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Re: [xmca] tracking changing terms in the literature



For general (non-academic) media, such trends can be tracked using LexisNexis. I used this for tracking the appearance of "American Exceptionalism" in the US media from 1981-2010, in relation to election campaigns (results are graphed at http://wp.me/s1V0H-ijse ).

On Thu, 22 Sep 2011, Helen Grimmett wrote:

Oooh! better qualify what I just said here about usage of professional
learning dropping away...

I just realised that the search terms I was using were set from 1800-2000.
When I changed this to 2008 (the most recent date possible) the graph takes
another climb for professional learning in all of English, American and
British graphs, but professional development falls away dramatically in the
British graph but keeps rising in the American graph!

Hmm, nothing is ever straightforward....

Cheers,
Helen





On 22 September 2011 12:46, Helen Grimmett <helen.grimmett@monash.edu>wrote:

Thanks Phil and Remi!
The ngram site was the only one I could make work if I included teachers in
the criteria. See:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=teachers+%27+professional+development%2Cteachers+%27+professional+learning&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Interesting that professional development is obviously still going strong
in the book publishing industry even though, here in Australia at least,
schools are being implored to do away with the term and refer to it as
professional learning. I wonder if the results are different if it was
graphing academic journals instead of books? Does anyone know of a similar
program that does this with say Google Scholar? Nevertheless the graphs do
show that teachers' professional learning only appeared in Google Books in
the late 1980's which gives me a good starting point. Also interesting to
see the difference you get when you change the criteria to British English
and American English. It appears use of professional learning is actually
dropping away rather than increasing. As usual our education departments
here in Australia are persisting with ideas that the rest of the world is
already abandoning!

The argument I am trying to make in my thesis is that professional
'learning' is necessary, but not sufficient. What we really need is for
teachers to 'develop' as professionals (as we talk about development in
Cultural-Historical theory). Teachers can easily 'learn' about new theories
of teaching/learning, but if they don't consider the implications of these
theories and 'develop' their professional practice to implement these new
ideas then what has been achieved?

Thanks again. I really appreciate your help,
Helen


On 22 September 2011 11:33, Phil Chappell <philchappell@mac.com> wrote:

Hi Helen

Try this http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

I searched your terms (see link below)  - you may need to adjust the
criteria!

Cheers

Phil


http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=professional+development%2C+professional+learning&year_start=1800&year_end=2011&corpus=0&smoothing=3


On 22/09/2011, at 11:16 AM, Helen Grimmett wrote:

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering if anyone can help me work out a way to find out when the
educational research literature started moving away from the term
'professional development' and began using 'professional learning'? I
vaguely remember someone talking here about some sort of web program
that
could do this but I can't even work out what words to use to google such
a
thing! Maybe there is even an easy way to do this without special
software
that my post-ISCAR jet-lagged brain just cannot fathom at the moment!

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Helen

--
Helen Grimmett
PhD Student, Teaching Associate
Faculty of Education
Monash University, Peninsula Campus
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--
Helen Grimmett
PhD Student, Teaching Associate
Faculty of Education
Monash University, Peninsula Campus







--
Helen Grimmett
PhD Student, Teaching Associate
Faculty of Education
Monash University, Peninsula Campus
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Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
 are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                  -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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