Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

Volume 14 Number 3 2013

www.wwwords.co.uk/CIEC

The Potential of Developmental Work

Research as a Professional Learning
Methodology in Early Childhood Education

JOCE NUTTALL
Faculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, Australia

ABSTRACT Developmental Work Research (DWR) is a methodology for simultaneous research and
innovation in workplace settings, developed by Finnish researcher Yryö Engeström. This
interventionist approach builds on the principles of cultural-historical activity theory, articulated by
developmental psychologists L.S. Vygotsky and A.N. Le’ontev. The article describes the use of DWR
with the staff of one Melbourne early childhood centre to argue for the potential of DWR as a
professional development methodology. A specific example is provided to show how a group of
educators resolved a contradiction within their collective system of activity, related to implicit cultural
rules about communication with parents. The article concludes by arguing that DWR has considerable
potential for reconceptualising practice in early childhood settings, whilst cautioning that some
practices are easier to reconceptualise than others.

Introduction
The quest to identify effective and sustainable approaches to professional development in early
childhood education (ECE) continues against a backdrop of intensifying discourses of ‘best practice’
(Blank, 2010), ‘lifelong professional development’ (Ackerman, 2004) and neo-liberal demands for
‘accountability’ (e.g. Miller & Smith, 2011). Early childhood educators form a relatively new
professional category, still caught in ‘a historic struggle for recognition of their professionalism ...
sustained by a traditional bifurcation of care and education’ (Moloney, 2010, p. 172). Although this
struggle has played out in different timescales across different Anglophone countries, the elements
are essentially the same: campaigns for better industrial conditions; advocacy for higher levels of
qualifications; and, eventually, the evolution of opportunities to sustain the ongoing development
of educators. However, as Buysse et al argue, definitions of what constitutes ‘professional
development’ remain poorly developed, and ‘[t]he absence of a definition of professional
development in early childhood likely contributes to the lack of a common vision for the most
effective ways of organizing and implementing professional development to improve the quality of
the early childhood workforce’ (2009, pp. 235-236). It remains to be seen whether a unitary
definition of ‘professional development’ is desirable, given the diversity of early childhood services
and levels of qualifications in many countries, or whether system-wide coherence in professional
development is a key variable in raising the quality of ECE. Nevertheless, these authors raise an
important point about the need to understand what the field means when it says it expects
professionals (or, indeed, the profession) to ‘develop’.
A second persistent problem in professional development in ECE is the emphasis on the
individual educator. This is partly an analogous with the history of individual teacher development
in schools (Doecke, 2005) and partly a reflection of contemporary managerialist discourses of
workplace development, with their emphasis on strategies such as coaching, mentoring, and
individual feedback. Recent examples in early childhood include the Guidelines for Induction and

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Mentoring and Mentor Teachers (New Zealand Teachers Council, 2011) to support provisionally-
registered teachers (including those in ECE) and advocacy for individual professional development
plans (e.g. Sugarman, 2011). In the last decade, however, there has been movement away from an
individualised emphasis in professional development toward an increasing acknowledgement of the
collective nature of working in many (if not most) early childhood settings, and the consequent
need for professional development strategies that foster centre-level coherence in values and
practices. The notion of ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998; Wenger et al, 2002) is one
instantiation of this shift, having been widely taken up in ECE, though with mixed results (see, for
example, Hodges, 1998; Fleer, 2003; Aitken, 2005; Maloney & Konza, 2011).
This article is an attempt to advance a view of meaningful professional development in ECE
as fundamentally collective, situated, historically accumulating, and multi-vocal. Specifically, the
article makes a case for Developmental Work Research (DWR) (Engeström, 1999, 2001, 2007) as a
powerful methodology for fostering professional development in ECE. The article begins with a
brief description of the underpinning theoretical principles of DWR, derived from cultural-
historical activity theory (CHAT), and then outlines how DWR operates in practice. An example of
changed professional practice is then drawn from a research and development project with
educators at a large childcare centre in Melbourne, to show how DWR takes professionals beyond
superficial understandings of their own learning and its relationship to cultural and organisational
change. The final part of the article reflects on some of the strengths and the limitations of DWR,
and its potential to move ECE beyond a definition of professional development predicated on
individual change.

