Framing the Issue of Teacher Research

In 2011, when I assumed the coeditorship of The Educational Forum with my dear friend and colleague Kim Fries, one of our early goals was to offer an issue focusing on teacher research and practitioner inquiry. This issue is the one we hoped for and is befitting of Kim's memory.

In 1997, when I entered a doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction after 10 years as a special education teacher and school administrator, I had not heard of teacher research or any other paradigm in which the researcher was also the researched, the research questions emerged from the practitioners' own challenges, and reflective narrative was a valid model for communicating insights and findings. Through the foundational work of Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar (2003), Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993, 2009), Greene (2001), Oldfather (1995), Palmer (1998/1999), and dozens of teachers, I discovered the power of a teacher research model that highlights complexity, rejects essentialism, and prominently features the subjectivity of voice. I never looked back.

Today, I serve as the director of a master's degree program in education and instruction that intertwines courses in instructional methodology, reflective practice, creativity development, and teacher research. Students enter the program generally wary of research, mostly because they have come to associate it with standardized testing—the results of which are often used against them to prove they are not effective enough. More often than not, research results are handed to them with the mandate that they mimic practices that the research recommends. Once my students are introduced to the work of other P–12 classroom teachers who generate their own research based on authentic questions from their own practice, I witness the transformation. The students realize that research can spring from their own experiences, curiosity, and decision making. The hundreds of teachers who have graduated from my program do not just do teacher research; they come to understand it as integrally tied to their professional identity and personal development.

As much as I am inspired by my students, who are all working P–12 teachers, I often wonder about how other university faculty members who teach teacher research approach their craft. How do they develop in-class activities, out-of-class assignments, and structured discussions that allow their students to internalize the dispositions that Fecho (1993) called “thinking like a teacher-researcher” (p. 265)? This themed issue examines the ways in which teacher research is conceived, taught, learned, and lived by exploring the symbiotic relationships among teachers, students, and colleagues who influence one another's work over time. Accordingly, this issue does more than present nine good examples of teacher research in action. It emphasizes the communication and learning cycles shared among educators working collaboratively to enhance the cause of teacher-generated inquiry. Each article presents (at least) two conjoined stories: one by an instructor—for example, a university-affiliated teacher educator or a school-based supervisor—who works closely with teachers as they develop their identities as teacher researchers, and the other by a teacher whose subsequent work reflects back on the instruction and mentoring the teacher received. Recursively, these stories then inform the learning (and teaching) of both parties involved, and hopefully our readers as well.

The editors of this issue proposed this structure because it seemed an appropriate way to illuminate the overlapping complexities in teaching, learning, and doing the transformative act of teacher research. Each pair of articles tells not only the stories of the teachers, schools, and students that live the research questions asked by each author, but also the story of ongoing collaborative dialogue and mutual benefit—a necessity for advancing a vision of school reform that incorporates the central standpoint of teachers. My coeditors and I feel that these articles illustrate the mandate that we ask teachers to speak and to question from their own unique and powerful position. I expect that readers of this issue will be as inspired by the voices presented within these pages as we are.

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Notes on contributors

Alan Amtzis

Dr. Alan Amtzis is Director of the Master of Education Program in Educational Leadership: Instruction for The College of New Jersey. A former English teacher, special education teacher, and school principal of a therapeutic school for adolescents in recovery for drug and alcohol problems, he received his doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College in 2003. Dr. Amtzis served for four years as Chair of the Teacher-as-Researcher Special Interest Group for the American Educational Research Association and currently serves as their Historian and Immediate Past Chair. His research and professional interests include teacher research and practitioner inquiry, creativity development, arts-based education, narrative and other forms of qualitative research methodology and assessment, and new and emerging issues about teaching, learning, and knowledge. He has presented his work on teacher education, therapeutic education, research methodology, reflective practice, and creativity development at more than 40 regional, national, and international professional research conferences.