Teacher Research and Collaborative Inquiry: Teacher Educators and High School English Teachers

UGA-NETS focuses on teacher research and collaborative inquiry. Mentor teachers and teacher candidates work as coresearchers and colearners. Teacher candidates take a full program of campus teacher education courses. During the two quarters prior to student teaching, they write literacy learner autobiographies and cultural autobiographies and design teacher-learner portfolios. In their school classrooms, they conduct five research projects under the guidance of experienced teacher researchers, exploring different data collection sources and methods to help them address their research questions. They bring data to campus classes to analyze and compare with data other teacher candidates collect (Graham & Hudson-Ross, 1996). Our joint work enables us to reflect on our efforts to promote teacher research as a way of knowing for teachers at all levels and career stages (Graham, Hudson-Ross, Adkins, McWhorter, & Stewart, in press). Having identified collaborative inquiry and teacher research as critical to redesigning teacher education and scrutinizing our teaching practices, we have encountered successes. For example, all participants embraced the concept of collaborative inquiry. Teaching in both school and campus settings, we value and seek talk with peers to deal with the complexities of teaching and learning and to break the isolation many of us experienced in teaching. We have also encountered tensions and struggles. Teacher research as a central theme revealed insecurities and brought forth antagonisms for many members of the group; some teachers associated research with scientific inquiry and controlled variables--assumptions creating a mismatch with their questions as practitioners. This attitude aligns with teacher education researcher findings that consistently reveal tension between university and school (Greenberg, 1991; Russell & Flynn, 1992; Sirotnik & Goodlad, 1988). Most teachers who applied to work as mentors in the program had limited experience as classroom researchers. They saw researchers as people who isolated themselves in universities, knew little and cared less about classroom complexities, but nonetheless passed down theories for practitioners to implement. Research was a devil word (Lloyd-Jones, 1986). That attitude was an enormous obstacle to overcome, requiring a shift in roles and responsibilities, assumptions and expectations about who creates knowledge and what counts as knowledge. Together, we sought to complicate the term research and move closer to Lloyd-Jones's (1986) definition of researcher as merely a person who looks very carefully and then reports very carefully what has been seen so that others will believe it is a useful way of looking (p. 5). Group members came to accept that teacher research was both systematic and intentional inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993), which could serve them well. In this article, I describe how collaborative inquiry promoting teacher research positively affected our experimental teacher education group. Those research collaborations had many different configurations, arrangements that have been productive for teachers at every level of career stage and in both university and school settings. I first look at the university teachers' and mentor teachers' initial efforts to learn more about teacher research and redefine roles and responsibilities. I then describe the process of creating experiences for teacher candidates in which they locate and explore different research questions and methods, based on their emerging realizations about the complexities of teaching and learning. I next present cases of mentor teacher-teacher candidate and mentor teacher-mentor teacher pairs collaborating on research projects focusing directly on their classroom context or larger issues growing from school culture and politics. I describe the most recent research project of the entire group of UGA professors, mentor teachers, and teacher candidates on alternative assessment as a means of inviting high school students into the research process. …