The Origins of DWR in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

Cultural-historical activity theory stems from the work of psychologist L.S. Vygotsky and his
collaborators, including A.N. Leont’ev, who worked together in Russia in the first third of the
twentieth century (Cole, 1996). One of the fundamental claims made by Vygotsky, in theorising the
relationship between mind and human action, is that this relationship is mediated by cultural tools
or artefacts (e.g. language and other symbol systems, as well as material objects, such as
agricultural tools, computers, toys, etc.). One of the profound implications of this claim is the idea
that, by adapting cultural tools, humans can foster their own cognitive development from the
outside (Daniels, 2004). Furthermore, cultural tools embody culturally valued meanings; by
adapting those meanings, humans can adapt their activity (both internal activity in the form of
thought and external activity in the form of behaviour), and therefore human culture. A simple
example is the adaptation of telephones from a device for one-to-one communication to today’s
capacity for one-to-many communication, supporting the development of new cultural forms such
as flash mobs (Molnár, 2010).
A.N. Leont’ev expanded on Vygotsky’s work to develop what Engeström (1987) has called
‘second generation’ activity theory. Leont’ev sought to theorise the collective nature of human
activity (and specifically collective labour activity) and its orientation toward the valued tasks or
‘motive objects’ necessary to maintain life and culture (Leont’ev, 1981). Such collaborations are
understood to occur both despite and because of differentiation between the tasks undertaken by
individuals within the group. In his formulation of ‘third-generation activity theory’ Engeström
(1987) further expands Vygotsky’s and Leont’ev’s claims about the role of cultural tools in
mediating the relationship between subject (the actors in the activity system) and object (the task a
group is working on that provides the purpose for the activity). Engeström argues that the rules
guiding shared activity mediate between the subject and their community, and that the division of
labour mediates between the community and the object. This notion of a multiply-mediated
collective system of activity is represented in Figure 1.
In the case of early childhood centres, cultural tools include both material artefacts (e.g.
statements of philosophy, programme plans, templates for observing children’s learning and
development, toys and other equipment), and abstract theories and beliefs (i.e. cognitive tools).
Rules can also be reified as tools (e.g. policy statements and guidelines) or maintained on the inter-
mental level within the group (e.g. spoken or unspoken understandings about ways of working
with the children that are ‘okay’ and ‘not okay’). Divisions of labour can be concretised through

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artefacts such as rosters, job descriptions, and the hierarchy of the centre’s management structure,
or maintained more subtly as mental abstractions (e.g. shared but unspoken understandings about
activities in which certain educators are more or less willing to participate).

Figure 1. A ‘third-generation’ activity system (Engeström, 1987).

While systematic identification of these aspects of cultural practice is important in DWR, it is the
dynamic between these features – the rules, tools, divisions of labour, subject, object, and
community – that determines the extent to which the group achieves its shared task. Note the
concepts of ‘activity’ and ‘practice’ are used here in the ways identified by Hedegaard, who argues
that ‘Practice and activity are related concepts: We will use practice when the institutional
perspective is taken and activity when the person’s perspective is taken’ (2008, p. 16). This view of
early childhood services – as instantiations of collective cultural practice rather than groups of
educators with individual ‘minds’ – is rooted in a view of human activity as collective, situated, and
multi-vocal.
Furthermore, the cultural-historical roots of DWR explicitly foreground the notion of
contradictions as a defining feature of systems of activity. Engeström (1999) has argued that
contradictions are a central characteristic of complex forms of human activity, and that ‘historically
evolving inner contradictions are the chief sources of movement and change in activity systems’
(p. 10). Contradictions result from misalignments between features of an activity system, which
confound the achievement of shared objects. Within DWR, however, they are viewed as
productive tensions since, if brought to consciousness and systematically addressed, they provide
the driving force for positive expansion of the system as a whole. This is the premise behind the
‘interventionist research methodology’ (Engestrom, 1999) of DWR.

