# Transcript

CLARE LEE
Hi. I’m Clare Lee and I’m talking to Gill Adams on the phone about her research. Now I supervised her research, so I know quite a lot about it but not as much as Gill does. Because when you do a doctoral research, you’re the expert and Gill is the expert here.
So, I will be asking her about the decisions she made as part of her research. The research used a narrative and biographical approach to collecting the data and we will have a conversation about all the different decisions she had to make.
OK, so, to start off could you discuss how you chose your research focus?
GILL ADAMS
Hi Clare. My research explored teachers’ experiences of their professional learning. And I focused particularly on women secondary mathematics teachers. And I’ll talk a little bit about why and how that focus came about. It really arose from my professional practice and experience. I was a secondary maths teacher and later a consultant supporting teacher professional learning. At the time I started the research I was a teacher educator. So, I worked with beginning teachers and also designed and led courses for experienced teachers as they continued to develop their careers.
My research was prompted really by an activity on an Open University module where I was asked to develop my own mathematics autobiography. And this got me thinking more about how I’d learned as a mathematics teacher. So, the initial stimulus for the research really came from reflections on my experience as a learner and as a facilitator of professional learning. Then from this starting point I began to explore the literature initially focusing on teacher professional learning and then digging a bit deeper into mathematics teaching. So, there were existing studies about particular professional development courses and initiatives in mathematics. But nothing really about teachers experiences of learning throughout their career. So how mathematics teachers experienced that learning on the job.
So, in addition to the research being driven by my interest and my own experience another influencing factor for me was a little bit more pragmatic and was shaped by my employment situation. And I think these pragmatic influences are quite significant actually because you need your research to fit your particular context. So, mine was shaped by my employment. I’d just come back to England after two years volunteering overseas. I had a temporary position in a university, and I needed my study to be one that I could continue even if I changed jobs.
I chose a narrative approach for my research as this enabled teachers’ professional learning to be firmly located within the teachers’ lives. And it helped me to reveal the significance of context. So those national, local and individual factors that influence provision to professional learning, access to it and teachers’ participation in it. This approach, I think, enabled me to elicit stories of professional learning, the kind of detail of teachers’ actual experiences. Drawing out some of the challenges and successes that they experienced. And providing a bit of time to stop and reflect on that.
The narrative approach enabled me to focus on depth and on the detail of these individual stories. So rather than trying to generalise it was really the detail of the individual lives that was important, as it is in much of narrative research. That focus was really important to me at the outset. And it was only really as the project developed that I fully began to grasp the huge significance of context at different levels. So moving away from the individual and, and thinking about them in relation to the bigger picture.
You need participants in life history and narrative research who are going to be prepared to give you a little bit of their time and their stories. And often participants are known to researchers in narrative and life history research. And that was the case in my study. They were teachers who I’d had some contact within my work as a teacher educator. So the research then provides other teachers with stories that might provoke their reflection on their own professional learning. And support them to clarify and articulate their professional learning goals and take a little bit more ownership over their professional learning.
I think very often in schools there isn’t that time to stop and think about your own learning and development and to take control of that and direct it and seek out opportunities. So, so the research would provide teachers participating with the opportunity to do that but also other teachers, the stories that were produced would enable them to use these as tools really for their own professional learning.