Critical Perspectives on Educational Policies and Professional Identities

Critical Perspectives is a vibrant addition to the academic literature, echoing the spirit of Bathmaker and Harnett’s influential work while carving its own distinct path. Within its pages, a chorus of practitioner-researcher and established academic voices offer a refreshing perspective on doctoral education that extends far beyond the confines of traditional school or college settings.

This book is a must-read for anyone with a stake in doctoral education, providing a rich tapestry of insights into policy and professionalism across diverse landscapes. From Higher Education to the National Health Service, Further Education, and Early Years, the authors unravel the complexities with meticulous detail. What emerges is a vivid portrayal of local concerns with a resounding impact that transcends boundaries, resonating across phases, settings, and sectors.

What sets this volume apart is its innovative approach to co-production, seamlessly weaving together emerging and established academic voices in each chapter. This dynamic collaboration opens a portal for the researching-professional, inviting them to seamlessly transition into a professional-researcher role. The book balances academic rigor with a grounded practitioner focus, effortlessly straddling theory and practice, conceptual and empirical realms, honouring the individual of voice entangled within an extensive ecology of agency.

At its core, Critical Perspectives will captivate academics and practitioners with a detailed exploration of the 'messiness and situatedness' inherent in the experience of being and becoming an educational professional. The authors skillfully navigate the intricate landscape of constructing, interrogating, and challenging professionalism, unveiling the limitations of a one-size-fits-all approach with poignant clarity.

This volume is more than a departure; it is a welcome revelation. It serves as a powerful reminder that doctoral training goes beyond providing the technical skills required to manage small scale research project, urging us to embrace knowledge generation that is applied, transdisciplinary, and deeply contextualized. It serves as a catalyst for change, reminding us that engagement with policy is not restricted to interpretation and enactment but includes the invisible activism of not only inevitable but welcome disruption. Critical Perspectives is a vibrant affirmation of the landscape of doctoral education as a realm of endless possibilities and transformative potential.

-- Dr Carol Azumah Dennis, The Open University

As someone who has been involved in doctoral research for many years, it is clear that this books will be an extremely useful resource for students and supervisors of doctoral research. The book showcases, through careful discussion, the issues of educational policy and professional identities within and through doctoral research. The included research is invaluable in informing practice. The book will therefore be extremely useful in understanding how to support researcher development as well as the broader research community and is therefore highly recommended.

-- Professor Carol Fuller, Institute of Education, University of Reading

Critical Perspectives on Researching Educational Policies and Professional Identities: Lessons from Doctoral Studies is a wonderful and unique collection of chapters, perfectly showcasing doctoral students’ work. Each chapter is cleverly crafted by a recent EdD graduate and their supervisor and makes a perfect volume of co-produced practitioner research projects, undertaken by EdD students at the University of the West of England. This will be particularly useful for other students at the thesis writing stage because the collection provides a very useful catalogue of exciting and relevant topics covered in previous EdD research. I imagine that 3 audiences will be very interested in this book: EdD students; EdD lecturers and course leaders; other HEIs who provide the EdD.

The book is organised into three core sections, each one dealing with a theme of educational practitioner research. The themes skillfully bring together doctoral research projects from EdD students at UWE, ensuring that their research gets disseminated more widely, as well as in a manageable and accessible collection. Prospective students will be able to see relevant examples of research topics and projects, possibly relating to their own sectors and research interests.

I have not seen any collections like this which relate to the professional doctorate in education. This book makes a valuable contribution to the field, and an even more valuable resource for students and academics. A major strength of the book is that it represents the most the up-to-date research in the field of education, bringing together relevant, current, and interesting doctoral research projects.

The EdD is fast becoming a very popular route to acquiring a doctorate, particularly for educational professionals. This collection of chapters is a much-needed resource; the research content is varied, interesting and pertinent, and this makes it a significant and important contribution to the field of education and doctoral research.

-- Iona Burnell Reilly, University of East London

In the field of Education, a bridge is often needed between research and practice. This book not only bridges the two but also provides directions for linking research on practice and educational policy. It tells us about practitioners’ research in a range of professional settings – it is not fixed in one setting, and it has something to say to professionals in many settings. Whether or not you do research, this book will prompt you to engage with educational policies, navigate the dominant rhetoric and consider solutions emerging from research described in this book. This book explains how societal and political influences shape educational policy. It also suggests how policy may be challenged.

