Year: 2003
Type: dissertation
Abstract: My study examines the first year in the life of a teacherlresearcher group, composed of professionals from the disparate sites of university and elementary school, who met weekly to collaborate on the design, implementation, and public (re)presentation of classroom-based research projects, and to share stories about teachingilearning in ethnically diverse, multilingual classrooms.This instance of collaboration was set within the strand of teacher research aligned with critical and feminist challenges to traditional hierarchies of knowledge and committed to reciprocity in research relations.My study offers a friendly critique of the normative frameworks of equity, inclusion and praxis that formed the larger discursive field for this local effort.I analyze the material and discursive conditions that shaped our conversations, using new rhetorical genre theory to understand how practices are organized in socially recognizable ways and noting how recognition shaped parameters for participation.My study shows how we negotiated direction within our rhizomatic conversations.I trace activities of identification, recognition and reception that enabled the presentation of some stories, some selves-and not others-within this space.I suggest that a more complex understanding of community within teacheriresearcher collaborations is needed, one that can take into account struggles for selflidentification amidst contradiction and difference.iii Chapter I : Theoretical frameworksMy inquiry investigates the practices of a group of teachers and researchers who met weekly to reflect on their teachingilearning in ethnically diverse, multilingual classrooms, to discuss recent research in sociocultural theory, and to work together on designing, implementing, and writing up research projects in teachers' individual classrooms.I analyze the material and discursive conditions within this particular community of practice during its first year and how these conditions enabled the production and presentation of selves, stories and expertise.As a particular, local instance of cooperation between classroom-based teachers interested in doing research and university-based researchers interested in classroom practices, this group was set within a larger educational discourse on teacher research collaborations.This group was intended to foster productive, respectful collaboration between differently situated participants-professionals in the disparate sites of university and elementary school. Teacher1 researcher collaborationsWithin educational discourse on teacherlresearcher collaborations (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999a, 1999b;Zeichner & Noffke, 2001;Ritchie & Wilson, 2000), certain assumptions underlie the notion of 'collaboration.'Seen as building bridges between university and school sites, collaborations hold a potential to provide fuller, more balanced views of classroom events, and thus more relevant and useful research.Ideals of inclusion, in particular including those 'on the frontlines'-teachers and students within actual classrooms-animate such claims for collaborative teacher research.This collaborative research can be seen to generally embody the best of what education as a discipline can offer: a profession allied with research.Some applaud the potential for teacheriresearcher collaborations to answer Dewey's (191611966) call to eliminate the dualism between doing and knowing, which he saw as antithetical to education in democracy.However, others are less enthusiastic.Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle (1999b), reviewing the past decade of the teacher research movement, outline some critical positions educational researchers take in relation to teacher research.Some argue that teacher research studies are not rigorous and produce practical but not theoretical knowledge.The knowledge critique is based on the premise that there is a formal, theoretical, or scientific form of knowledge for and about teaching distinguishable from some other kinds of knowledge variously referred to as practical knowledge, craft knowledge, lore, received wisdom, the wisdom of practice, accrued wisdom, or knowledge that is experiential, personal-practical, situated, relational, embodied, popular, and/or tacit (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999b, p.20). 'Like a pen trying to write on an oily surface'How would you describe the relationships between teachers and researchers in the group?How would you describe the discussions of the group?Is there anything more you would like to add?
Source: Summit (Simon Fraser University)
Author: Bonnie Waterstone
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2122270982