Realising and extending Stenhouse's vision of teacher research: the case of English history teachers
Abstract
Stenhouse's original vision of teacher research incorporated a strong emphasis on curriculum construction, interpretation and evaluation. This curricular emphasis is less prevalent in the present in the dominant ‘professional development’ and ‘what works’ traditions of teacher research. It is shown here, however, that this curricular focus has been maintained in the published discourse of history teachers in England. Using a citation analysis to illuminate the growth of professional knowledge, this paper shows how curricular issues drove history-teacher published discourse between 2004 and 2013, and how this discourse drew upon a highly subject-specific knowledge base in this period. Research by teachers in a tradition of ‘curriculum theorising’, it is argued here, could prove to be a powerful component in establishing a more systematic knowledge base for the profession.
Introduction
The teacher research movement, advocated most famously in the UK by Lawrence Stenhouse, took as its original purpose to involve teachers in a process of curriculum construction (Stenhouse, 1975; Elliott, 1983; Rudduck & Hopkins, 1985), an aim made possible by various curriculum freedoms in British schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1980s, however, the idea of teacher research has moved in two broad directions, both of which place less emphasis on curriculum development. On the one hand, teacher research has been seen as a means of professional development in which teachers, by deploying the tools of classroom-based research, might reflect further on their own practice, perhaps with the aim of establishing greater professional autonomy (Zeichner, 1993; Pollard, 2005). On the other hand, increasing demands for teaching to become an evidence-based profession have led to calls for practising teachers to work with university academics in order to produce knowledge about good pedagogical practice, whether this be context dependent (Elliott, 1991; Zeichner, 1993; Carr & Kemmis, 2005; Somekh & Zeichner, 2009; Kemmis, 2011) or context independent (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Hargreaves, 1999; Groundwater-Smith & Hunter, 2006). Within these broad movements, Stenhouse's original vision of teacher research as involving a process of curriculum construction, interpretation and evaluation has tended to be eclipsed by one that emphasises the development of pedagogy.
In a recent paper, however, Counsell argued that a tradition of curriculum research—as envisaged by Stenhouse—has been a central feature of history-teacher publication in England (Counsell, 2011a, b). Counsell argued that history teachers have, since the early 1990s, developed a sustained and coherent research tradition predicated on a process of ‘curriculum theorising’ that can be seen as one realisation of Stenhouse's construal of teacher research. It is my intention in this paper to develop this conclusion further by elucidating the ways in which history teachers have taken on Stenhouse's notion of teacher research. Specifically, I seek to demonstrate here how history-teacher publication between 2004 and 2013 drew on highly subject-specific literature to build collective knowledge about the nature of history curricula and how this is realised in classrooms. Further, I seek to show that history teachers have taken the idea of curriculum research to its logical conclusion, going further than Stenhouse envisaged by using pedagogical practice to explore, define and elucidate the properties of history as a discipline within the context of a national curricular framework.
My argument here proceeds in three stages. First, drawing on a citation analysis, I shall show that the issues that have been most readily sustained in the published discourse of history teachers have been those which involve a process of ‘curriculum theorising’, a working out of the disciplinary boundaries of a subject at a pedagogical site. Secondly, using the citation data, I shall show that this form of research drew predominantly on subject-specific literature in order to undertake this process of curriculum theorising. From these two empirical analyses, I shall argue that curricular knowledge—of the kind constructed by history teachers through their published discourse—forms a powerful body of professionally owned knowledge for teachers. Indeed, the body of curriculum knowledge produced by history teachers in England might serve as an example, or even a model, of how the theoretical knowledge base of teachers might be created and extended in a systematic way.
Teachers as researchers
Two broad traditions of teacher research have emerged in recent years. One tradition involves an emphasis on teachers being reflective practitioners (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; López-Pastor et al., 2011). The underlying principle of this approach is that teachers, and indeed other professionals, can come to a better understanding of their particular contexts through a process of explicit reflection. As Schön put it, a practitioner ‘becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case’ (Schön, 1983, p. 68). There has been a proliferation in the number of books, many aimed at novice teachers, that outline an approach to ‘reflective practice’ (McEntee et al., 2003; McIntosh, 2010; McGregor & Cartwright, 2011; Arnold, 2012; Tarrant, 2013) all of which provide teachers with the tools they need in order to better understand their practice. Reflection can of course be collaborative as well as individualistic, and British schools have increasingly drawn on the Japanese tradition of lesson study which is an explicitly collaborative form of reflective practice (Dudley, 2012; Cajkler et al., 2014). Although the definition of reflective practice tends to vary from author to author, at heart this construal of teacher research sees it as a sophisticated form of professional development in which individual teachers, or groups of teachers, deploy research tools in order to better understand the context in which they work, with a view to developing their practice accordingly.
