Resisting the Given(s): Enacting Teacher Professional Learning and Development Differently

Abstract Under the professional obligations set by the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, teachers are expected to undertake professional learning and development (PLD). Additionally, both the Teaching Council and the New Zealand Curriculum strongly encourage ‘teaching as inquiry’ as a framework for engaging with PLD. However, PLD can also be used for political purposes, for example to support the current coalition government’s desire for structured approaches to literacy and numeracy. Ministry of Education processes and language around PLD position it as a formal, product-driven event which will lead, linearly, to improved student performance. This narrow view moves away from what literature and research suggest constitutes good teacher PLD and helps establish what is ‘given’ about PLD in Aotearoa New Zealand. Current education policy renders some PLD opportunities more thinkable, sayable, doable than others. This paper examines a possible practice of resistance to the given(s), in the form of teachers playing a collective, board game-like activity. As they play, teachers design their own PLD opportunity—interrupting their own assumptions (their givens) to do so. Through playing the collective activity, teachers enter into a metacognitive space where they co-create knowledge as and for PLD. They co-create a PLD opportunity for themselves and their colleagues, and they expand their knowledge about the possible nature and form of PLD.