DWR Methodology
As Daniels (2004, pp. 121-122) explains:
[if] human beings have the capacity to influence their own development through their use of the
artefacts, including discourses, which they and others create or have created then we need a
language of description which allows us to identify and investigate: the circumstances in which
particular discourse are produced; the modalities of such forms of cultural production; the
implications of the availability of specific forms of such production for the shaping of learning
and development.
One of the aims of DWR is to develop this methodological language and set of practices to allow
the subjects of a system of activity (in this case, educators working in early childhood services) to
identify and investigate their own circumstances in collaboration with researchers. Central to
DWR is a process of investigation, supported and facilitated by one or more researchers, that seeks
to bring to consciousness contradictions within cultural practices. For example, there can be a
contradiction between a centre rule (parents are welcome to discuss their child’s progress with any
member of staff) and its division of labour (only fully-qualified educators actually meet with parents
to talk about children’s progress). Identification of these dynamic tensions is followed by shared
exploration of ways to resolve these contradictions by adapting rules, tools, and division of labour;
in other words, by changing key elements of institutional practice.

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The locus of the DWR process is a series of workshops or ‘change labs’ (Engeström, 2007).
Prior to the first workshop, the researchers generate data about the system from the perspective of
participants in the system. In the case of the present project, this was mainly done through
interviews with educators, managers, and Life Members of the centre, but also through analysis of
key documents. In the early stages of DWR, data generation is structured to identify the overall
outcome the system is working toward (e.g. ‘high quality care and education’), and the central
task(s) or objects the participants are working on to achieve this outcome (e.g. ‘developing an
effective and efficient approach to recording evidence of children’s learning’). In analysing this
initial data, researchers pay attention to evidence of rules, tools, and divisions of labour identified
by the participants as they describe their work, and actively identify examples of contradictions
between these features that seem to be important to the participants.
The DWR workshop is organised around four research tools. First, the researcher brings a set
of ‘mirror data’, comprising elements of the data that provide evidence of contradictions that are
confounding the group’s object. In the present project, mirror data took the form of excerpts from
interviews and key documents that were copied on to overhead transparencies for ease of sorting
and display during workshops. Second, a chart showing the theoretical structure of the activity
system (see Figure 1) is on display. This is because an important strategy in DWR is for the
participants to learn this theoretical tool so that they have a shared language to interrogate their
institutional practice. This strategy, known as ‘double stimulation’ (Engeström, 2007) is one of the
fundamental differences between DWR and approaches such as action research. DWR proceeds by
participants not only working on particular problems of practice but by bringing the analytic
principles of third-generation activity theory (see Figure 1) to these problems. Third, a blank
flipchart is available for the use of the researcher. Finally, a video camera (or research assistant
taking detailed field notes in the case of this project) records the workshop. All records created
during the workshop (the whiteboard, a record of which data is mirrored, the field notes, and
anything recorded on the flipchart) added to data set.
The first workshop begins with discussion of the purpose of the development project and
confirmation of the outcome the system is seeking to achieve. This stage is usually straightforward:
participants are easily able to identify (at least rhetorically) what their workplace exists to do. Then,
elements from the mirror data are ‘mirrored’ back to participants to provoke their awareness of the
contradictions within the system. Participants are invited to prioritise and explore these, and offer
commentary and related examples. A key aspect of the work of the researcher is to prompt
discussion about the way in which the contradiction under discussion is confounding the group’s
object (i.e. the task at hand). The researcher does not have to proffer suggestions for alternative
practices that might resolve the contradiction; instead, suggestions are sought from the group and
explored in the light of whether they will enhance the group’s achievement of their object.
Resolution of contradictions is achieved by adapting the mediating elements in the system of
activity: the rules, tools, or divisions of labour. For example, in an early part of the project a tension
was identified between a rule – ‘educators only work during the hours for which they are paid’ –
and a division of labour – some educators were voluntarily coming into the centre on weekends to
update children’s portfolios. This contradiction was resolved not by adapting either the rule or the
division of labour, but by changing the format of the portfolios (a cultural tool) so that it
simultaneously met two objects: effective reporting of children’s learning and being able to be
completed within the educators’ paid non-contact time. By mentally engaging with a practical
problem and the theoretical model at the same time, participants experience ‘double stimulation’ as
they develop new forms of practice.