A second approach, and one not necessarily incompatible with the first, has seen teacher research as a means of producing knowledge about pedagogy that goes beyond particular contexts. Here, teacher research contributes to a public knowledge base about effective teaching, such as through the creation of case studies or participation in large-scale trials. One example of this are those trials currently being funded in the UK by the Education Endowment Foundation.1 Partnership, particularly between schools and universities, is seen as central to this understanding of the teacher–researcher, particularly as research networks are a means of disseminating research findings and bringing research expertise from universities into schools. Some journals do exist with the purpose of sharing research produced by teachers, including those who completed their research as part of a programme of initial teacher education (Taber, 2010). This approach to teacher research has, however, been dogged by criticism of the quality of the research that teachers produce (Hargreaves, 1996 2007, 2007; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, pp. 19–21; Goldacre, 2013). The key issue for this particular tradition of teacher research is whether or not the knowledge produced by teachers is transferable beyond particular contexts, and whether such knowledge can inform other teachers about ‘what works’ in practice. Although this particular research tradition has arguably yet to come to maturity, the production of knowledge about effective pedagogy nevertheless remains a goal for a number of teachers and policy makers.
These two broad approaches are internally complex, interconnected and poorly delineated, but are perhaps best differentiated in terms of the knowledge they produce. The knowledge output from the first approach—the ‘professional development’ tradition—is limited because of its emphasis on gaining knowledge within particular contexts, meaning that knowledge tends to be shared only within relatively small communities and is not accessible to a wider audience. The knowledge produced by the second approach—sometimes referred to as ‘what works’ research—aims to be disseminated more generally, though numerous questions have been raised about the quality, consistency and sustainability of this research. It is not my intention here to argue against either of these approaches. The first, insofar as it is a research tradition, has an important role to play in teacher professional development and school improvement. The second, particularly where clear boundaries are provided as to the nature and scope of the research, might well go on to provide a knowledge base that makes it possible to develop a set of pedagogical principles on which teachers can draw. I do, however, wish to argue that both of these traditions fail to unlock fully the potential in Stenhouse's construal of the teacher–researcher.
The missing dimension here is the subject specificity of the curriculum. The ‘professional development’ and ‘what works’ traditions are generally associated with improving pedagogy, rather than exploring the nature of the curriculum to be taught. Stenhouse's interests were clearly pedagogical, but his emphasis was less on using research to develop a set of teaching techniques, and more on establishing what a particular curriculum design might make possible in the classroom. As Stenhouse put it, ‘what plays are for actors and directors—media through which to learn by their everyday activity about the nature of life and their art—curricula are for students and teachers. They are media through which we learn about both knowledge and pedagogy because they invite pupils to test ideas about both in practice’ (Stenhouse, 1985, p. 73). This argument was heavily informed by Stenhouse's commitment to a process-based curriculum model, as realised in the Humanities Curriculum Project, in which teachers and pupils set out together in pursuit of an understanding of the world in which we live. In this context, it was natural for Stenhouse to see teacher research as involving a process of curriculum design, rather than working out how to deliver a curriculum decided on by some other authority.
History teacher research and the National Curriculum
Stenhouse was writing at a time of considerable change and upheaval as structural reforms in the British education system—particularly the march towards comprehensive schooling across most of the country—created questions regarding what ought to be taught to children of all abilities. The Humanities Curriculum Project and the Schools Council projects all emerged in this context, and Stenhouse's notion of teacher research was in keeping with a situation where teachers had considerable freedoms in curriculum design. This flexibility came to an end, however, with the introduction of the National Curriculum, first taught in England and Wales in 1991.2 At the same time, the introduction of the GCSE, first taught in 1988, began to close down discussions about different forms of public examination by setting out a standard national examination (Torrance, 1987; Bowe & Whitty, 1989). Now, for the first time, there was a common knowledge base that all teachers were expected to teach to all pupils, accompanied by a common assessment system. Stenhouse's principle—that the curriculum is a set of hypotheses to be solved—was as applicable to the new National Curriculum as it was to any other curriculum. The National Curriculum contained a complex array of knowledge and skills, concepts and competences, all of which, in the tradition of teacher curriculum research, were potential hypotheses waiting to be explored in the classroom.
