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Once again, there is no such thing as teaching without research and research without teaching. One inhabits the body of the other. As I teach, I continue to search and re-search. I teach because I search, because I question, and because I submit myself to questioning. I research because I notice things, take cognizance of them. And in so doing, I intervene. And intervening, I educate and educate myself. I do research so as to know what I do not yet know and to communicate and proclaim what I discover (Freire 1998, p. 35).

Context

The past five to ten years have witnessed the increasing use of the somewhat nebulous term, ‘21st-century learning’. This implies learning and teaching that prepares students to engage with the 21st century world, and while an imperfect term, it is one many policy-makers have latched onto, although terms like ‘modern learning’, ‘innovative learning’ and ‘modern teaching and learning’ are also heard amongst practitioners. Internationally, schooling systems have been motivated for some time to ensure that teachers are able to provide school-leavers with appropriate life-long and 21st century skills.

There is value in understanding how teachers and leaders are making the shift from transmission models of teaching to modern and innovative approaches that develop such skills as critical thinking and problem solving; collaboration and leadership; agility and adaptability; initiative and entrepreneurialism; effective oral and written communication; accessing and analysing information; and curiosity and imagination (Wagner 2008, cited in Saavedra and Opfer 2012, p. 8).

Being a Teacher in the 21st Century traverses the space between being a research report and being a conventional book. It is not exclusively about changes to the spaces in which teachers work, the digital tools they use or the pedagogies they develop in response to these changes. It is rather more about what all these changes do to teachers’ heads (to put it bluntly), and thus to teachers’ conceptions of their work.

The book is not intended to be a practitioner book of ‘how to’, or practical suggestions for what to do in flexible space or with digital technology. What it does do is draw on the findings of a qualitative study of teachers and leaders in several New Zealand schools over three years to take stock of some of the central manifestations of 21st-century learning. In particular, these are the collaborative practices associated with teaching and learning in flexible learning environments, and digital pedagogies. This book reflects on the mental shifts and sometimes-painful transitions teachers and leaders are making and experiencing, as they move through uncharted waters, from traditional classroom practices to ones emphasising collaboration, teamwork and the radical de-centring of their personal roles. It demonstrates how they navigate these changes, describing and explaining the nature of pedagogical shifts apparent in digital classrooms and modern learning environments, which, according to international schools’ architect, Nair (2011), make the classroom obsolete.

The purpose of this book is to provide scholars, teacher educators, and reflective school leaders and teachers a valuable insight to what it is to be a teacher in the 21st century. The book achieves this aim by presenting original research based on my study of several New Zealand schools between 2013 and 2015, and in particular, my focussed study of four of those schools in 2015.

This book has particular benefits:

  1. 1.

    For teacher educators who may have long since left the classroom, the notions of digital technology and pedagogy, flexible learning spaces, ergonomic furniture and developing critically reflective practice may not be familiar territory. This text will support their efforts to prepare their student teachers for a rapidly changing school environment.

  2. 2.

    For New Zealand scholars and reflective school practitioners, this book contributes by addressing the paucity of relevant, critical, New Zealand education literature in relation to the concept of flexible (or innovative, modern or new generation) learning environments. It does so through its carefully analytical and critical consideration of 21st-century learning, modern pedagogy, teacher reflective practice, and the strategic actions of school leaders in responding to these discrete elements.

  3. 3.

    While drawing on examples that have a New Zealand focus, and reflecting on fieldwork in some New Zealand schools, this book has international relevance. Scholars, teacher educators and reflective school practitioners will recognise the experiences of their New Zealand counterparts described and interpreted in these pages.

Conceptual Framework

Here I will engage in discussion concerning the conceptual underpinnings of this book, which is framed by an ontology that emphasises the lived experience of individuals working in an evolving and emerging educational environment. These individuals seek to make sense of this experience, and this book is an attempt to convey and interpret this sense-making. The analyses in this book are framed by a critical and rationalist epistemology that emphasises the importance of uncovering underlying patterns of thought and practice in discourses, found in daily work practices and texts such as policies. Of particular interest is to uncover discourses that oppress, disadvantage or marginalise whilst simultaneously shaping identities and manufacturing consent. The ontological discoveries and findings are contextualised and embedded in the critical analyses, which in turn are informed by social democratic political influences.

