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.
I think some pathways – I wonder whether some links with the universities would be helpful so that there was a pathway for a partnership between teachers and universities. I wonder whether that would be useful, but when I was an undergraduate I did a geography degree and I did some work on children’s geographies for one of my dissertations and there was all about the different levels of participation and levels of democracy. And so there were different levels of participation and I wonder whether there is a broader scope for increasing the level of participation in research for teachers about that more of a co-construction between universities and schools, rather than trying to equal that power relationship.
“I went to that webinar and I think you were there as well, the OU one with Jenny? Was it Jenny Rowsell? – I can’t read my own handwriting – about creating spaces for justice literacies which is really interesting, and I think that research was very academic and theoretical perhaps, but like I really enjoyed being there, but I perhaps struggled to access it as a kind of practitioner. Some of it. It was really enjoyable as a session but I wasn’t sure about the practical application in my setting … but I guess not all research for direct practical application perhaps.”
T11: Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I have also thought as well what is research. So when you said, ‘What is research?’ I was thinking yeah, what is research. Is it me researching something? Because I’m looking at other people’s research, so it’s not live. I am at the moment involved in something else to do with visual thinking and so I have been doing my own research, but it’s within my classroom in my school. So it’s very small but then before I did that I had to read somebody else’s research to find out where to go to next for my own, so, you know, where does it begin? It’s a chicken and an egg, isn’t it. [#laughs]
T26: It’s great you’re doing your own research. That’s brilliant.
T11: Well, I think it is interesting, because you can look at it from a completely different angle, because you’re in the classroom all the time and you’re doing the same thing over and over, but when somebody puts something in your head you’re going ‘Ohh, that’s interesting. I might try that and see what happens’ Yeah, and then I brought something back to everybody and I said, ‘What do we think of this?’ and they were going ‘Oh, hmm’, and I said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll try it and then make a decision’ rather than just saying ‘No, it’s not going to work for our children’, so again that is another piece of research, isn’t it. So you’ve got to trail something, see if it works, look at the results from it, and then decide is it good enough for us. I think that we do that all the time, don’t we?
T26: We all try, I think. We always want to know the next best thing. Well, I know some teachers don’t. I know at my school there is definitely some teachers that don’t want to try it, but I am always like ‘Ooh yeah, I’d like to try this’.
“Well the reason we’re doing whole class reading in our school is because I remember doing Carousels and looking one day at my class and thinking why are three-quarters of them doing time-filling activity while I’m paying attention to these 6? And I remember looking into what was the thought of doing whole class reading and looking for the research and that goes back to that gap that T75 was talking about identifying it and I suppose at that point I did. I just very sneakily without permission did it and it was only when my class’s results were getting better and people were observing it and noticing it as they were walking past that they began to ask why, and I justified why I had done it, but it was very much under the counter. It wasn’t necessarily an overt thing as a result of reading but it was the other way around. I identified a need and I looked for something that matched it.”
