How language teachers address the crisis of praxis in educational research

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with a group of language teachers’ reading and interpretation of a peer-reviewed journal article. It draws empirical materials from a larger study, which explored how teachers addressed the ‘crises’ of representation, legitimation and praxis in educational research. In this article, I present a subset of data to illustrate how some of the participants responded to the crisis of praxis. I describe the participants’ interpretive work as ways of reading, and discuss how these ways of reading constitute an imaginative-ethical approach to reading research. Such an approach, it is argued, holds the potential to interrupt the dominant instrumental model of research use. Throughout the article, a case is made for understanding how teachers read and interpret research-based recommendations in keeping with their local contexts and professional commitment.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational research
• knowledge mobilisation
• language teachers
• interpretive reading
• ethics of research utilisation

Acknowledgments

This article is based on my graduate research project supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to the Council for the fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anwar Ahmed

Anwar Ahmed received his PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto in Canada. Currently he is teaching in the English Department of Glendon College at York University. His articles have appeared in journals such as Educational Philosophy and Theory, Professional Development in Education, Discourse, Reflective Practice, Teaching in Higher Education, Educational Studies, Curriculum Inquiry, International Journal of Leadership in Education, International Journal of Research and Method in Education, CALICO Journal, and The Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics. His recent edited book is Knowledge Mobilization in TESOL: Connecting Research and Practice (2019, Brill).