Developing pupils’ understanding of the distinctive properties of disciplinary knowledge and its difference from the ‘everyday’ is what history teachers have been attempting to do for about 25 years. Moreover, history teachers’ published theorising has rendered the principles of that practice increasingly explicit. Where practice published as articles or shared through websites and workshops is openly cognisant of others’ efforts, it adds up to a coherent discourse of some power. (Counsell, 2011a, p. 203)
Counsell identified a number of curriculum ‘hypotheses’ that history teachers have set out to resolve, particularly through their published discourse.3 At heart, she argued, the problems that history teachers were addressing were those that arose in trying to bring an academic discipline to a pedagogical site, as demanded by the way in which the discipline of history was captured in the stipulations of the National Curriculum (Counsell, 2011b, pp. 1–3).
Practising history teachers, in their writing, have also pointed towards the existence of a sustained, coherent discourse of teacher research. One history teacher, for example, noted that ‘the teaching of [the curriculum concept of] causation in Year 7 has developed so fruitfully that approaches to practice are well established and their principles widely debated by teachers, researchers and teacher–researchers’ (Jenner, 2010, p. 4). Another history teacher stated that ‘over the last two years, professional debate surrounding [the curriculum concepts of] change and continuity has proliferated as more and more practitioners have experimented with, and evaluated, different approaches’ (Jones, 2009, p. 13). In both cases, these history teachers were taking concepts specified by the National Curriculum (cause, change and continuity), and pointing towards a tradition of teacher research that provided a basis on which the curricular properties of these concepts might be better understood. The existence of a National Curriculum certainly placed constraints on history teachers, yet at the same time it gave them a common set of reference points that could then be the basis of a sustained and coherent tradition of curriculum research.
The idea of exploring the conceptual boundaries of a national curriculum are fully in keeping with Stenhouse's vision of the role of teacher research and the existence of a national curriculum in England meant that research into the curriculum by teachers adopted a degree of transferability. A national framework meant that the curricular issues being considered by a teacher in one part of the country were the same as those in another. This common set of problems made possible the existence of curriculum research by teachers at scale. As Counsell has indicated, it was in the context of a National Curriculum that history teachers increasingly concerned themselves with a process of curriculum theorising. Indeed, as the next stage of this paper demonstrates, it was a concern to work out the nature of the curriculum being taught that directed the published discourse of history teachers.
Citation network analysis: research design
In order to uncover the nature of this tradition of teacher research, it was necessary to conduct an empirical study that set out the substance and structure of the tradition. This study proceeded as an analysis of history-teacher published discourse as identified by Counsell (2011a, b) and teachers such as Jones (2009) and Jenner (2010). It is important to make a distinction between a ‘publication’ and a ‘discourse’. A collection of publications it not a discourse: rather, a published discourse exists where particular themes emerge that are addressed by a number of teacher–researchers in their writing, with subsequent teacher–researchers advancing the conversation further by explicit reference to those who wrote before. One way in which a published discourse can be systematically analysed is through a citation analysis. Citation analysis is used widely in studies of higher education, a research tradition greatly facilitated by the existence of citation databases that are used for the purpose of judging research impact (Crane, 1972; Gattrell, 1984; Scott, 2013, pp. 118–120). In school education, however, citation analysis has been of little use to researchers owing to (a) a lack of systematic publication of teacher research, (b) low citation rates in teacher publication where it existed and (c) the absence of a citation database. To some extent, however, the first two of these problems have been overcome in history-teacher publication in England. The publication of teacher research is made possible by the existence of the journal Teaching History, published by the Historical Association, and each article in the journal contains a list of citations.
