Chris Edwards-Groves

Christine's recent research draws on practice theory, critical participatory action research and conversation analysis to investigate the nature and dynamics of educational practices, particularly in literacy instruction and professional learning. As Chief Investigator on Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery project "Leading and Learning: Developing Ecologies of Educational Practices" (DP1096275; 2010-2012), she has substantially contributed to the development of the theory of practice architectures and theory of ecologies of practices with Emeritus Professor Stephen Kemmis and colleagues. Significantly, these are new and distinctive developments in practice theory that she applies to literacy practice, dialogue and pedagogy and site based education development. This work is published in two co-authored texts "Changing practices, changing education" (Kemmis, Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, Hardy, Grootenboer and Bristol, 2014), "Understanding Education: History, politics and practice" (Kemmis and Edwards-Groves 2018) and "Classroom Talk: Understanding dialogue, pedagogy and practice" (Edwards-Groves, Anstey and Bull, 2014).

Christine's specific work with international collaborators in the "Pedagogy, Education and Praxis" International research network applying practice theory has advanced knowledge about professional learning and action research in the development of two new concepts: "Generative Leadership" and "Middle Leading practices", both notable theoretical achievements. Both concepts are derived from new theorisations about the longer term influences of action research, not previously identified. The research is concerned with developing rich characterisations of the connectivities between professional development practices and leading through in-depth empirical descriptions of these practices within 'ecologies of practices'. These theoretical concepts are currently being developed further in an international study she is co-leading with Professor Karin Ronnerman (Gothenburg University, Sweden) and Professor Peter Grootenboer (Griffith University, QLD); this research is investigating the leading practices required for facilitating sustainable change in teaching.

In recent times a main research focus centers on investigating classroom interaction practices, in particular the enactment of dialogic pedagogies. In 2016, Christine, with CSU colleague Dr Christina Davidson, was awarded the inaugural national Literacy Research Grant funded by the Primary English Teaching Association Australia "Researching Dialogic Pedagogies for literacy learning across the primary years". Results of this study were published in 2017 in "Becoming a meaning making: Talk and interaction in the dialogic classroom" (PETAA).This work seeks to understand, and so improve teaching practices, that utilise dialogic approaches for teaching and learning to improve students' oral language use in reading, writing and numeracy lessons.