Data Generation and Analysis

Data generation was ongoing throughout the three years of the project. Semi-structured interviews
with the 17 educators in the centre were repeated at regular intervals, focusing on changes in
practice arising from the workshop sessions and identification of ongoing contradictions in centre
practice. Each interview was transcribed and returned to participants for checking. A research
assistant observed and transcribed as much as possible of the workshop discussions, held every
second or third month, and the workshop notes were expanded immediately after each workshop.

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Frequent observer comments were recorded during workshops and on regular visits to the centre.
Records were also made of new artefacts as they were developed, either as photocopies or
photographs, or by collecting examples.
Data analysis was conducted both deductively and inductively. In the deductive phase, a
priori concepts drawn from Engeström’s model (i.e. ‘rules’, ‘division of labour’, etc.) were used as
sensitising concepts in analysing the data. Data were also analysed inductively, using two main
strategies. The first strategy was to identify persistent discursive patterns, either in the language
used by participants or as sense making (e.g. when the same meanings were attached to artefacts or
events). This allowed for the identification of first-order codes, which were repeatedly rearranged
to form second-order interpretations and finally third-order themes such as ‘subject position’
(Savin-Baden & Major, 2010, pp. 111-114). The other inductive strategy was narrative analysis. This
allowed interpretations of meanings and events to reach beyond what Brunner calls ‘the
boundaries of theoretical discourse’ and to value ‘a multiplicity of voices and perspectives’ (1994,
pp. 16-17). Critical incidents observed in the workshops or reported in the interviews were treated
as narrative vignettes. The example reported in this article, of the ‘shared stories board’ introduced
in the infant and toddler room, is one such vignette.
With such a large data set, careful attention had to be paid to issues of qualitative validity,
including credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (Lichtman, 2006). This was
attempted through multiple forms of triangulation. As well as the opportunity for data
triangulation (e.g. from interview to interview with the same person or across interviews with
different people), intra- and inter-observer interpretations were explored with the research assistant
working closely on the project, sometimes leading to the development of methodological
memoranda (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). Checking interpretations with the participants themselves
was also critical: because a feature of DWR is the ‘mirroring’ of data back to participants in later
workshops, the researchers could regularly test the significance of particular patterns or vignettes
with the participants.

A Contradiction Addressed within the Project

One of the motive objects identified during the project was ‘for assessment of children’s learning to
be a genuine collaboration between educators and families’. A contradiction was identified by
educators between this object and the division of labour that was in operation: information was
flowing only one way, from educators to parents and not from parents to educators, despite
parents having welcomed the new assessment tools (individual child portfolios) the educators had
developed.
In late 2006 Kara (a pseudonym), was the Room Leader in Room One, the centre’s infant and
toddler room. Kara spoke about this contradiction and earlier attempts her team had made to
resolve it:
In Room One (as with the other Rooms, I’m sure) we place a great value on the information we
receive from families – it helps us to build strong relationships with both the individual child as
well as their family; it helps us to provide a programme that can be reflective of individuals,
families and communities; it helps to give children a sense of belonging and confidence that what
they do is important; it also lets them know that we care and want to find out more about them;
and it in turn encourages them to share more with us.
In Room One especially, (being the under 3 year old room), this information sharing is so
valuable as children are limited to what they can share themselves as their language has not yet
developed.
Throughout the two years I have been working at [the centre] in Room 1, there have been
several different ways in which staff have tried to obtain information from families about current
interests, outings, events, changes that occur in their family etc, in addition to the often brief
discussions that occur at the beginning and end of the day.
Previously, these attempts have been presented to families in the form of a document, usually
boxed, with a short blurb as to why we are seeking this information, then a space for name, date
and then comment. In Room 1 there have been five different versions of this document, each

