Inside research, inside ourselves: teacher educators take stock of their research practice

Abstract

This paper tells the story of how a group of teacher educators in a university education department used action research to examine their research situation, and what conclusions they reached. Some recent historical background puts the study in context, identifying tensions between university expectations and time‐heavy teaching demands that operated as obstacles to research activity. This context is shared by many academics who provide training for practitioners in UK universities that seek substantial funding through their performance in national research quality assessments. The project was initially organised in Spring 2007 by new research staff who had investigated staff perceptions of and interests in research through semi‐formal interviews, observations and documentation. An invited group turned to action research as a possible way forward. They asked the question ‘What kind of research culture do we want, and how can we get it?’ Over a year, all participants gathered at semi‐formal meetings for collaborative reflection and discussion, engaged in a diversity of micro‐researches that experimented with ways of researching around the barriers, and wrote a collaborative paper about what they had learned. This gave rise to a series of national and international conference presentations that drew several of the group members into the wider research community. The group members grew to realise that the kind of research that they perceived the institution to value was not necessarily a kind that was readily built into their identities as teacher educators. But this realisation itself was empowering, exposing previously opaque assumptions that had left a felt irreconcilability that had been difficult to articulate.

Keywords:

• teacher education
• research
• collaboration
• barriers
• strategies

Notes

1. For the avoidance of doubt, these kinds of communications were committee‐drafted and in referring to Professor Search throughout we refer to a set of perceived institutional assumptions, which were not necessarily held by any person involved in the authors’ then‐institution.

2. Some of the project participants and authors of this paper have moved away from the institution and/or into different roles since the project was undertaken. This institution itself continues to undergo considerable change.

3. There have been six RAEs, including the first in 1986. The last RAE was somewhat delayed and took place in 2008. At the time of writing, the next (REF) will take place in 2014/15.

4. We should note that in Scotland the policy commitment to a university component in Initial Teacher Education currently remains undiminished in comparison with the various alternative routes into teaching that are growing in the rest of the United Kingdom, although the Scottish situation is currently under review.

5. All participant names in this article are pseudonyms.

6. In the case of education, there have been meetings of the Research Committee of the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers, and meetings organised by the British Educational Research Association.

7. This may be exacerbated by the use of ‘bibliometrics’ – the next REF has considered the use of statistics showing how often a paper is cited by other researchers as an indicator of its quality, although this emphasis has been reduced outside the natural and physical sciences.