Working ‘against the grain’: a conversation piece from the academy about the experience of sustaining collaborative research with teachers

Abstract

This article reports the experience of a group of universitybased academics in supporting teachers' engagement in research in and across a cluster of secondary schools in the Norwich area. It takes the form of a discussion constructed from emails about the ways in which the academic context of their work shaped their interactions with teachers in schools. Much has been written about the ways in which the workplace environment shapes the research of teachers in schools, but there is relatively little on the ways in which the working environment of academics shapes their capacity to collaborate with teachers and support their research in schools. This article attempts to make a contribution to a somewhat neglected area of study.