Ruth Ray is optimistic about “the influence of teacher research on education” (187). I like Keri and others am surprised that teacher research is a new movement. However, I am learning that ‘new’ ideas in the world of education are not adopted quickly, and I find it interesting that the movement away from postivist thinking coincides with the movement toward teacher research. Perhaps it is no coincidence because teacher research is often not the black and white objective research that is found in science.
I think Mike makes some important points about Ray’s article and the limitations that she cites. “1) The teacher participant observers lack perspective, 2) teacher based research doesn’t always live up to community expectation, 3) the data is only relevant to the teacher-researcher’s classroom, 4) the teachers attention is divided.” Number three interests me the most. I have been reading a lot of critical pedagogy lately, and while I attend to agree with a lot of what people like Shor, Giroux and McLaren are saying, they rarely give the reader any examples of their theories. They rarely put their philosophies into practices, at least in their writings. One of the reasons behind this speaks to Ray’s # 3. I think that all teaching needs to be specific to the community, culture and historical setting that it is in. I don’t think there is a a universal method of teaching that works in all classrooms; however, I do think that methods can be adapted and that teacher can learn from other teachers, which speaks to the collaboration between teachers that Ray writes about.
While Ray writes about teacher research in a positive way, I feel that some times teachers feel that research is not part of their job. Their job is to teach, but some interesting things can be learned from research. Ray writes about Jeffrey Schwartz and the three things he learned from doing from doing two shared inquiry teacher research projects. The first was that “students discovered info [he] wouldn’t have seen” (177). I think this is important to note because students’ perspectives and thoughts can sometimes be overlooked by the dominating teacher with an agenda. Secondly, students “ acted responsibly as peer readers,” and third “when raising questions and analyzing data, we all learned about language together” (177). These are all important points because they address the power structure of a classroom. Sometimes students aren’t given enough credit for their ability to be insightful, and sometimes it is only the teachers opinion that is valued. Students can be afraid to make a mistake or voice an opinion for fear of being corrected. Elbow addresses this as does Ray. “The distinguishing feature of all these teacher-research studies is that the teachers gave up their attempts to control student’s learning and in the process students helped teachers see, think, respond, and even write in different ways” (178).
This is important to remember because sometimes what teachers learn from students is not mentioned enough, but that is what we are doing as ethnographers, learning from teachers and students. I think that is why it is important to go into each classroom with an open mind and try to check our opinions at the door. That is a very hard thing to do, at least it is for me, but the more open we are to learning and others opinions the more we as both teachers and students can learn. I forget that sometimes because I have such strong opinions; however, I have always felt that everyone’s opinion and points of view were valid and that universities and schools were places to express those opinions, and no matter how much you disagree with the crazy guy preaching fire and brimstone on campus or the man who thinks we are all aliens, their opinion matters, and not only that but we can learn from it. I think that’s the sort of mind set teachers need to go into research with and that’s the sort of mind set we should be trying to cultivate as we observer classrooms.