The diversity of approaches is thought-provoking, and there are plenty of ideas and implications that we can take from these chapters: a chapter about research in the primary school setting, for example, can get us thinking about other settings; chapters on the teaching of controversial topics like terrorism and counter-terrorism measures, for example, are helpful in terms of both theory and practice.

More importantly, this book offers a model of supporting doctoral students and researchers to publish their work in order to bring it to a wider audience, where it can actually be of use. Drawing on my own work on communities of writers and writing retreats, the editors decided to co-author and mentor doctoral students, so that students learned about the publication process. This will not only help educators but will also boost careers. It also means that all this research will not just sit in university archives. Of immediate use to other researchers and Directors of Research will be the chapters where the whole process of writing this book is opened up. So often, the stage of ‘writing up’ research is unexplained; but this book shows the way to develop a community of writers, a practitioner research community. This is how to sustain research and impact. Writing communities and retreats will sustain practitioner researchers, for whom making time for research and writing is a huge challenge. Moreover, in light of the recent warning about the urgent need for a supportive culture for researchers in Education, from the British Educational Research Association (2023), this book shows how to create such a culture through supportive peer review and dedicated time.

Finally, this book shows how to produce real research outputs that speak for and to educational professionals. Other books may focus on research findings or practical implications; this book does both, while opening up the process of practitioner research and writing. This will have more interest to more readers because of the many individual researcher voices that come through – they tell us how and why they did their research. I hope this will not only prompt more people to read and do practitioner research but also embed the idea of communities that bring researchers and practitioners together.

-- Rowena Murray, Formerly Professor in Education and Director of Research at University of the West of Scotland, now independent Higher Education consultant

How much doctoral research in education disappears after the viva? How much illuminating and critical research about the complex interplay of society, professional identity, policy and practice remains forever unread? 

Critical perspectives on researching educational policies and professional identities: Lessons from Doctoral Studies is vitally important because it is the first book to provide a space for early career researchers in education to share key aspects of their doctoral methodologies and findings by co-producing chapters with more experienced academics and a highly credible editorial team. The result is a truly fascinating, theoretically informed practitioner-based insight into education policy and practice at all levels using a range of cutting-edge and often creative methodological approaches. 

Whilst each chapter stands alone, offering insights for doctoral researchers, early career researchers, their supervisors and more experienced academics into specific subject and age phases of education research, the chapters also resonate with one another, drawing out key themes that help define and articulate close-to-practice research in its current context. The first theme looks at different ways in which educational professionalism is shaped and contested within society; the second theme highlights different perspectives on professional identity and how professional development might be conceptualised over time; and the third theme examines the impact of policy on professional identity and practice, highlighting tensions and modes of resistance.

This means that Critical perspectives on researching educational policies and professional identities: Lessons from Doctoral Studies is highly relevant and a must-read for all academics and practitioners in education who are interested in articulating their research and its value through exploring and applying theory, innovating with and adapting methodologies, and experimenting with forms of representation to reach and impact on new audiences.

-- Professor Tom Dobson, York St John University, School of Education, Language and Psychology

This novel and highly original collection speaks to a range of critical perspectives articulated in the research of a doctoral community at UWE through a rich blend of methodologies.

Each chapter is a collaboration between the doctoral graduates (now early career researchers) and experienced academics who worked as their supervisors. The result is huge contribution to our understanding of the impact of the doctoral journey on professional identities and practices in education but also to the development of the educational doctorate field itself. This is manifested in Meg Maguire’s concluding appraisal of the body of work curated here, observing how this book casts a lens on how practitioner research enabled by educational doctorates disrupts policy and in so doing is policy work in itself. This gives this collection a tactical status, moving beyond ‘lessons from’ to a form of activism.

This book will be reassuring, inspiring and developmental - politically, conceptually and practically - for anyone involved in an Ed D, thinking about doing one or curious about them.

-- Professor Julian McDougall, Bournemouth Univer