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one requesting the same information with the format being slightly altered. It seemed to me in
this time that very few of these forms were actually used by families or returned to the centre.
These are some of the reasons why, as a team, we decided to look more closely at our method of
obtaining information and to explore other possible ways to draw it from families.
An obvious solution might have been to attempt, yet again, to redesign the tool. Kara described
how the group took a different approach, inspired by borrowing a tool from outside the centre’s
established culture:
Inspired by the [DWR] Project, we began to think outside of the ‘box’ and the methods we had
previously been employing, and started to form new ideas about where and how we could
exchange information. It was also around this time that Donna and Andrea [pseudonyms for the
centre Director and kindergarten teacher] had their own inspirational trip to New Zealand and
returned with some great information, ideas and photographs. Through discussion about these it
became apparent that some of the centres in New Zealand valued sharing information about
staff’s personal life with the families they worked with.
It then seemed to be clear to me that if we wanted to know more about our families, that
perhaps they too wanted to know more about us. It also seemed that many families may feel
awkward about, or unsure of, what to write, how much etc, and that perhaps, if we (as staff)
were to lead the way and do our own stories, they might be inspired to begin and do their own.
So the idea for the Shared Stories Board was formulated. We purposefully took a less formal
approach and decided not to place any limits, boxes, forms etc in this method and left it open to
the families’ interpretation, guiding them only with a brief blurb, inspirational word, and
examples provided by staff. We also left the option open as to what medium they would like to
deliver the information to us – email, handwritten, computer disc, memory stick etc – and we
have since had information given to us using all these forms.
The success of this innovation prompted further changes:
Another idea we had with the Shared Stories Board was that the information should be able to be
just that – shared. And so all documents have been laminated, Velcro applied, and they have
been placed down low so that children, families and staff can remove them from the area and
take them around the room to look at, or to be discussed with each other.
In Room One, these Shared Stories have provided us with the opportunity to promote language,
discussion, reflection, a sense of belonging and have also helped us to include activities in our
programme to extend on the information shared. We are continuing to promote and develop
this concept among the staff and with the new and existing families.
The stories the Room One educators shared with families about themselves were brief and modest
– information about interests, pets, teaching experiences, travel, family, and so forth – but the
change in practice described in Kara’s account is evidence of the way in which conscious attention
to rules, tools and divisions of labour, and to contradictions arising between these, can inspire
effective changes in professional practice.
Kara’s statement is part of the transcript of a presentation made to the centre’s Annual
General Meeting in late 2006, during which educators from each of the three rooms spoke publicly
about contradictions they had identified in centre practice and their attempts to devise new forms
of practice by adapting rules, tools, and divisions of labour. At first glance, this account of changed
practice at the centre seems small, even banal. However, in introducing the Shared Stories Board,
the educators in Room One were not only shifting the division of labour in generating information
about children. They also were overturning a powerful but implicit rule that mediates the
relationship between educators (subjects) and families (community) in ECE: that educators have
the right to treat children and families as the ‘known’ without a reciprocal responsibility to make
themselves known to families. This system of activity, showing the rule/object contradiction and
the division of labour/object contradiction, is summarised in Figure 2.

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Figure 2. Activity system of assessment practices in Room One showing contradictions in practice.

This discursive rule is a feature of schools as well as ECE and is not only embedded in assessment
practices; it is evident in administrative processes (enrolment forms, health information) (Gunn,
2008), record-keeping (attendance registers, records of feeding and changing), parent–teacher
interviews, and even the one-way rituals of educators’ greetings to parents that seek information
about families (‘How was your weekend?’) without disclosing information about the educator.
Early childhood centres are intimate spaces. Educators are privy to private information about
parents and families – the state of marriages, health problems, eating and sleeping patterns, cultural
and religious beliefs – but families are almost never privy to personal information about educators.
This is understandable on the grounds that educators are employees providing a service to families,
their ‘clients’. However, educators’ privileged subject positions as ‘unknown’ are frequently
justified not as a feature of their employment conditions, but by accessing discourses of
professionalism that dictate ‘optimal distance’ between educators and families and by marginalising
tacit knowledge (Taggart, 2011, p. 87). This seems to contradict the intimate nature of work in
childcare. The educators in Room One created a new and explicit rule with the intention of
expanding their immediate object of better staff–parent communication: if families are expected to
share accounts of life at home, educators must also be prepared to share aspects of their lives
outside the centre. As a by-product of this process, further rules for mediating the relationship
between educators and families was also made explicit: that no-one is automatically entitled to
everyday information about others and no-one provides information they do not wish to share.
I understand Kara’s account to be evidence of the collective nature of professional learning in
ECE because it is an example of ‘the transformation of patterns of professional working in terms of
the transformation of discursive practice’ (Daniels, 2004, p. 127). The centre as a whole learned
that, in order to develop closer and more meaningful relationships with families, educators must
offer something meaningful about themselves. Furthermore, the educators in Room One took a
risk in upsetting a discursive rule of ECE. In sharing their experience at the Annual General
Meeting, they pointed publicly to an abiding contradiction found in many ECE settings: practices
that position parents as the ‘other’ in the midst of official discourses that claim close relationships
with families. The final section of this article speculates on the role of DWR in fostering such
agentic behaviour amongst these educators.

