Commentary #2

“Compositions from the Teacher-Research Point of View”

Ruth Ray

In our last reading we learned that to be an ethnographic researcher, an observer had the following two possibilities for approaching the target group. One option has the researchers becoming one with the group being studied so that they can “live in the world of the participant”(Purcell-Gates 96). Another option is acclimate the target group to researcher’s presence through staying extended periods of time with them until they almost forget that the researcher is there. In this week’s reading by Ruth Ray, we are confronted with a new possibility for culturally based classroom research. This article presents a researcher that is ever present and highly visible in the classroom. In her article, Ray presents the idea of the teacher as an acceptable and powerful researcher.

It was surprising for me to hear that it is cutting edge for teachers to also be researchers. In the opening of the article, Ray mentions that education today usually takes an administration-to-the-classroom approach (Ray 173) where teaching policies and practices originate outside the classroom. No Child Left Behind immediately springs to mind. I agree with her in that the opposite should be true. The classroom is where the teaching is done and its success or failure is first measured. Teachers are on the forefront of the educational system and almost no one is better qualified to make judgments of their theory and practice than those who are actually teaching. Teaching and researching, according to Ray, forms a “dialect” where they “continually inform each other” (184). I would think that this process might have an advantage over traditional university research because of its revolving information continuum.

In Ray’s article I was able to infer that teacher research is looked down upon by the currently accepted field of university researchers. Why? Last week we learned that a good ethnographer is able to observe and make judgments without bias or with as little bias as possible and without affecting the target group. Being in the position of the teacher gives a different perspective into the students’ work, their lives, and the classroom community. I would argue that neither research is better but that both present different views of the classroom community and that each view can be valuable in developing theories and methods for the writing classroom. I think that it would be ideal if one could combine the research of a teacher-researcher with that of an ethnographic researcher. In combining the two one would be able to use the external impartial observation with a more emotionally detailed teacher narrative. Comparing the two perspectives on the same target group would be interesting.

In the end of the article Ray asks the question, “what does this [tentative] voice suggest about their attitudes toward knowledge making” (Ray187)? Teacher research even has an inferiority complex evident in the “tentative voice” with which findings are reported. We make this voice stronger by giving credit to teacher researchers as having valuable input to bring to the composition studies theories and methods discussion. Knowledge is an evolving thing and we may need to redefine our accepted definition of what good research is.