Abstract

The failure of top-down approaches to education policy in England draws attention to the importance of context and foregrounds the need to help teachers to see themselves as practitioner–researchers, scholars and researchers capable of conducting systematic and trustworthy research into the improvement of their educational practice from the ground up and on the inside. This empirical, small-scale, qualitative study presents accounts of the lived experiences of 12 practitioner–researchers as they engage in the national practitioner research programme (PRP). The PRP offers intensive MPhil/PhD research training in which the evocative powers of aesthetic experience, culture and the arts are purposefully introduced to support practitioner–researcher–scholar identity formation and to encourage teachers to heighten the vitality of pedagogy and curriculum content by putting the cultural resources of society to work to make key ideas and concepts in education and educational research more accessible to all learners. Methods include 12 semi-structured interviews of 45–60 min, observation, field notes, case studies and extracts from MPhil/PhD theses. An objective of PRP research is to contribute to understanding how educational change and improvement might be done differently, including how persistent divisions, and barriers to teachers’ successful engagement in educational research and improvement, might be dismantled and dissolved through the strategic development of system-wide, HE-supported practitioner research. This article examines and calls into question the commonly held view that the arts are basically only instrumentally useful for their impact upon something else, such as the development of critical thinking and creativity. Main findings suggest that the use of aesthetic experience and the arts create epistemic-shortcuts which can not only help practitioners to overcome “imposter syndrome” but also enable them to access key ideas theories and concepts, theories and ideas in education and educational research more easily from the ground up, in context-attuned ways.