It remained, however, that in order to make a citation analysis of history teacher research, it was first necessary to construct a citation database for this journal. A 10-year period (March 2004–December 2013) was chosen for the purpose of this study. From this time period, all of the articles were selected that were written by practising history teachers. In addition, articles written by ‘non-practising’ history teachers were included, typically written by individuals who had moved into teacher education but who were drawing on their prior practice in their writing. This gave a total of 171 articles written with a ‘teacher voice’. These 171 articles collectively made 1696 citations of 929 publications. Repeat citations within one publication—including ibid. and op. cit.—were excluded from the sample. The mean number of citations made by a teacher in his or her writing was 9.9 (n = 171, SD = 6.3).
This citation database makes it possible to see who was citing whom, but a citation does not make a discourse. Rather, a discourse—in the broadest sense—involves a conversation developed over time about a particular issue to which a number of teacher–researchers contribute. Using the citation data, these conversations can be illustrated most clearly by means of directed social network graphs that place highly cited papers at the heart of an ‘ego-network’ (Borgatti et al., 2013, pp. 274–275). Figure 1 shows an idealised example. Here, Publication 1 is a highly cited work in teacher publication, being cited by Publications 2–4. In addition to citing Publication 1, the subsequent publications also cite each other. Although some caution is needed in assuming that such a connected network does represent a coherent and sustained discourse, I would argue that these networks are likely to be good indicators of published discourse, which can then be confirmed by subsequent content analysis. To this end, I took the 16 most cited works called upon by history teachers between 2004 and 2013, and placed each at the centre of a network graph. I then took the connected publications in each graph to establish (a) whether there was a key issue under discussion and (b) what this issue was. Two of those networks are set out below as typical cases.
Case 1: exploring ‘causation’ as a curricular construct
The examples in this case (Figure 2) all cite Chapman (2003). This particular conversation emerged from Chapman's attempt to address the way in which the historical concept of ‘causation’ operates within a curriculum. In doing so, he was explicit in addressing that this involved a process of working out what causation looks like as a curriculum component. Chapman stated that
… it is worth exploring what causation actually means with students. What exactly characterises the sophisticated and complex pieces of causal reasoning that historians present us with? How do they attempt to classify causes and ascribe different values to them? What makes one explanation of, say, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire different—and perhaps even ‘better’—than another? (Chapman, 2003: 47)
This particular question—about the nature of causation as a taught concept—is developed further by Chapman in a later piece, and by Woodcock (2005), who drew upon Chapman's work to ask about the role of language in developing a sequence of lessons in which pupils might be brought to understand the causes of an event. In the work of both Chapman and Woodcock, as it developed between 2003 and 2006, they explored what it meant to make ‘causation’ a curricular construct, using the site of their own practice as a crucible in which to test their understandings.
This line of enquiry is then picked up by Buxton (2010) and subsequently developed by Worth (2012). Buxton takes the emphasis on causation set out by Chapman and Woodcock, inter alios, but then develops this by addressing the role played by counterfactuals in causal explanations. In particular, Buxton sets out in her article to address the extent to which counterfactual reasoning is a necessary component of constructing causal analyses. This is a good example of a further probing of the conceptual boundaries of the discipline when deployed to a pedagogical site: in reflecting on her own practice, Buxton was providing a more sophisticated account as to what the curricular properties of this historical concept might be. Worth (2012) then develops this thread further, drawing on both teacher research and historical theory to argue for making limited use of counterfactuals in order to help pupils establish more clearly an association between cause and effect. In all of the articles in this example, teacher–researchers write about their pupils, their lessons and their pedagogy: the overriding concern—and what seems to sustain the conversation over time—is to establish what good causal reasoning might look like in the classroom. The classroom, in this sense, becomes a site in which to theorise about the curriculum.
Case 2: determining the curricular relationship between history and reading
This second case (Figure 3) is based around articles that cite Kitson (2003). Literacy is a key aim of many curricula and the development of pupil literacy is something with which all iterations of the National Curriculum and public examination specifications in England tasked history teachers. In this example of published discourse, however, we once again see the disciplinary properties of this curriculum requirement being explored. In this case, teachers were exploring the curriculum properties of examination specifications for pupils at Advanced Level (age 16–18). In her article, Kitson encouraged more explicit emphasis on what the purpose of reading was in the history classroom; in particular, she argued that teachers needed to make clear to pupils the ways in which reading could contribute to progression in learning history. Bellinger (2008) developed this idea of reading for a purpose further by introducing historical scholarship into her lessons, and used this to reflect on how engagement with scholarship shaped pupils’ experience of the curriculum.
