“Compositions from the Teacher-Research Point of View” by Ruth Ray

I found that Ray’s article suggests that teacher research is looked down upon by the currently accepted field of university researchers. Why? I offer that the ruling ideology has to perpetuate the notion that the in-the-trenches teachers should just do their job, like good “laborers” and leave the research, “important stuff” to the Administration, the elite of society.

The teacher-research movement is seen as “revolutionary” because it challenges a number of assumptions underlying the traditional (positivist) paradigm in education: that research should be objective, controlled, and decontextualized; that the researcher should be distanced and uninvolved; that research is always theory-driven and must be generalizable in order to perpetuate theory building; and that knowledge and truth exist in the world and are found through research (Ray 175). These assumptions can be, and should be challenged because, as Ray tells us, “knowledge and truth in education are not so much found through objective inquiry as socially constructed through collaboration among student, teachers, and researchers” (Ray 175). Teachers qualify as researchers if they are “open-minded and inquiring and see the classroom as an egalitarian community in which he/she is but one of many learners” (Ray 175). The fact that they are involved should not rule them out as valid researchers. Ray uses Peter Elbow’s perspective which is that “Even though we are not wholly peer with our students, we can still be peer in [the] crucial sense of also being engaged in learning, seeking, and being incomplete” (Ray 175).