Re: [xmca] tracking changing terms in the literature

[Helen Grimmett <helen.grimmett@monash.edu>]

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
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>



-- 
Helen Grimmett
PhD Student, Teaching Associate
Faculty of Education
Monash University, Peninsula Campus
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca