Transforming Professional Identity in a CPD Community of Enquiry

This paper discusses a CPD programme which achieved effective professional learning by engaging with the social and institutional dimensions of learning culture, through an understanding of learning as a process of becoming. The pedagogy of teacher education was enacted as an intentional discursive move to project some discourses and resist others, in a contested space created by hybrid policy discourses. The paper describes a pedagogy that drew on ideas of social learning in communities of enquiry and engaged with a number of synchronising discourses for the co-construction of an imagined community and towards the negotiation of a shared but pluralistic professional identity. The value of a VLE as a mediating tool is considered. Finally, some evidence of transformation - of practitioners becoming activist professionals - is presented.