Howells (2011) took this further, with explicit reference back to Kitson and Bellinger, by arguing that learning history requires that one learns to read historically, before going on to consider what this might look like in the classroom. Laffin (2012) drew directly on Howells, Bellinger and Kitson to develop further the idea of what it might mean to learn to read ‘historically’, identify a number of aspects of historical writing that pupils needed to learn in order to become historically literate. All four of the articles referred to here were about learning history for public examination and, understandably, all four of these authors had a concern as to how their pupils might best be brought to success in those exams. In all four cases, however, this was approached less by weighing up the relative merits of particular pedagogical techniques, but rather by explicit reflection on the nature of what they were teaching. As with the previous case, these were teachers making hypotheses about the nature of the curriculum, and then addressing these through their practice.
The required knowledge base for curriculum theorising
These two examples are typical of the kinds of conversations that emerged in the published discourse of history teacher–researchers between 2004 and 2013 as captured through a citation network analysis based on highly cited publications. The citation network analysis demonstrates that the cumulative research produced by history teacher–researchers—that is, the contributions on which subsequent writers extended collective understandings—involved an attempt to address curricular questions. As the two cases illustrate, such curricular theorising involves using classroom practice as an opportunity to probe the disciplinary properties of a curriculum. Although publications by teacher–researchers across the 10-year period in question addressed a wide range of topics, it was matters related to this process of curriculum theorising that seem to have been most sustained, and which have a cumulative character. These examples support the conclusions reached by Counsell (2011b) regarding the nature of history teacher research. It should be noted, too, that this particular tradition differs significantly from the more common ‘professional development’ and ‘what works’ styles of teacher research that currently predominate. Although teacher–researchers in this study wrote explicitly about professional development and the success or failure of pedagogic practice in their individual works, it was this third tradition of curriculum theorising that sustained an interest over time.
The nature of this research tradition can be understood by exploring, as I have thus far done, the substance of the conversations that evolved over time. A further understanding, however, can be gained by revealing the knowledge base on which this research tradition is built. Stenhouse was relatively silent on what knowledge he thought teachers needed in order to engage in curriculum research, though he clearly did see the growth of teacher knowledge as an important component of this work. In the next part of this paper, I shall use the citation data to push a little further what can be said about the nature of this tradition of ‘curriculum theorising’. In order to establish the different knowledge bases on which teacher–researchers were drawing, five categories (Table 1) were created iteratively and each of the 929 publications cited across the period were assigned to one of those categories. Where there was potential overlap between categories the final decision was made based on the evidence base being drawn upon in the publication.
| Knowledge Base | Code | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Practising history teachers | TEACH | History teachers writing about their practice, or using their practice as the basis on which to theorise about the curriculum. Practice typically involves the creation of schemes of work, school curricula, one-off projects or extra-curricular activities. |
| Non-practising history teachers writing with a teacher voice | TEACH-NP | Knowledge in this category tends to be produced by university staff working in teacher education or advisory teachers working nationally or in a region. Articles are normally based on practice – identified above – either of the author or a collaborator. |
| Empirical work on history education | HEER | Research based on philosophical, psychological or sociological studies, usually involving children outside of a classroom environment. This work tends to be of an international character. |
| Generic work on education | EDUC | Research based on the philosophical, psychological or sociological studies of education. |
| Substantive works of history | HIST | Historical research written by professional historians researching a particular period of history. |
| Other | OTHER | Works that were included in this category included school textbooks, fiction and philosophy. |
Knowledge Base 1: teacher research
The single largest citation base for teacher–researchers writing between 2004 and 2013 was other works published by history teachers. Twenty-eight per cent of citations went to practising teachers and 14% went to non-practising teachers, meaning that in total 42% of citations pointed towards the work of other teacher–researchers. In most cases the articles being cited involved classroom-based research where teachers reported on a particular lesson, scheme of work or curriculum model and outlined the principles that had guided the construction process. For example, the most cited publication (Riley, 2000) addressed medium-term curriculum planning and the role played by ‘enquiry questions’ in curriculum construction, while Woodcock (2005)—the most cited work published in the period in question—wrote about the relationship between language and historical concepts when teaching history. Although the median number of citations received by a piece of teacher research was two, there were several publications that received considerably more. As Table 2 shows, of the 16 most cited papers, 12 were examples of teacher research and, of those articles cited five times or more (Table 3), 69% were examples of teacher research. This points towards the coherence of the published discourse of history teacher–researchers, and also indicates that work published by such teachers went on to be subsequently useful to later writers in the field.
