The Enquiring Tutor (RLE Edu O) : Exploring The Process of Professional Learning

Stephen Rowland explores the relationship between the turor (or facilitator) and the professional worker on post-experience professional courses. His emphasis in on the processes of reflection and enquiry in professional learning and is not content specific. Drawing upon his experience as a course tutor and the perspectives of students, he suggests an approach to professional learing which is firmly rooted in the experience and interests of the student.

This book addresses professionals across multi-disciplinary fields and provides an insight into the way in which students and teachers interrelate. An interpretive approach to teaching and learning is explored in this volume. It gives rise to a series of dilemmas for the tutor of professional people; dilemmas which arise from attempts to apply educational values in a social context- shaped by previous expectations of learning and institutional pressures. Such dilemmas are explored by interweaving accounts of teaching, the author''s reflective fieldnotes as a course tutor, students'' evaluative commentaries, and fictional accounts, in order to uncover how teaching and learning are experienced in these settings. They give rise to an understanding of the relationship between tutor and student which emphasises the control which the professional people are able to exercise over the development of their own understanding and practice. Following an outline account of an interpretive approach to teaching and learning, the chapters consider the stages of learning from negotiating the learning context, encountering the unknown, reflecting upon experience, developing new understanding, course evaluation and a reconsideration, professional competences which such courses might serve.