Maria Shreve

English 5870

Dr. DeVries

March 3, 2008

            Up until this class, I really haven’t thought about teacher-research, per se.  While I was getting my teaching credential years ago, we did observations, but the observations were more general, and focused on teaching methods, and not centered on answering research questions.  Ruth Ray’s article Composition from the Teacher-Research Point of View adeptly delves into the teacher-research movement, which, she believes, can potentially change the field of composition studies (172).  She notes that in addition to teacher-research being considered a movement, it has also been considered a revolution due to the emphasis on change “from the inside out – from the classroom to the administration, rather than the other way around…”  For those of us who are educators, we know that this is seldom the way that changes occur.  My overall impression of teacher-research is that it is essentially an equalizer in many ways and, in fact, Ray refers to teacher-research as follows:

…an emancipation proclamation that results in new ownership – teachers’ own research into their own behaviors and theories; this personally owned research replaces the concept of research as residing “elsewhere” in universities and other traditional sites of inquiry (174).

She notes that teacher-research not only addresses the imbalance between typical university researchers and teachers, but also the imbalance between scientific, theory-driven approaches of the university researcher and the qualitative, practice-oriented approach of the teacher (174-75).

According to Ray, another key principle of teacher-research is the idea of an egalitarian community.  That is, for teacher research to be successful there needs to be a classroom community in which knowledge and truth can be found in a learning environment in which there is collaboration between students, teachers, and researchers (175).  Ray cites many examples of teachers who collaborated with their students and notes, “Such redistribution of authority often affects the direction of the research, as well as the teaching and learning that occur” (177).  Of interest is that the examples that she used are not only from the college level, but from the high school level, as well, in which students’ input made them essentially partners in the learning process.  Ray notes that what many teacher-researcher studies have revealed is that when teachers “give up their attempts to control student learning, and in the process students helped teachers to see, think, respond, and even write in different ways” (178). 

Another part of the teacher-researcher movement is teacher-teacher collaboration.  Ray notes that Ann Berthoff believes that teachers don’t need more research, but they do need a dialogue with each other (178).  She quotes Berthoff: “Educational research, if it is to have any significance at all, must be created by, for, and among teachers.” 

  I recently experienced a wonderful opportunity for teacher collaboration at the Great Valley Writing Project Mini Institute this past summer.  The participants ranged from first grade teachers to the community college level, and I have never encountered the depth of teacher-teacher exchanges in terms of experiences and successful lessons that transpired there.  The participants were all willing to share and because we came from diverse academic worlds, it was very extremely informative. In terms of cultural orientation, Ray relates collaborating with two other professors on the subject of student response to text, one of whom worked with Alaskan native students from University of Alaska, another with Hispanic students from Wayne State University in Indiana, while she worked with Asian students from San Francisco State University.  She concludes that the other two teachers, both of whom were trained ESL teachers “saw cultural influences on my students’ responses that I had not considered significant” (181).  She notes after collaborating with each other,  the three of them learned to appreciate the effort that went into the student writing which before collaboration was not apparent. 

This collaborative spirit, Ray notes, is what makes teacher-research different than composition research.  An additional difference is the emphasis on the interrelationship between theory and practice and it’s interest in bringing out change.  The change takes on many forms, including the teacher, the student, the school system, the teaching profession, the field of study, and even within the classroom (183). On the other hand, the teacher-research movement is criticized for a variety of reasons.  For instance, because teacher-researchers are both participants and observers, they may not have the perspective to interpret their own classroom environment; the teacher-research may not meet the standards of the research community; teachers may not frame their research in terms of theory, which my render the evidence useless beyond their classrooms; it may be difficult for a teacher to both teach and generate research (184).

Ray predicts that future for teacher-research looks promising as “It will offer a new point of view – one that sees teaching as equal to research in its intellectual rigor and intent and envisions full collaboration between teachers and reaches as central to the maturing of composition studies as a field” (187).