| RANK | ARTICLE | TYPE | CITATIONS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Riley (2000) | TEACH-NP | 23 |
| 2 | Banham (1998) | TEACH | 16 |
| 3 | Woodcock (2005) | TEACH | 15 |
| 4 | Counsell (2004) | TEACH-NP | 15 |
| 5 | Banham (2000) | TEACH | 13 |
| 6 | Chapman (2003) | TEACH | 11 |
| 7 | Shemilt (2000) | HEER | 11 |
| 8 | Harris (2001) | TEACH | 11 |
| 9 | Phillips (2001) | TEACH-NP | 11 |
| 10 | Hammond (2002) | TEACH | 10 |
| 11 | Lee (2005) | HEER | 10 |
| 12 | Counsell (2004) | TEACH-NP | 10 |
| 13 | Howson (2007) | HEER | 10 |
| 14 | Kitson (2003) | TEACH-NP | 10 |
| 15 | Riley (1999) | TEACH | 10 |
| 16 | Carr (1969) | HIST | 10 |
| Category | Total citations of this category | Percentage | Articles cited ≥ 5 | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TEACH | 471 | 28% | 30 | 46% |
| HIST | 366 | 22% | 3 | 5% |
| HEER | 349 | 21% | 14 | 22% |
| TEACH-NP | 230 | 14% | 15 | 23% |
| EDUC | 154 | 9% | 2 | 3% |
| OTHER | 126 | 7% | 1 | 2% |
| Total | 1696 | 65 |
Knowledge Base 2: history education empirical research
Works in this category were distinguished from works in Knowledge Base 1 primarily on the findings coming not as a result of teachers researching their own practice, but rather by means of large-scale empirical studies that examined history education through the lenses of the psychology, sociology, philosophy and history of education. Twentry-one per cent of citations by teacher–researchers in the period 2004–2013 went to research work in history education, and similarly 22% of publications cited five times or more went to this category. In the UK, large-scale funded projects—such as the 13–16 curriculum evaluation (Shemilt, 1980), Project CHATA (e.g Lee & Shemilt, 2003) and Usable Historical Pasts (e.g Howson, 2007, 2009)—all produced papers that attracted the interest of teacher–researchers. This tradition has a large research output that examines the ways in which pupils progress in their conceptual understandings of the discipline. A number of international scholars in the field of history education were also cited by teacher researchers. From the USA, teachers drew on the work of Wineburg (2001), particularly his novice–expert studies of reading history, and Barton and Levstik (2004) whose work on historical significance interested a number of researching teachers. Importantly, all of these authors communicated their research to teachers through publication in Teaching History, making it accessible to teacher–researchers, though it should be noted that citations were not limited to publications in this journal.
Knowledge Base 3: historical scholarship
The third knowledge base for teacher–researchers to emerge from the citation analysis is that of historical scholarship. Works of historical scholarship, generally written by practising academic historians, received 22% of citations. The majority of works of historical scholarship, however, received only a single citation; typically such works were related to the substantive period being considered by history teachers in a particular article. The exception to this, however, were works published by academic historians in what might be called the philosophy or theory of history. For example, the three most cited works of historical scholarship cited by teacher–researchers were Carr's What is history? (1969), Evans’ In defence of history (1997) and Megill's Historical knowledge, historical error (2007). In works such as these, academic historians probe the nature and boundaries of their discipline, addressing its purpose, ontology and epistemology. This knowledge base, which is often highly theoretical in character, seemed to attract a great deal of interest from teacher–researchers, possibly in part because of such texts being common on undergraduate history and initial teacher education courses. It would seem, nonetheless, that the attraction of teacher–researchers to this knowledge base would corroborate Counsell's (2011a) conclusion that one of the major tasks of research-active history teachers has been to explore the curriculum properties of the discipline of history; reference to works in historical theory would seem an essential part of such a process.