The human experience, while bound to specific contexts, offers valuable lessons across contexts. Why researchers approach their study of human experience the way they do is shaped by multiple historical and cultural influences, giving rise to and deriving from particular ways of seeing the world. These ways of seeing the world influence how researchers conduct their investigations, and, in particular, what they do with the results of their efforts.

A Bricolage of Critical Theory, Critical Hermeneutics and Post-Intentional Phenomenology

Denzin and Lincoln (2005) and Steinberg and Kincheloe (2010) wrote of bricolage, that is, a bringing together of elements from different and varied sources. Denzin and Lincoln (2005) called the qualitative researcher a bricoleur, showing the term to have wide use among many researchers. The bricoleur ranges freely, but carefully and intentionally, across a wide range of approaches to research, deploying practices that are pertinent to the particular research task at hand. These practices may not necessarily be worked out beforehand, but emerge from the complexities of the task, as they unfold (2005).

Steinberg and Kincheloe, in keeping with the notion of the bricoleur, sought to combine several streams of critical theorising besides the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, including Foucault’s genealogy, poststructuralist practices of deconstruction, and critical cultural studies and critical pedagogy (2012). Hermeneutics, they argued, provided this bridge.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is a methodology of interpretation (Mantzavinos 2016). It is the process that allows human beings to interpret what is perceived and to make sense of their perceptions (Ramberg and Gjesdal 2009). Although hermeneutics has a long history, as a method of sceptical critique of Biblical Scripture, it has been associated in modern times particularly with Hans-Georg Gadamer. His approach to hermeneutics, with its emphasis linking interpretation to human interests makes it an ontological project.

Hermeneutic practitioners (such as Gadamer) regarded interpretation as contextual and closely related to the one who interprets. Researchers and their participants are products of history and tradition, and this is likely to influence researcher interpretations. Texts then, are viewed from within each individual perspective, and interpretations are therefore partial (Kinsella 2006). Not only is it the researcher who is historically located, but the texts themselves, and the language in which they are expressed (2006). Therefore, language is fundamental to interpretation. In fact, Gadamer claimed credit for placing the linguistic at the centre of hermeneutics. Human language is essential not only to their humanness, but to their ability to learn from each other. Gadamer noted, in his interview with Carsten Dutt: “We do not need just to hear one another but to listen to one another. Only when this happens is there understanding” (Gadamer et al. 2001, p. 39. Emphasis in the original).

Gadamer’s point suggests conversation, a further dimension of his hermeneutics, is an invaluable concept in understanding the interpretation of research. Conversation is not a monologue, but a dialogue with another. The process of research entails using language to better understand, even translate, the message the researcher receives. To do so, requires researchers to step over their boundaries and personal limits (2001). In hermeneutic conversation, the researcher becomes a translator of texts in search of a common(ly understood) language. Kinsella (2006) called for a Bakhtinian notion of polyphonic voices to underpin a researcher’s understanding of this search for meaning. Certainty is thus replaced with ambiguity, which is consistent, according to Kinsella, with Gadamer’s own understanding of how to approach texts. Multiple conversations replace a single, universal intent, thus reducing the prospect of an authoritative reading of text (2006).

Critical Theory

Critical theory originated from the work of the Frankfurt School, which included Theo Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. Jurgen Habermas is an influential ‘second generation’ member of the Frankfurt School (Farganis 2011). The Institute for Social Research was established at the University of Frankfurt in Germany in 1923, though its founding members were forced to migrate to the United States after 1933 when Hitler’s Nazi government outlawed the Institute.

The original members of the Frankfurt School developed a social reconstructive perspective and a commitment to social justice (Bohman 2005). Critical theory draws on several disciplines (Bohman 2005; Farganis 2011) in the human and social sciences. This allowed its founding thinkers to bring together “empirical and interpretive social sciences… [with] normative claims of truth, morality and justice” (Bohman 2005, p. 5). Critical theory is therefore practical, in a moral, not instrumental sense, and normative. Its normative orientation is mainly pointed towards “the transformation of capitalism into a ‘real democracy’” (Bohman 2005, p. 3), deploying the knowledge it generates to achieving just social outcomes (Farganis 2011). Critical theory is an epistemological project that proposes rational interests, and its practical effect is to bring about enlightenment and emancipation (Geuss 1981).

