Questions, Calls, and Conversations for Researchers in Teacher Education.

Examination of the foundations and practice of inquiry is increasingly common in the academy. At conferences, in journals, in books, scholars are looking beyond the findings of research to questions of method, merit, and knowing. These discussions have been diverse catalysts and have resulted in increased openness to new ways of pursuing educational knowledge. At the same time, many have noted growing tensions among scholars who represent the edges and center of this "methodological diaspora" (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). As inquiry has become more diverse, questions about standards and links to past work have helped to build boundaries that have limited conversations across perspectives. We draw on our recent experiences as editors of an educational research journal to pose some questions about the problem of research in teacher education. We attempt to bring the lessons learned and opportunities lost in our work related to the broad notion of educational research to the more narrow and easier to define topic of teacher education, tacking back and forth between narratives of experience and standards for practice, showing that the two mutually constitute each other in ways that are located in terrains of power and ideology. Our standards reflect us and we reflect our standards. It is our hope that this story in practice provides a new way of looking at the problem of inquiry, locating it in the social realm as a cultural and political practice. It is from this experience that we suggest a situated look at questions posed about research that might inform the community about its involvement in scholarly conversations and interchange. In 1995, we were asked to take on the editorship of the Review of Educational Research (RER), a major research journal of the American Educational Research Association that focused on presenting reviews of research. As we considered the invitation, we consulted our colleagues to find out what place RER had in their professional lives. Almost to a person, we were told that it was part of their library but that it was primarily relegated to the shelf. It seemed that it was a journal that looked backward, telling of the work of those established in the educational research community. Reading over its history, we were struck by the homogeneity of perspectives and the limited conceptions of schooling and its complex contexts. We wondered if we could, as scholars committed to issues of equity and diversity, use the opportunity with RER to create a space where new voices might be heard. Would it be possible to use the genre of the research review, which seemed to many to be a conservative force in the generation of knowledge, to open up the notion of research and make new understandings? With much hope and trepidation, we undertook this challenge by attempting to turn the notion of review on its head. We began with a review of RER, reading with dual purposes. First, we looked at what was there, hoping to understand the culture of the journal, its language and discourse forms and rules for practice. For the most part, we found that the work could be described in the following way: From a classical view of inquiry, a review is a basic element of knowledge accumulation and generation in the educational community. A synthetic perspective on inquiry allows the community to accumulate understanding on a topic by looking for commonalities in the literature. In the past, metaphors have depicted the scholarly literature as the construction of a wall and the review as an architectural examination of the wall, pointing to the notion of foundations and accumulation of evidence which allows us to build a knowledge base that is concrete, identifiable, and definitive. (Graue & Grant, 1999) We worried that if reviews were conceived in this modernist fashion, if knowledge was conceptualized as something that accumulated and formed physical foundations for future work, we could only re-create what was already there. …