Research On Education Research Communites Of Practice In Workplaces

This paper focuses on the issues in teaching and research practice of vocational school teachers,the purpose is to describe and interpret the phenomenon and mechanism of teachers taking teaching and research activities based on the community of teaching and research practice.The study takes a century old vocational school in N City in Southern China as a case study,collects a large amount of the first-hand data through field study method,and analyses the data by using single person independent coding,group coding and multi-person coding.The starting point of this paper is the region where the field school is located and the school history.The related narratives clearly demonstrate the deep influence from the school history,policies and system,cooperation in education,classroom teaching,teachers’ stories and other factors on the teaching and research practice of this vocational school teachers.The key point of the paper is the conflict when the teachers take teaching and research practice.In the process of teaching and research practice,it is inevitable to have conflicts.The process of teaching and research practice is also the progress of occurring and resolving conflicts.The conflicts can be roughly divided into four categories.First,positioning error.Second,over intervention.Third,lack of identity.Fourth,short of support.The root causes are: first,the functional orientation of teaching and research practice in vocational schools is not in line with the actual demand of vocational education;second,there is a contradiction between the unified requirement of school institutionalization and the individual needs of each teacher.When facing the conflicts and problems,teachers will take three kinds of countermeasures.The first is resistance.The second is adjustment.The third is transfer.Whatever it is resistance,adjustment or transfer,it is teachers’ ‘collective response’ to the ‘external’ teaching and research policy and school system.The logic behind is to find the ‘pass way’ in the game battle between school system logic and teachers’ behavior logic.There are three crucial ‘components’ in the process of the formation of teaching and research practice community.First,identity.Its function is to give the sense of belonging and cohesiveness to the community of practice.Second,crossover.The nature of crossover is integration,fusion,and amplifying the value of integrating and interacting resource.Third,practice.All the changes of ideas must be verified by practice,and the ‘practice’ is the direction of the attributes and characters of the practice community.The formation mechanism of education research community of practice is the core issue of this paper.The formation process of community of practice is diverse and complex,which is a process of continuous interaction between teachers and educational practice & social life,and also a progress of bi-directional reconstruction of teachers’ concept and educational practice.This paper raises a simplified mechanism for the formation of teaching and research practice community,which includes six factors,and comes up with three mechanisms for the formation of teaching and research practice community: the first is the negotiation mechanism for common goal and meaning.Second,the mechanism of crossover cooperation and group construction.Third,sharing resources and expanding learning mechanism.