Following a well-attended online meeting of the BALEAP Teacher Education in EAP SIG, I expressed critical interest in Exploratory Practice (Allwright & Hanks, 2009; Hanks, 2017a), and asked in this post: ‘but is it research?’. Judith Hanks sent me the following response, which I’m posting here in a spirit of critical knowledge sharing. I acknowledge that my understanding of Exploratory Practice was at best rudimentary and am grateful to Judith for this detailed response.
Is Exploratory Practice research?
To answer this question, I take as my starting-point a quote from Denzin & Lincoln (2003 p.33): “All research is interpretive: it is guided by a set of beliefs and feelings about the world and how it should be understood and studied.” A little later, research was defined as “purposeful, ethical, and critical investigation which takes place in a socially constructed world, with the aim of deepening human understanding” (Hanks, 2017a, p.35). Most recently, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which superseded RAE in 2014, states: “research is defined as a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared” (REF 2029). These definitions reflect the abundant variety of creative, inclusive, interdisciplinary research approaches that have proliferated in the 2000s.
This is helpful as we consider the various paradigms in which researchers, educators, and students live and work. Research approaches in the 2000s range from positivist/post-positivist through to interpretivist and constructivist, with many different forms acceptable in different fields.
In the blogpost above, Olwyn suggests that I don’t define research in the article she cites (Hanks, 2017b). In a short article for a journal, this was indeed the case: the focus of that article was to discuss a case study examining Exploratory Practice’s principle of integrating research and pedagogy in action. However, I have spent considerable time and attention on definitions of research in my book (Hanks, 2017a). Indeed, I devoted an entire chapter to this very topic (‘From Research to Practitioner Research’), and this colours my remarks here.
I’ve been thinking about the blogpost since my attention was drawn to it a while ago. There are some elements that really do need addressing. For example, there’s an assumption that the kind of co-produced, collaborative puzzling and investigating that Exploratory Practice promotes is somehow ‘not research’; that it would not pass muster in Business subjects, Health Sciences or STEM subjects. Yet co-produced collaborative research is often a part of MBA or Business degree projects – students are required to work in groups to investigate and analyse a topic, and they are increasingly assessed via oral presentations and written assignments on their findings. In Healthcare, students are regularly required to reflect and demonstrate reflection, staff must complete reflective logs and analyse their approaches, and researchers do both in their funded research projects. In Engineering co-production and collaboration (two central planks of the Exploratory Practice framework) are increasingly common. Moreover, funded research projects are frequently collaborative, interdisciplinary, and employ mixed-methods as well as quantitative or qualitative approaches. There are research projects which involve entire villages as engineers work together with architects and community leaders to re-build fallen bridges or decide on parameters for building projects. The N8 Partnership website provides many examples of research projects in agriculture, computing, engineering (air-flow around wind-turbines anyone?), medicine and drug design. Each of these has its own individual stamp, yet principles of collaboration, exploration, puzzlement, investigation, analysis and multimodal dissemination are common. To leave our EAP students unprepared for such work would be to do them a disservice.
Olwyn helpfully suggests that Exploratory Practice could be well-used by EAP teachers to raise their awareness of research. Going back to the REF 2029 definition, many ‘processes of investigation’ have yielded ‘new insights’ in various areas, and have been ‘effectively shared’ by language teachers, EAP teachers, teacher educators, and students through Exploratory Practice (see, amongst many others, Banister 2021; Benson et al., 2018; Dawson et al., 2017; Hanks, 2017a, b). Perceptions of what is/isn’t research have shifted, to enable a more inclusive, interdisciplinary approach. I’ve written about this in Hanks (2022, 2024), citing the many teachers and students who have engaged in researching their practices in EAP and in other fields. It’s the kind of student-staff partnership that Healey et al. (2014) are constantly advocating, and which Advance HE has adopted as a central plank for research in Higher Education. Far from eating its own tail, Exploratory Practice sits comfortably with Action Research and Reflective Practice as a way of enhancing research and pedagogy with thorough reading of the literature, allied with empirical evidence which, together, provide deep insights worthy of further consideration. The ‘Fully Inclusive Practitioner Research Network’ provides a platform for these practitioners to share ideas, projects and publications. Exploratory Practice is just one of many ways in which such research may be achieved. The evidence from teachers and students themselves indicates that motivation is often enhanced as a result.
References
Allwright, D., & Hanks, J. (2009). The Developing Language Learner: An introduction to Exploratory Practice. Palgrave Macmillan.
Banister, C. (2021). Harnessing learner research agendas to continuously explore EAP learners’ needs. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 51.
Benson, P., Chehade, M-A., Lara, J., Sayram, G.A., Speer, L. (2018). Exploratory practice and professional development in ELT: The roles of collaboration and reflection. English Australia Journal. 33(2), 3-19.
Bramley (2019). https://www.n8research.org.uk/co-production-and-the-n8/ (last accessed 02.01.2025)
Dawson, S.J., Ihara, P., Zhang, K. (2017). EAP learners exploring their own language learning lives through Exploratory Practice. IN T. Stewart (Ed.) Voices from the TESOL Classroom: Participant inquiries in higher education classes (pp.7-13). TESOL Press.
Hanks, J. (2017a). Exploratory Practice in Language Teaching: Puzzling about principles and practices. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hanks, J. (2017b). Integrating Research and Pedagogy: An Exploratory Practice approach. System 68, pp.38-49.
Hanks, J. (2022). De-mystifying the nimbus of research: re-igniting practitioners’ interest in exploring EAP. Journal of EAP, 60, pp.101176, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101176
Hanks, J. (2024) Shifting perceptions of inclusive practitioner research: Epistemological affordances of Exploratory Practice. Language Teaching Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688241265432
Healey, M., Flint, A., & Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement through partnership: Students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. Higher Education Academy. HE Academy.
Higher Education Funding Council (1998). Research Assessment Exercise 2001: Key Decisions and Issues for Further Consultation, Guidance Note ref. RAE 1/98, HEFC.
N8 Research Partnership. (2016). Knowledge that matters: Realising the potential of co-production. ESRC www.n8research.org.uk
Research Excellence Framework 2029 (n.d.) https://2029.ref.ac.uk/ (last accessed 02.01.2025)
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