At the AERA convention last week, Sarah Puglisi made the acquaintance of Paul Baker, who works in public relations at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Sarah suggested setting up a national teacher-researcher network, and Paul wrote about that on his blog. According to Paul, Sarah said that “Research organizations like the AERA could harness existing technology to establish a teacher-to-researcher network offering unprecedented information exchange, networking, and mentoring.”

My comment, summarized here: It’s not news that policy making in the US is being driven from outside the education community, which makes education research seem kind of (forgive the expression) “academic” to reporters, and teachers - to some extent. Research that isn’t relevant to the standards-based discourse which has come to dominate school staff meetings is of little interest to people with few options in practice.

I do see a great deal of value in a teacher-researcher network, however. I believe that a network of this nature could provide the political leverage to re-open lines of inquiry that are being closed off by the narrowed curricular focus resulting from high-stakes tests.

In an earlier comment, prompted by a link that Sarah provided to a post in which Paul speculated about an apparent research-to-practice disconnect I noted that whenever I read a research paper, I try to imagine how similar the situation being presented in the report is to my own - even if the question is one that I might have asked myself - because the way that I implement any research findings will be some variation of what I already know, and what my students are capable of understanding.

My graduate school cohort worked within a teacher-as-researcher model, similar to the one that Christopher Sessums described, and we learned from one another. This, to me, was one of the most empowering and thought provoking professional experiences I’ve ever had. Get a group of teachers together. Offer university credit. Encourage them to ask and answer their own questions. Discuss. Show them how to publish their findings. That’s what we did.

As I wrote these comments, I was reminded of a book by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, in which she talked about the need for indigenous peoples to design their own research projects in order to achieve goals that are consistent with their own felt needs and cultural values. I see the situation with teachers and education research as quite similar.

Smith describes how research is used as an imperialist tool in colonial enterprises. She is a Maori intellectual from New Zealand, and though she is most particularly concerned with aboriginal self determination, her insights into the power of research to impose an interpretive frame from outside a community, which can then be used to manipulate policy, spoke clearly to a set of concerns that have been festering for me:

The greater danger, however, was in the creeping policies that intruded into every aspect of our lives, legitimated by research, informed more often by ideology….At a common sense level research was talked about both in terms of its absolute worthlessness to us, the indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument. It told us things already known, suggested things that would not work, and made careers for people who already had jobs (Smith, p. 3).

Smith recommends “researching back,” in the sense of talking back. And this is where I see the teacher action research network as a political strategy. Standardized tests are used in an essentially colonial enterprise aimed at imposing narrow definitions of knowledge on school communities. They effectively disrupt efforts to attain non-cognitive educational outcomes which we might also find desirable. Even in classrooms where instructional decision making is constrained by limited curricular options, researching that set of conditions could provide data that might help to enlighten policy making. A network for teacher-researchers situates local inquiries within a context that has the potential for collective action.

I’m not sure about the role for an organization like AERA in a teacher-researcher network. Mentoring and information exchage are both worthwhile possibilities. It would help to generate visibility for teacher-research within the educational research community, at the very least. I also wonder about the incentives and limitations for the participation of academic researchers.

I do know, from a teacher’s point of view, there is little motivation to take on extra work. It might be hard to recruit teachers. We’ve had small groups of teachers try to set up teacher-research networks on a local level, but the energy required to sustain them is hard to maintain.

I also know that there is a lot that we can learn from one another, and many lines of inquiry remain to be explored. My larger concern is that if we do not begin to connect with each other about the practical issues we face in the classroom, “evidence-based” education policy might choke off the imagination required to ask questions that might lead us past the simplistic story being told with testing data.

Patrick Shannon tells of the need to develop poets “to help us rethink our lives and the structures we have and will create for them”:

The will to act, which for many has been diverted from public to private matters, must be redirected through individuals’ sociological imaginations - the recognition that their apparently private problems are really connected to public issues because that problem is shared by many.

Teachers should consider becoming poet-scientists now. We need to expand the “research-based” discourse to include questions that teachers want answered. We need to deliberately rethink our practices, and consider options for creating new structures, such as action research, within which we can ask new questions. When opportunities for inquiry and innovation are closed, training and indoctrination will be all that remains.

update: See Sarah’s post about making poets - I saw it earlier and neglected to link to it. Text provided in the comments here. Thanks, Sarah

Sources:
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand, University of Otago Press.