Key Features of Exploratory Practice

Three fundamentals

• The aim of EP is to prioritize the quality of life of our learning-teaching environment above any concern for instructional efficiency
• EP aims to develop our understandings of the quality of learning-teaching life instead of simply searching for ever-'improved' teaching techniques
• EP recognises the fundamentally social nature of the mutual quest for understanding, in which both learners and teachers can develop

Why work for understanding?

Dick Allwright, who has been central to the development of EP, says of the typical approaches to quality improvement:

We have been seduced by the prevailing 'wisdom' that participant research must essentially aim to improve the efficiency of (professional practice), typically by isolating practical problems and solving them one by one . We have largely accepted that such 'improvement' will be best achieved by the practitioners themselves . addressing their classroom problems as mainly technical ones, to be solved by the development of 'better' teaching techniques.

(Dick Allwright, 'Exploratory Practice: rethinking practitioner research in language teaching. Language Teaching Research 7,2 (2003) p. 113 - 4)

Allwright rejects this notion of the aim of practitioner research, focussing instead on the social nature of teaching and the need for all participants to be aware of the processes involved:

'Working for understanding life in the classroom will provide a good foundation for helping teachers and learners make their time together pleasant and productive. It will also, I believe, prove to be a friend of intelligent and lasting pedagogic change, since it will automatically provide a firm foundation for any 'improvements' that investigation suggests are worth trying.'
Allwright, ibid: 114

Puzzles, not problems

I advocate working with 'puzzles', rather than problems, . partly to avoid the negative connotations of 'problem', (which may be seen as an admission of incompetence), and partly to involve areas of learning-teaching life that are not obviously 'problematic', but which we might well want to try to understand better. Allwright, ibid: 117

But EP is for language classrooms .

Although EP was 'initially developed as a coherent set of ideas about practices for language teaching and learning research', we (like Allwright) believe that it 'offers a set of principles for any sort of practitioner research.' Ibid: 109