Facilitation of reflective practice as a collaborative and improvement-oriented professional learning: A teacher educator’s self-study experiences

Khalid Mohammed Idris; Anikó Kálmán

doi:10.3311/ope.40278

Authors

Khalid Mohammed Idris

Affiliation

Khalid Mohammed Idris is a teacher educator in Eritrea and a doctoral researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. Khalid has years of teaching, leadership, and research experience in teacher education. He also has teaching experiences with international students in a European university context. His research interests include developing a teaching and research nexus in teacher education; self-study research; collaborative, practice-centred, and action-oriented inquiry among and with practitioners; and in language education. He has published in well regarded journals in his areas of interest. Khalid also collaborated with local and international partners in pedagogical and research development projects in teacher education. He is currently involved in a capacity development project among Finnish and Rwandan higher education institutions.
Anikó Kálmán

Affiliation

Prof. Dr. Anikó Kálmán, University of Nyíregyháza She is recognized as one of the few experts in Hungary in the field of Lifelong Learning and Andragogy. She got her PhD degree in 1999 in Educational Science and the Habilitated Doctor (Dr. Habil.) qualification in 2007 in Management and Organizational Sciences. Among others, she is currently full professor at the University of Nyíregyháza and associate professor at Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), academic staff member at the Doctoral School of the Faculty of Education and Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and in the Educational Doctoral School at the University of Szeged. She was executive president of MELLearN Hungarian National University Lifelong Learning Network between 2002-2015 and was elected to the SEFI Board of Directors in 2014. In 2015, she worked as a visiting lecturer at Tampere University of Applied Sciences. Her research fields include lifelong learning, staff development, adult education, methodology, the knowledge triangle and the new ecosystem.

Abstract

Professional learning literature advocate intentionality towards collaborative and improvement-oriented initiatives among teacher educators. Employing the notion of professional learning as praxis development, i.e., morally committed and change oriented action, this article discusses one teacher educator’s experiences of self-study on his facilitations of reflective practice. Through a reflexive thematic analysis on a self-reflective and interactive data sets, aspects of the proactive facilitations that prefigured praxis development are presented. These include researching self-in-practice and positioning contextual challenges as conditions for developing professional experiences. A dynamic of researching practices and creating conditions for improvements is identified to have led to developing improvement-oriented collaborative commitments in and for practice. Modelling and development of intrinsic motivations by attending to social and relational dimensions in sites of practice are highlighted as implications for improving collaborative commitments among practitioners in challenging contexts.