Critical theory can thus be distinguished from a traditional (scientific) theory by an explicit agenda for a change of society. A major challenge facing these theorists was the growing influence of a materialist, capitalist economic ethos of instrumentality and technological development, which negated social change (not unlike the influence of neoliberalism today). Horkheimer, in Eclipse of Reason (2004), argued that instrumental reason, driven by technological progress, was supplanting independent thought and action. Moral reasoning, which seeks truth and meaning, by focusing on moral ends, had been replaced by irrationality that focussed on means whereby desired practical ends (rather than desirable ones) could be attained.

Writing in 1941, Marcuse spoke of “a new [technological] rationality and new standards of individuality [that] have spread over society” (1998, p. 42). Marcuse argued that technological rationality was characterised by compliance and automatic behaviour: “Rationality is being transformed from a critical force into one of adjustment and compliance…Reason has found its resting place in the system of standardized control, production and consumption” (p. 49).

Therefore, what both thinkers were arguing is that humans were losing their ability to think and act critically, due in significant measure to the economic and technological development of capitalism, but also because of the rise of Fascist ideologies. This compliant attitude exists in ironic relation to so-called open and democratic societies, which ought to be open to critique, but are actually closed to any dissenting opinion (Farganis 2011).

Critical Research and Education

Steinberg and Kincheloe (2012) suggested five requirements of critical research:

  • a rejection of positivistic rationality;

  • making and keeping explicit the value position (social justice and democracy) of the researcher or practitioner in relation to the field of practice;

  • making explicit the tacit cultural and professional understandings that shape the thinking of researchers and practitioners;

  • exposing power structures that are dominant in society; and

  • maintaining a conscious link to practice, with a view to improving its social justice and democratic potential.

Positivistic rationality can be rejected by recognising the constraints in place over teachers and education researchers. A significant constraint is the singular focus on student achievement. This focus is an example of the ‘instrumental rationality’ referred to earlier, where teaching and its associated areas of interest are reduced to mere technicalities. Similarly, this mentality is evident in the ‘evidence-led’ dogma that underpins so much educational policy and practice (see, in this regard, Biesta 2007).

It is helpful for researchers to have a self-conscious sense of their research identity, and to be able to define their positionality. Being a critical researcher and practitioner requires “the attempt to free oneself from the tacit controls of racial, class-based, and gendered discourses and lived practices” (p. 1489). Culture in all its forms is deeply contested terrain in education, and particularly in critical education studies. Culture is “a domain of struggle” (Steinberg and Kincheloe 2010, p. 144), and is a key determinant in shaping perspective. Therefore, the critical educator and researcher must be able to acknowledge the role their own cultural positioning plays in shaping their attitudes. This means recognising the roles class, gender, race and religion play in shaping attitudes, not to mention the role played by the popular culture of cinema and music, for example.

Developing research strategies to counteract the technical determinism inherent in a ‘what works’, ‘evidence-led’ policy and practice framework, and to do the work of emancipation could include empirical work. What critical researchers do with that empirical data is what will set them apart from positivistic researchers, by going beyond description and ‘objective’ reporting, to searching for contradictions and patterns that explain power relationships, for example. The critical researcher eschews the notion of a fact–value divide in empirical work: “The knowledge that the world yields has to be interpreted by men and women who are a part of that world. What we call information always involves an act of human judgment” (Steinberg and Kincheloe 2012, p. 1493).

Power does not hit us in the face, as it were. It is somewhat subtler, yet the critical researcher must seek it out and expose it for what it is—often sophisticated policy announcements and positions designed to encourage a technological determinism, for example. Giving education practitioners the language to identify and ‘name’ instances of power has an emancipatory effect. So too can be the exposure of the ways in which “citizens are regulated by the forces of power operating in a general climate of deceit” (Steinberg and Kincheloe 2010, p. 140). This requires some understanding of the symbolic language of society, which often acts as a vehicle to convey images of power (such as extolling material affluence in popular media). Uncovering the winners and losers in society is another example of revealing power and how it works. Yet other examples would include instances of gendered power, or issues of sexuality in schools.

To avoid the determinism inherent in ‘what works’ and effect-size research does not automatically imply that critical theoretic researchers are not interested in bringing about improved practice, though their first concern would be to bring about improved situations and contexts. Giving teachers frameworks on which to construct coherent value positions of their own will be an important first step to supporting their practice. It is not only the practice of teachers that should be of concern here, but the practice of researchers too. Through self-reflexive activity, they are able to confront challenges in their own research practice, especially in such areas as personal cultural context or unintended displays of power.

