Abstract:
Communities (including online communities) appear to provide powerful contexts for the
professional development of teachers. Yet, despite the apparent educational potency of
groups, professional development research has almost exclusively focused on describing and
explaining the learning of individuals. In a world now overwhelmingly characterised by
collectivity (not singularity), there are compelling reasons for adopting a collective
perspective on learning, for exploring the usefulness of new learning technologies in making
such a perspective possible and for examining the worth of such an account.
We take up the challenge of developing a preliminary position on group learning in this
paper. We describe and analyse aspects of the learning of a group of teachers in the first
phase of DESCANT - SciTech, a large ARC-funded e-learning research and development
collaboration between the University of Technology, Sydney and the NSW Department of
Education and Training (DET). In so doing, we address the strategic challenge of how to
gather data and report stories of group (not just individual) learning, and the conceptual one
of how to explain and understand the growth of this professional group. In conclusion, we
speculate as to the importance of this first step in developing a contemporary approach to
professional (self-) renewal.
