Teacher Research and the Problem of Practice

By F. Rust. Teachers College Record, 2009

128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What knowledge informs practice? How does this knowledge become ensconced in a practitioner’s repertoire? How can new knowledge change practice? To many academics and scientists, the answer to these questions lies in getting practitioners to pay attention to and use current research. To practitioners, research-informed pressure for changes in practice often seems unrelated to what is needed in day-to-day and minute-by-minute interactions. To educational reformers, these questions are critical because understanding what teachers do, how they do it, and why they do it is central to any effort at reshaping education policy around teacher education, teacher professional development, and school reform. Any effort to bring researchers, practitioners, and policy makers together in order to influence practice is what Shonkoff (2000) described as a “true cross-cultural experience”(p. 182) in that it “requires respect for their differences as well as a commitment to their shared mission” (p. 182). In this special issue of Teachers College Record, we posit teacher action research as a bridge connecting research, practice, and education policy—as an important and practical way to engage teachers as consumers of research, as researchers of their own practice who use research to shape practice, as designers of their own professional development, and as informants to scholars and policy makers regarding critical issues in the field.

Subfields: Education, Human Factors and Ergonomics, Sociology and Political Science

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