Knowledge Base 4: generic educational research
The knowledge base most conspicuous by its absence in this analysis was works of generic educational research, which includes psychological research into how children learn as well as studies in the sociology, philosophy and history of education that do not have a history-specific focus. Just 9% of citations went to works in this category. There were two publications cited five times or more: Black and Wiliam's (1998) ‘Inside the black box’ and Donovan and Bransford's (2005) How students learn. If teacher–researchers are typically engaging in a process of curriculum theorising about their subject discipline, as the analysis of knowledge bases 1, 2 and 3 suggest, then it is perhaps not surprising that little reference is made to non-subject specific research. The fact that such generic research is less available to practising history teachers might further explain the paucity of reference to this knowledge base. In general, however, it seems that teacher–researchers found little to interest them in generic educational research when contributing to their published discourse.
Curriculum research and the knowledge base of teachers
Two observations can be made of the data presented in this paper. The first is that history teachers, in their published discourse, primarily addressed curricular questions in which they probed and assessed the properties of history curricula as these became manifest in their own classroom practice. The second is that, in producing this research tradition, history teachers drew heavily on subject-specific knowledge bases that included the research of other history teachers, wider studies into how children learn history and historical scholarship, particularly regarding the nature of history as a discipline. I seek to conclude this paper by arguing that, in producing this tradition of curriculum research, history teachers have gone further than Stenhouse originally envisaged by producing a sustained and coherent research tradition that transcends the boundaries of particular contexts and, as such, represents a coherent and codified form of professional knowledge.
It is necessary at this stage to provide some clarity as to what a professional knowledge base for teachers might look like. Shulman (1986) famously offered three knowledge bases for teachers: content knowledge (knowledge of the discipline being taught), pedagogical content knowledge (disciplinary knowledge adapted for the purpose of teaching) and curricular knowledge (the ways in which the subject can be structured in a curriculum). Shulman's distinction between content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge proved a pregnant idea, notwithstanding the argument that the distinction between the two may well be untenable (McEwan & Bull, 1991). His third category of ‘curricular knowledge’ has, however, tended to be overlooked in subsequent analyses of teacher knowledge. Curricular knowledge, for Shulman, involved knowledge of the different ways in which it was possible to structure a curriculum in a particular subject; associated with this are questions as to ways in which the subject can be assessed, the kinds of principles which might govern curriculum construction and the ways in which the curriculum of one subject might meaningfully interact with another. As my analysis here has demonstrated, these are precisely the kinds of issues about which history teachers have built knowledge in their professional discourse between 2004 and 2013.
If there is no national curriculum, then what unites teachers of one subject is the existence of their subject discipline. The imposition of a National Curriculum in England from 1991 provided further structures and fewer freedoms for history teachers. This did, however, mean that history teachers now had a great deal more in common. Not only did they share a discipline (history) but they also faced a common curriculum framework that represented the ‘recontexualisation’ of the academic discipline as a school subject. A large quantity of history teachers’ published works examine the relationship between one teacher's classroom, the centrally imposed curriculum model and the academic discipline of history. It is likely, I would suggest, that the interaction between these three phenomena made possible the considerable growth in history teacher professional knowledge in the period in question. Stenhouse's principle—that the curriculum is a set of problems to be resolved—seems to have held as true in the context of a centrally imposed curriculum, and indeed the existence of a national framework seems to have produced a context in which professional knowledge might more easily be transferred from one place to another.
If this analysis stands, then history teachers in England have made considerable steps towards establishing a knowledge base on which their professional autonomy might be founded. The lack of a recognised professional knowledge base has been seen as one of the reasons why governments have been unwilling to transfer professional autonomy to teachers (Wilkinson, 2005, p. 428). If history teachers, as I have argued in this paper, have succeeded in establishing a professional knowledge base for themselves, then arguably they are now in a much stronger position to make claims to professional autonomy. The professional knowledge base described in this paper is now a component of several teacher education courses in England and, on such courses, part of the induction into the profession is seen as gaining some mastery over a body of professional knowledge, including identifying ways in which that knowledge base can and needs to be extended.4 Importantly, the extension of this knowledge base is something over which history teachers have considerable control. It is difficult to think of major problems in history teaching that do not have a tradition of being examined through history teacher research. It is, I would argue, the realisation and extension of Stenhouse's vision of teacher research through a process of ‘curriculum theorising’ that provides us with the best opportunity for establishing the autonomy of profession.
