partnership between higher education and schools, and critiques the trend towards locating initial training enti...
Article
This paper was first delivered at the National Curriculum Conference, University of Liverpool, April 1989. A version of it was subsequently presented as a keynote address at the Curriculum Association's annual conference in York in April 1990.
Article
Changing views of models of evaluation are considered, with a review of models for program evaluation debated in the 1970s. The evaluation of a police probationer training program illustrates the relationship between the democratic evaluation advocated by B. MacDonald and action research. (SLD)
Article
This paper focuses on the problems, dilemmas and issues which confront facilitators of teacher-based action research in schools. The paper incorporates a biographical strand in which the author describes three action research projects he has been involved in as a facilitator during the last 15 years. In doing so he attempts to show how each project...
Article
*This article is the text of the Presidential Address to the British Educational Research Association given at the University of Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, 1989.
Article
Schools and universities in the United Kingdom are coming to accept performance appraisal as a fact of life. The first part of this paper discusses appraisal policies as "negotiated ambiguities." Ambiguous criteria concerning wording subject to misinterpretation has created reservations on the side of the National Union of Teachers. This study demo...
Article
The theory of action research is discussed in terms of how second-order action research can help theorists to clarify and deepen their understanding of action research. After a brief introduction, the paper examines methodological criteria governing a piece of action research conducted at an action research training workshop sponsored by the Centra...
Article
The purpose of education should not be to fill students with objective knowledge but to develop in students the ability to process information in ways that enhance understanding, according to the process model of curriculum development proposed by Lawrence Stenhouse. Defining education thus does not allow for the establishment of fixed educational...
Article
On Friday 7 July 1978 Brisbane optometrist John Elliott gave evidence before the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs. ‘The Health Problems of Aborigines’ was the subject of this enquiry.His study gives a comprehensive overview of present facilities and proposes meaningful and practicable improvements in the provision o...
Article
The Context of the Project 1 The Ford Teaching Project was an attempt to involve 40 teachers in the East Anglian region of the United Kingdom in a programme of action research into the problems of implementing inquiry/discovery approaches in classrooms. The project developed out of a concern that the curriculum reform movement, sponsored by the Nuf...
Article
Curriculum reformers in the United Kingdom who have expressed concern with the failure of the research, development, and diffusion model to implement inquiry/discovery learning have tended to offer a problem-solving approach to foster innovation at the classroom level. This approach is illustrated in the Ford Teaching Project, sponsored by the Ford...
Article
Informal teaching looks easy, smooth and effortless : it is none of these. Similarly, research into teaching appears clear and straightforward, but again appearances belie reality. Before writing this article, the authors spent a long period observing teachers, discussing teaching performances with both teachers and pupils and encouraging the forme...
Article
It is hoped that a further report on the Ford Teaching Project will appear in a subsequent issue.

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