Abstract: The research in question investigated the potential of teacher educators as agents of change. It adopted a critical realist paradigm. This was a difficult decision as I found myself in a research community of interpretivists. However, I managed to unravel the assumptions of critical realism and design and carry out a coherent study in which the research instruments and data analysis framework emerged from the underlying assumptions of the paradigm. Some challenges arose including some ethical dilemmas that had not originally been anticipated. The seminar will explain the research journey and encourage participants to think about how to achieve coherence in their own research.
About the speaker: Dr Kris Stutchbury is a Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, and Academic Director for the multi award-winning Teacher Education in sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) programme – the largest established teacher education network in Africa. Dr Stutchbury joined The Open University as a part-time tutor in 2005, before becoming Subject Leader for Science full-time on the Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) in 2009, rising to Director of the programme in 2012. In July 2015, Dr Stutchbury was appointed Academic Director of TESSA, combining 20 years of classroom teaching experience with her active interest in international development and supporting learning at scale. Her principal research investigation studied a group of teacher educators in an East African university to understand how they see their role in the education system, how they carry it out and how they negotiate the tensions between the view of teaching and learning set out in policy aspirations, the TESSA materials, and the reality in schools.For her bio: https://www.open.ac.uk/people/ks4474
