Ruth Ray focuses on the context of the classroom and the community when talking about effective teacher research. University research that deals in mass generalizations and standardized testing does little to help in teaching students. The main reason for this is that each community, each school, and even each individual classroom with its own set of students is a highly contextualized atmosphere and therefore cannot be generalized. Learning environments are socially constructed, and it is the examination of each environment individually and in relation to each other that will allow for the best research to be done.
Ray acknowledges that there are limitations to this type of research, the most obvious is that as the research is highly contextualized, we cannot apply all of the information gained outside the context in which it was learned. The community from which it came may benefit from it, the teacher that did the research may use that information in his/her own classroom in the future, and share it with his/her colleagues with some success, but outside that setting, it becomes less useful. Students in different communities learn in different ways, see the world through different lenses, and need to be taught using different strategies, strategies tailored to their particular set of commonplaces. Having said that, however, it is also incredibly valuable to collaborate with other teachers in research endeavors to compare what they have found.
Ray gives an example of this in describing her own experience collaborating with two other teachers in different parts of the country. What they find is that the three cultures they were looking at, Latinos in Detroit, Native Americans in Alaska, and Asians in San Francisco, had several similar characteristics in the ways they looked at texts. None of the students looked at the texts in the same way that Ray did, and two of the cultures, Latinos and Alaskan Native Americans, had similar cultural influences directing their reading and writing about the texts. These three teachers would not have learned nearly as much as they did in collaboration had they worked on these projects alone. So while it is necessary to look specifically at your own community and your own classroom to develop strategies in teaching best suited to your students, it is also important to compare your observations with other teachers in order to better understand which of your observations are particular to your community and students, and which are shared by other teachers in other communities and schools.