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Strengths and Limitations of DWR as a Professional Development Methodology

This final section underlines three of the strengths of DWR in the light of its potential for
professional development in ECE: understanding that individuals and systems develop together;
acknowledgement of practice as institutionally and historically produced; and orientation to shared
objects of work rather than individual performance. This section also touches on some of its
practical limitations, notably the labour-intensive nature of the research and development process.
An analysis of Kara’s account from within the ‘cultural’ strand of CHAT (as distinguished by
Lave & Wenger, 1991, cited in Edwards, 2005, pp. 4-5) might suggest that the educators in Room
One were able to change their everyday understandings of communication with parents by
appropriating more sophisticated (i.e. ‘scientific’) concepts. This interpretation does not, however,
explain the role of teacher agency in acting upon concepts at the concrete level of everyday
practice. Nor does it explain the dynamic between educators’ individual (intra-mental) learning and
the learning distributed across the centre system as a whole, which is predicated within CHAT on a
dialectical relationship between individuals and the cultures in which they go about their daily life.
As Beach (1999) argues, individuals and cultural institutions ‘co-evolve’ across time. For example,
the development of one’s subject position across time as ‘a child care educator’ is both an act of
self-narration and an appropriation of the concept of ‘child care educator’ available within the
wider culture. A cultural-historical perspective on the development of abstract understandings
argues that abstractions such as ‘child care educator’ are first held in the culture, then appropriated
by individuals as they engage in cultural practices at the everyday level (Vygotsky, 1978).
Therefore, an individual’s conceptual framework for who and what a ‘child care educator’ is and
does can be reconstructed by shifts in the culture surrounding the individual (e.g. by changing rules
or divisions of labour in centre practice). Furthermore, this can happen in the opposite direction,
when individuals act agentically to shift the practices of the culture then experience the
consequential shifts in that culture (Beach, 1999). This would suggest the Room One educators felt
able to expose one of the tacit rules of ECE because they had already experienced the positive
consequences of changing the rule within their centre culture.
Nevertheless, institutional practices accumulate over time and can be remarkably difficult to
dislodge. In a DWR project under way at present with child care co-ordinators in Melbourne
(Nuttall, in press), the participants are attempting to introduce the Early Years Learning
Framework (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009) as a cultural
tool to mediate educators’ understandings of their work with children. While many of their staff
are keen to learn about the Framework and have attended professional development workshops,
their historically sedimented position as wage workers means they have limited time to engage
with what the document might mean for practice. As one co-ordinator explained:
It’s just such a wonderful tool. But I think the main thing that most of us are facing – especially
our staff because they are working by themselves, and they have got all this training that they
come here [to the local authority], it’s paid for and it’s good – when they go back, they start their
work, they don’t have enough time to read through or understand or to document. They
document during their lunchbreak.
This example underlines the way in which tensions felt by individuals (in this case a contradiction
between the object of fostering effective professional learning and the division of labour laid down
in employment agreements) arise out of historically-accumulating and persistent contradictions in
the profession as a whole. DWR seeks to raise awareness of such contradictions so that individuals
understand that their difficulty in engaging with demands imposed on them is not due to personal
failure. Furthermore, the co-ordinators in the project are learning to see their teams not as
individuals whose practice needs to be ‘fixed’ through modelling or coaching, but as participants in
complex systems of collective activity inevitably characterised by contradictions, and that these
contradictions can provide the springboard for developing practice.
A frequent query in response to accounts of DWR is whether opening up deep-seated
contradictions opens up a Pandora’s box of simmering tensions between individuals. In practice,
DWR does the opposite. The ‘glue’ in DWR workshops is the commitment of the group to an
agreed outcome; in the case of this centre the participants had identified this as being to provide
‘high-quality early childhood care and education they would be proud to demonstrate to other

