In the Research Mobilities project, we spoke to primary school teachers in England about their varied encounters with literacy research. They shared how and why they look for research, the different kinds of ideas and formats they come across, how they share and engage with research, and the opportunities and challenges they face along the way.
These excerpts highlight a range of experiences and challenges with literacy research. You can use these quotes to get into conversation with teachers’ different viewpoints and prompt your own questions and reflections.
“That is so interesting, T16, I have literally just written in the chat would it be possible to get a list of places to access great research, because I feel exactly the same. Like there is so much out there and you kind of need personal recommendations like T11 was saying, someone to say ‘Have you read this great article about this?’, you need those interactions with other teachers who are passionate about research or passionate at a certain area and if you are just in a school on your own, not engaging with other people like that, you aren’t going to get those recommendations and you’re not going to – unless you’re on Twitter constantly or, you are not going to have those recommendations and therefore not really the inclination or just being a bit lost.”
“So I’m the one in the middle, and the cloud above, that is the research […] that is a little bit how I view writing research. It’s just kind of – I know it’s out there; I know that it’s about, but I don’t quite seem to be able to easily access what I want to access so it’s a bit of a swirl that I think is out there somewhere, but I can’t quite grab it. The little musical notes are the podcasts and so that is kind of where I get a lot of information from and obviously the books there, and then kind of this dude here is a colleague and lots of it comes through communication. Someone will say – there is one colleague in particular in our school […] and if you go to him and say ‘I need this’ he will point you in the right direction. So that is conversations between each other, but yeah, it can leave you feeling a little bit, or it can leave me feeling a little bit confused sometimes as to how to […] get that one thing that is going to make the biggest difference.”
“When I’d been teaching for a few years, I spoke to a friend of mine who works in teacher training education, the education department at [university] and I was sort of talking about ways to, not like move on, but talking about what there was to make the classroom practice – I had enjoyed all the training aspects of things and I feel that in some ways that tails off a bit. You know, there is CPD in work settings, but it can be, depending on the school, it can be a bit sort of – Sometimes it’s just serving a purpose that you need the school to serve […]
She kind of encouraged me to doing things like joining some professional organisations, like the UKLA, and sort of engaging. So I am a UKLA member and through that, and getting on the Reading for Pleasure mailing list and that kind of thing, I feel like compared to my first years of teaching it sort of opened up just a set of encounters, as you put it, with different bodies of research and I guess the research side, it can be quite loose. I do sometimes I buy books, and I’ve read some recently published books about vocabulary acquisition or writing, and approaches to writing, but I think it’s more kind of, yeah. You kind of get a sweeping sense of one type of approach and then you really get a sense of another kind of approach, and then you hear somebody talking about how in their school they might have a third kind of approach.”
“One I came up with was when we’re supporting SEND children in terms of English and dyslexia and things like that. We do a lot of research looking around ways we can support them but, again, I struggled finding different ways. I have a dyslexic tutor that will send me stuff that she has, or journals that she’s bought and then passes on, but in terms of actually accessing it online, often we find that we’re very stuck for things like that. But if I think day-to-day interaction with research, I think in primary schools a lot of it tends to be watered and filtered down through a different scheme that somebody else has taken and interpreted that research, or a different curriculum programme that somebody else has taken that research and watered down and filtered in. So it’s not necessarily the core ideas and the core aspects of that research, it’s somebody else’s watered down version of it.”