Developing a Critical Hermeneutics

Although critical theory and hermeneutics do not appear to sit well together, Steinberg and Kincheloe (2010) argued that their reading of Gadamer led them to the view that interpretation is an act of moral reasoning and action (and therefore allied to the aims of critical theory). The time is right, they suggested, for a dialogue between critical theory and the bricolage of postmodern and poststructural theories, such as feminism, Foucauldian genealogy, complexity theory and discourse analysis, amongst others. Drawing together this amalgam of approaches to research is consistent with the fuzziness of the contemporary 21st century world. A critical reading of hermeneutics, they suggested, creates the bridge between the bricolage of theories that reject boundary setting and Cartesian rationality on the one hand, and critical theory on the other.

An understanding of Gadamerian hermeneutics reminds a critical theorist and researcher “that meaning making cannot be quarantined from where one stands or is placed in the web of social reality” (2010, p. 148). To this view of meaning, Roberge (2011) added that ideology plays a major role: ideology is filled with meaning (rather than meaning something), thus inquiries must seek out the links between groups and their beliefs. Coupled with the impetus to moral action, research will interpret according to the context and the social forces at play over that context, and will seek to point to appropriate action in relation to the phenomena-in-context (Steinberg and Kincheloe 2010). Roberge (2011) too regarded critical hermeneutics as a theory of action responding to ‘ideology, domination and violence’ (p. 13), by developing, for example, participation and solidarity.

Steinberg with Kincheloe noted that the ‘critical’ addition to hermeneutics brings a concern with power and justice, and it requires the ethnographic researcher to seek to expose the “concealed motives that move events and shape everyday life” (2010, p. 148). Gadamer’s notion of historical context now includes researcher self-awareness, the place and significance of culture in a research context, the construction of research design and the significance of human subjectivity and its construction. The voices of the subjugated are brought forth, and the hermeneutic circle engages the researcher in conversation with those voices, in the pursuit of deeper understanding. Not only are the voices raised and heard, but also they are located in their unique historical, socio-economic, political and cultural contexts.

Critical hermeneutics attempts to marry both the ontological project that Gadamer had in mind, and the epistemic project of critical theory. It signals particular ways to go about designing and conducting research. It represents a bricolage that draws widely on disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history and economics, and on research scholarship. This of course includes phenomenology, Gadamerian hermeneutics, critical theory and many postmodern influences, such as gender studies, cultural studies, indigenous research, discourse theory, autoethnography and narrative. While this sounds like a random and eclectic mix, critical hermeneutics gets its coherence from its emphasis on analysis uncovering power and ideological influences, its focus on social justice outcomes, and the contextualised place of researcher, participants and research texts in their varied forms.

Post-Intentional Phenomenology

A final influence over the content and analysis in this book is attributable to the recent work of Vagle (2010, 2014). He has developed a critical dimension to phenomenology (2015), thus taking it beyond its descriptive/interpretive bounds, and his work adds dimensions not present in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. He emphasises postmodern strategies such as journaling, and appeals to the postmodern concept of ‘playing’ with different approaches to disrupt customary flows of thought and action. It is especially Vagle’s use of ‘post-intentional phenomenology’ that is worth grappling with, however. I do so as it provides some of the tools to enable a discussion of the meaningful ways in which practitioners within and across schools engage with the policy imperative to implement modern teaching and learning practice, characterised by flexible learning environments and digital technology.

Vagle (2014) described intentionality as the inseparable connectedness between subjects (people) and objects in the world (animate, inanimate, ideas). Intentionality signifies our meaningful connection to the world, not conscious planning to take action, or deliberate choice. Having an understanding of intentionality is central to engaging in research that has a phenomenological impetus. There are intentional relations ‘that manifest and appear’ (p. 27), and the researcher is attempting to grasp these, which appear to take the form of ways in which people are connected to other people, their workplaces and their work. The manifestation of these relationships may be evident in their feelings, such as hopefulness, despair, confusion, joy or resistance. The development Vagle posited, building on earlier phenomenological uses of intentionality, was to see intentionality as a meaningful connection people make to their world. In this sense, he prefers the notion of consciousness-with, rather than consciousness-of. The latter sense speaks, Vagle argued, of Western ego-centred rationality (and here we can see his postmodernism come into play). Clearly, Vagle’s intent was to place “phenomenological philosophies in dialogue with aspects of post-structural philosophies” (p. 29).

