Mediating Relationships across Research, Policy, and Practice in Teacher Education

Abstract

This self-study explores my mediation as a literacy teacher educator in the context of a professional development undertaking that involved developing and leading an early school years literacy course. I examine the tensions that arose in the light of my own professional history and explore ways that the tensions led me to reconcile conflicting messages through processes of reframing. I describe how I put my reframings into action in the way I designed and presented the professional development course. This self-study advances knowledge about teacher education in terms of its role in mediating connections between research, policy and practice, identifying some of the tensions that occur in this mediation and illustrating how, as teacher educators, we can use these tensions to reframe our mediation.

Keywords:

• research, policy and practice
• reframing
• tensions
• mediating relationships

Acknowledgements

While this self-study was self-funded, the broader Literacy Nexus Research Project is supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP0771675).