Learning in and from Practice: Opportunities and Implications for Teachers' Informal Learning in Lithuania and the United States.

Abstract

This research explores a relatively un-theorized and unstudied area of professional education: teachers’ work-based informal professional learning. A socio-cultural perspective provides the lens for this exploration. Informal learning is viewed as cultural practice in which teacher agency is a critical factor. Research results call for re-evaluation of professional development systems to include informal learning as an important path for professional growth, necessary for continual and consistent implementation of educational reforms. The dissertation is organized as a set of 5 essays. The middle three (Essays 2, 3 & 4) are stand-alone studies that explore what constitutes informal teacher learning for individual teachers (Essay 2), the roles of school cultures in their teachers’ informal learning (Essay 3), and national conditions constitutive of school and individual approaches to informal professional learning (Essay 4). Three school cultures, and their teachers (Lithuanian, Russian in Lithuania and suburban American) in two countries—Lithuania and the United States—are compared as to the ways the teachers and their educational systems perceive and provide opportunities for teacher learning. The second essay explains how teachers created and used opportunities for their professional growth. Discourse analysis revealed how teachers learned through interaction with students, colleagues, and administrators, and how personal culture influenced professional teacher identity. This study generates hypotheses about relationships between the nature of informal learning, its content and its contexts. The third essay draws from comparative and international education scholarship to discuss relationships between national education cultures in Lithuania and the United States and teacher learning illustrated in the second essay. This study employs discourse analysis to interpret meanings teachers assigned to their interactions with those national systems. Similarities and differences found in teachers’ professional learning are related to national processes of educational reforms and transnational processes of globalization. The fourth essay explores the learning environments created by the teachers’ individual school cultures and how they positioned themselves as learners within them. Literature from the fields of educational anthropology and educational leadership inform three illustrative cases of how teachers in each school co-constructed understandings of innovations through collaborating and learning from each other, while reflecting on their practice.