The “dynamic intentional relationships that tie participants, the researcher, the produced text, and their positionalities together” (p. 30) yield understanding in the research process. For Vagle, “this positioning is only known through intentionality” (p. 30), and he thus gave significant emphasis to constant self-critique by researchers of their performance in the field, which he considered an ethical act. Vagle clearly indicated that the researcher is implicated in the findings of research, by virtue of being positioned. Just as research participants are constantly projecting forward into various relationships, so the researcher is projecting into the research relationship. Research findings are anything but final, being instead “de-centered as multiple, partial and endlessly deferred” (p. 31. Emphasis in the original).

The concept of intentionality is one I now attempt to integrate into my research, particularly in regard to making sense of ways my participants make sense of their lived experience and describe their meaningful connection to their lifeworld. Vagle’s post-intentional approach is liberating insofar as it de-emphasises the notion of deriving universal or defined essences of meaning and understanding. Apart from recognising my own place in the research process, there is an opportunity to share and develop mutual understandings with my participants. Vagle furthermore suggested constant self-reflection, fundamental to which is the awareness researchers have of their own position.

A Personal Note

There are several influences that intersect with, and overlap, the concerns, themes, ideas and topics presented in this book. The obvious concerns relate to a question about what is happening to teachers’ work in the midst of rapid changes. Change is, surely, one of life’s constants, so I want to be careful from the outset not to create the impression that I think teachers and school leaders find themselves caught up in some kind of ‘revolution’, or that decades of idyll have been suddenly and rudely interrupted.

Like countless other teachers before (and many still today), I practiced my work in cellular rooms with fixed, uniform furniture. Indeed, some of my early teaching was carried out in classrooms not unlike the ones in which I spent my school years, replete with rows of the solid wooden desk/seat and hinged top and inkwell! More modern furniture allowed a little more flexibility, the overhead projector and slide projector (if you were a really progressive sort) may have been replaced with the data projector and interactive whiteboard, but, by and large, the single-cell room, with the teacher the focus of attention at the front, has remained largely unchanged.

In the past five years or so, in New Zealand, and in schools elsewhere in the world (in parts of Australia, in some Scandinavian, English and American contexts, for example), this picture has been undergoing considerable change, however. Contemporary architectural and furniture design has been implemented in the building of new schools and other educational institutions, and in the renovation of exiting buildings. ‘Eco friendly’ and ‘smart’ design principles have been utilised, combined with the provision of technology-rich infrastructure (such as ultra fast broadband and sophisticated servers) to create places of learning that have been dubbed ‘modern’, ‘innovative’, ‘flexible’, ‘agile’ and ‘new generation’ to name some of the more popular terms. In these spaces, much larger than single-cell rooms, multiple classes are combined and teachers work in teams. No longer is the sole teacher at the front the focus of attention (indeed, there is no longer a discernible ‘front’).

Moreover, the focus in education has been shifting steadily in this century from ‘knowing’ to ‘learning’. Teachers are becoming ‘facilitators’, ‘learning coaches’ or ‘learning advisors’, and ‘students’ are ‘learners’. These changes in the physical space of learning, the changes in the way we think and speak about teaching and learning, and the tools and artefacts which support teachers’ work, are all bringing about significant demands on teachers to reconceptualise they way they think and carry out their work.

As a teacher educator, I have some interest in conveying to my students an understanding of what underlies these changes. I also have an interest in supporting them to develop some of the strategies they will find invaluable once they step into the classroom, particularly if it is to be a shared, collaborative space. Universities can work with, and support schools in their work. Research work with schools falls into this category, and as Freire said, as a researcher I have a responsibility to “communicate and proclaim what I discover” (1998, p. 35). Schools have a vested interest in the external perspectives researchers can provide on the nature and processes of their work.

Division of Content

In the following chapter, I will introduce readers to the specifics of the research process that has generated the findings on which the book’s content reflects. To challenge the oft-heard comment that “there is no research” to support the shifts towards flexibility in architecture and pedagogy and digital strategies, Chapter 3 will consider a review of relevant literature informing the field on which my research inquiries into flexible, modern environments and pedagogy is based. Chapters 4–8 will present and discuss the findings, with reference to impacts on teachers’ work, reflective practice and responses to the policy drive to implement ‘21st-century learning’. The book concludes with a chapter of ‘take home lessons’.