Pat Thomson
Pat Thomson is Professor of Education and Director of Research in the School of Education, The University of Nottingham. She is a Special Professor in Education at Deakin University (Victoria, Australia) and Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia. She is currently the training and capacity building coordinator on the British Educational Research Association council and an Editor of the Educational Action Research journal.
Pat worked in the school sector for nearly three decades before entering higher education. She was a headteacher in classified disadvantaged schools and then had responsibility for policy and planning in the South Australian Department for Education and Children’s Services. She was awarded the inaugural Public Service Medal in 1991, a Fulbright study fellowship in 1992 and the inaugural Garth Boomer award from the Australian Curriculum Studies Association in 1995. She was President of the South Australian Secondary Principals Association, on the executive of the Australian Secondary Principals Association and was a member of a number of state and national policy-making bodies, including the National Board for Employment, Education and Training, the National Qualifications Advisory Board and the South Australian Juvenile Justice Ministerial Advisory Board.
Since entering higher education in mid 1999, Pat has written over 100 peer reviewed articles chapters, monographs and books. Her research and teaching has focused on four major areas: socially just school change; headteachers’ work; the arts and creativity; and doctoral education. Recent publications include Helping Doctoral Students Write (with Barbara Kamler, 2006), Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People (2008) and School leadership: Heads on the Block? (2009). The Routledge Doctoral Students’ Companion: Supporting Effective Research in Education and the Social Sciences and The Routledge Doctoral Supervisor’s Companion: Supporting Effective Research in Education and the Social Sciences, both co- edited with Melanie Walker, will be published in early 2010. This will be followed by a set of co -edited books on creative learning - Researching Creative Learning (with Julian Sefton Green), The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Learning (with Liora Bresler, Ken Jones and Julian Sefton Green) and a David Fulton creative learning series for teachers. She is also working with Jill Blackmore on Changing Schools Through Systematic Enquiry: Why and How School Leaders do Research.
See previously featured authors
School Leadership - Heads on the Block?
Most teachers become heads for idealistic reasons, wanting to make a difference to the lives of children and young people. Yet serving heads suggest the…
read moreFebruary 2009 | Paperback: 978-0-415-43075-3 (Routledge)
more information about School Leadership - Heads on the Block?
Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People
Visual media offer powerful communication opportunities. Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People explores the methodological, ethical, representational and theoretical issues surrounding image-based research…
read more2008 | Paperback: 978-0-415-43110-1 (Routledge)
more information about Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People
Helping Doctoral Students Write
Pedagogies for Supervision
This essential guide offers a new approach to doctoral writing, written specifically for doctoral supervisors. Rejecting the DIY websites and manuals that promote a privatised…
read more2006 | Paperback: 978-0-415-34684-9 (Routledge)
Most people who work in Education have experience in a field of educational practice other than university. I just waited a little longer than most to move into higher education… some 27 years or so. I’ve also moved house and country, and after six years in England have just about learned how to say pudding (not dessert) and how to see rabbits and foxes as wildlife rather than a feral nightmare.
Because of this relatively late transition, the question of professional practice and its influence on academic life is one that is important to me, and I often reflect on how it is that my own practitioner history informs my current research, teaching and writing. Indeed, my own shift into the University of South Australia was to design and lead a professional doctorate; not only was my salary at the university jointly paid by the state education system and the university but I was also able to cross systemic boundaries with only some loss of status and income, unlike many of my colleagues who literally have to start all over again at the bottom in order to change sectors. ‘Border maintenance’ of knowledge and position (whose knowledge counts, where, when and why?) plays out in my current research into doctoral writing and doctoral education. My own practitioner-researcher teaching with doctoral researchers attempts to disrupt the ways in which text-work/identity-work can cause some of them to feel as if they are required to shed their identity/ies as expert professional in favour of that of novice scholar.
But my work before entering higher education has further influences on what I now do. I confess that I do sometimes play the head-teacher card when working with school leaders and managers. I do this in part because I don’t want to waste time deconstructing the tired and tiresome myth of the ‘real world/ivory tower’, but also because I want to say, in not so many words, that while what I might say about changing schools might be challenging, I do actually know it’s possible, just as I know it’s not easy, because I’ve been there too. But the influences arising from practical experience go much deeper than this.
