Chapter 7: Teachers Learning About Children's Learning

In earlier chapters, we gave accounts of the main aspects of teachers’ participation in the project. In this chapter, we revisit the Ako Manga dimension of the research, but viewed through a teacher learning lens. In this regard, we need to remember that teaching and teacher learning always take place within, and are actively shaped by, the broader discourse of education policy and accountabilities, occupational culture norms, and the expectations of parents, local community, civil society, mass media, and social media. To set the scene for our analysis of teachers’ practical engagement with the phenomenon of children’s informal and everyday learning, we first summarise the official teaching and teacher learning education policy complex in which the schools and teachers in our study were immersed. We then present a narrative account of the Ako Manga, or ‘learning and teaching in the stream of action’, processes that were followed across schools, together with a focused analysis of the way in which assessment of student achievement imperatives reportedly influenced their orientation to and engagement with the CRISPA framework (see also Bourke et al., 2018). Next, we discuss the key learnings we took from the project as researchers in terms of what worked well and what did not in teacher learning about children’s informal and everyday learning. Finally, we conclude with some suggestions about how the learning from this project might usefully inform teachers’ work and learning in the future.