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educators’. Because the researcher ensures all contributions in the workshop sessions are explored
in relation to this shared commitment, the focus is always on the object and not on individuals.
The workshops also proceed on the assumption that the participants are intelligent and capable
professionals who, collectively, will be able to creatively resolve persistent contradictions, thereby
deepening their understanding of their shared work objects.
There was evidence in the project that an important bridge between individual activity and
institutional practice is the reconfiguration of educators’ sense of professional agency. Early
interviews in the project indicated a powerful cultural and historical tradition of educators
engaging only in distinctive forms of practice, which were handed down from year to year and
educator to educator so that, eventually, no-one was able to remember the source of particular
practices. Known colloquially in the centre as ‘the [centre] way’, these practices included an
emphasis on natural materials, avoidance of plastic toys and bright colours, and planning based on
traditional areas of play and developmental domains, but no-one was quite sure what ‘the [centre]
way’ was. In later interviews, educators were asked why they thought they had managed to
achieve so many positive changes during the project. Several teachers responded with statements
such as, ‘We’ve been given permission’, ‘I feel empowered’, and ‘We’re not afraid to try new things
now’. A clear theme in their responses was that they were claiming (or reclaiming) their subject
position as agents in the activity system of the centre.
These responses can be interpreted as meaning that participation in the project had shifted
the rules and divisions of labour, previously internalised within the activity system of the centre, to
afford more agentic responses on the part of educators when contradictions are identified that
threatened the centre’s object. Edwards (2004) identifies the concept of a ‘zone of freedom of
movement’ (p. 91), which seemed to concur with the experiences of the educators. As the
possibilities for change were opened up (i.e. as the zone of freedom of movement was expanded at
each workshop), the educators took an increasingly agentic approach to transforming practice in
the centre. In other words, they developed professionally.
One significant reservation about the use of DWR is its labour-intensive nature, particularly
for the researchers. In the case of this project, there was just one researcher and one research
assistant, but a comprehensive workshop set-up for DWR ideally requires at least four researchers.
In her recent book on DWR in integrated children’s services, Edwards summarises these as:
a session leader who presents mirror data for discussion, a team member who summarises and
presents discussion data on flipcharts, a team member who constructs a research note on the
what [sic] ideas are being developed in the session, [and] a team member who video records the
session. (2010, p. 163)
This makes DWR an expensive undertaking just for the workshops, and there are also repeated
cycles of data generation, transcription, cleaning, and analysis, both for research output purposes
and for subsequent workshops. One solution is to use a variant of DWR whereby participants
engage with the theory and methodology in collaboration with just one or two researchers without
applying detailed research scrutiny to a full workshop (e.g. Ellis, 2008).

Conclusion
In their project to define ‘professional development’ in ECE, Buysse et al (2009) outline the six
assumptions that guided their thinking: that it encompasses a wide range of learning opportunities;
it serves a diverse workforce; that families are essential partners; that learners must actively engage
in learning experiences; that providers should facilitate experiences that respond to problems in
practice; and that professional development should be conceptualised via three intersecting
components – the who, the what, and the how (p. 238). This article is an attempt to move beyond
such basic and instrumental assumptions, to argue instead that professional development in ECE
should be understood as multi-vocal, historically and culturally situated, and proceed from bringing
to consciousness persistent contradictions in practice. The fundamental possibility offered by
DWR, however, is to approach professional development in ECE not as an individual pursuit, but
as a collective endeavour.

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Joce Nuttall

Note
This project was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committees of Monash University and
the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.

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JOCE NUTTALL is an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of
Education at Australian Catholic University, where she is Director of the Faculty’s Centre for Early
Childhood Futures. Her research focuses on the initial education and continuing professional
development of early childhood educators, and is mainly informed by cultural-historical activity
theory. Correspondence: joce.nuttall@acu.edu.au

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