The first school I ran (mid 1975-1981) was an alternative school for young people who stood out, yelled out, walked out and generally made it clear that they weren’t going to fit into the dominant modes of schooling. After an exhausting and exhilarating six and a half years in the job, I ‘knew’ that the vast majority of young people responded to: being in a small group; having a regular routine; learning to read and write if they couldn’t; engaging and creative activities that they thought were relevant and interesting; experiencing a vigorous programme of physical activity; having a say in what happened to them and around them; and to the patient imposition of clear limits with the expectation that they could not only behave and learn but have a productive and happy future. These understandings were deeply embedded and embodied in all of the staff who worked at the school and they still infuse the work that I do not only on the provisions made for young people who are designated by policy as ‘at risk’ but also on creative learning, student participation and socially just pedagogies and school organisation. Of course, these understandings are hardly just mine: they have been documented by researchers in several countries over a long period of time and are deeply ‘known’ by a bevy of professionals. Because of the robustness of these findings, and their reach over space and time, the research question to be asked now seems to me not to be ‘What can we do to assist all young people to be well educated?’ but rather (1) Why is it that we don’t do what is well known to be what makes a difference? or perhaps this is better expressed as (2) What is it about mainstream schools that prevents them from being more inclusive and just?
The second school I worked in was what might be called a ‘full service school’. It was a secondary school and a collection of government services situated new build modelled on similar settings in England. School staff members were able to call on doctors and nurses, dentists, welfare workers, child care workers, youth workers and adult and community educators, as well as use library and recreation facilities which were also available to the community. It was here that I learnt that some professionals think people (officially known as disadvantaged, impoverished or deprived) need may not be the same as what it is that the people themselves want. The residents of the large public housing (council) estate had asked, via a massive government initiated consultation, for a swimming pool and upgraded schools. They were given an enormous complex of services and, because it had to cover operating costs, the most expensive pool in the city. The local welfare service had a strong community development philosophy and had previously operated out of a series of neighbourhood houses supporting a number of community organisations. When the service moved into the large complex, many of the residents no longer dropped in and the community organisations dwindled; at the same time the prevailing welfare philosophy changed to become that of service delivery and case work. Many of the school students at the school did not want to take advantage of the health, welfare and youth services because their friends would see them going there and they often wanted their visits to be private and not public knowledge. In addition, all of the predictable problems of inter-professional cooperation – time for meetings, different professional codes, confidentiality issues, staff who did similar work on different pay scales in different services, budgetary disputes over maintenance, minor development and utilities – also had to be dealt with. These issues were not unique to this particular site: they were known and documented in Australia, Britain and the United States. While it is easy to write glowingly about the benefits of community schooling and interagency provision, I cannot help but wonder how it is that ‘evidence’ about prior experiences such as this are located and understood in contemporary policy making processes. I do try to let little pieces of this experience/knowledge permeate some of the things I research, particularly in the kinds of questions I ask in schools, and the documents I ask to examine.
Of course, using experience in order to inform research is tricky because there might be accusations of simply reinforcing existing biases and opinions; the whole point of research is to be surprised and to acquire new perspectives on the taken-for-granted. But working from the basis of experience is not the same as using experience as direct data for research. I frequently call on my experiences in the K – 12 school where I was head from 1985-1996 to not only develop but also interrogate what I know about: the value of using practitioner research as a means of school change; the importance of the arts and creative pedagogies in order to enhance engagement, retention and achievement; and the practical realities of translating pedagogies that are possible in alternative settings into mainstream schooling. These ‘knowings’ set an agenda for research, while at the same time, the experiences in this school of working in partnership with university academics in reciprocal relationships keeps me optimistic about, and focused on, my current professional practice and teaching. However, I have also used my own experience of headship in this school in particular, as data. But to do this means subjecting my own notes and memories to the same kinds of critical and sceptical approaches that I adopt with any other data – my words are not privileged simply because they emanate from my past. Thus, my most recent book, School Leadership: Heads on the Block?, not only focuses on a set of issues that I know to be important and have investigated further both in England and in Australia, but also occasionally uses myself as evidence. That being said, all research is inevitably filtered through the researcher’s lived experience, so to read anything I write is to inevitably encounter my past/present/future.
