English Teachers and Research: Becoming Our Own Experts¹

1. This essay began life as a keynote lecture, given as part of the London Association for the Teaching of English conference, Becoming our own experts: research and English teaching, held at the Institute of Education, UCL, London, 10 March 2018.

ABSTRACT

What is the relation between research and teaching? Are they entirely distinct activities – and should they remain so? What is the relation between research and teachers? Should teachers be positioned as either the objects or the recipients of research that is conducted by specialists, researchers who possess categorically different forms of expertise and equally different perspectives on what happens in schools and classrooms? This paper considers the ways in which education research is conceptualised in dominant discourses and offers the possibility of alternative approaches, informed by different epistemological and ethical understandings.

KEYWORDS:

• Research
• accountability
• English
• storytelling
• teachers as researchers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This essay began life as a keynote lecture, given as part of the London Association for the Teaching of English conference, Becoming our own experts: research and English teaching, held at the Institute of Education, UCL, London, 10 March 2018.

2. I should come clean. I was one of the teachers whose research was funded by the Teacher Training Agency in the mid-1990s – the initiative which is the focus of Foster’s (1999) analysis. I had been researching the teaching of Shakespeare. In the ‘findings’ paper – a brief summary of the research that the TTA required each of the teacher-researchers to produce – I had described my project as ‘a school-based case study’. In the version published by the TTA, this phrase had disappeared. As I wrote at the time, ‘What I had presented as an account which focused on one department in one school in Hackney was in danger of being transformed into a statement about How to Teach Shakespeare – any time, any place, anywhere’ (Yandell 1999, 41).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Yandell

John Yandell taught in inner London secondary schools for twenty years before moving to the Institute of Education, University College London, where he has worked since 2003. He is the editor of the journal, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education and the author of The Social Construction of Meaning: reading literature in urban English classrooms (Routledge, 2013).