In the Research Conversations podcast series, researchers and teachers come together in conversation to collectively explore different aspects of engaging with literacy research. They draw on their diverse priorities, interests and concerns as they reflect on what their encounters with research are and reimagine what they could be.
You can listen to the episode or read the transcript below to consider their different perspectives when it comes to accessing research.
“A sense of space in the day”: Challenges and opportunities for finding research
In this episode, researcher Julia Gillen and teacher Daisy discuss how classroom practitioners can access and incorporate a wide range of research in their work.
Limited forms of research make their way into schools and restrict how teachers are expected to engage with these ideas. Additional pressures mean that many teachers are unable to critically engage with research or draw on their own expertise and experience. However, there are different avenues that expand multiple approaches to research. More people, projects and organisations are inviting teacher voices to inform the kind of research that is undertaken and to better understand how this research can reach people in the classroom.
Listen to the episode here
Julia Gillen (JG): Good morning, Daisy. I’m absolutely delighted to meet you for the first time today.
Daisy (D): Good morning. Likewise.
JG: I thought we should start by introducing ourselves because I know you’ve met other people from the project, I don’t think we’ve met yet. I’m Julia Gillen. I’m a co-investigator in the project and I’m from Lancaster University.
D: Lovely. I’m Daisy. I am a primary school teacher. I work in a school in Sheffield. And I’ve been involved in the research literacies project as a kind of participant since … ooh 2022, I think.
JG: That’s wonderful. Yes, it’s a pity that we haven’t met before.
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JG: I’ve spent a lot of time in schools, but I’ve never been a primary school teacher myself. I’ve spent time in early years, primary and secondary and I’m just in awe really of what you do – and how you cope. And it’s kind of amazing that you’re interested in research as well. So we’re just delighted that you’re kind of involved in the project. However, I suppose at the same time, every teacher is inevitably involved in research. Is that true, would you say?
D: Well, what you may or may not be aware of is that there is now a kind of increasing drive to have every teacher involved in research that is named research. It’s become part of the teacher’s standards that teachers will keep up with developments in research. And that’s partly what got me interested in participating in this project in the first place. Because my understanding and my colleagues’ understandings and general understanding in education of what research constitutes is quite a broad church. And it’s been very interesting to work with people for whom research is their daily practice, to see the kind of alignments and also tensions between what we think of as research.
JG: You say that you do kind of recognise a broad church of research. And that’s really interesting because some of our participants are telling us that they’re getting only access to a very narrow range of research.
D: I think that is quite largely the case, in fact. Because of my involvement in this project and because of my own extracurricular interests, I perhaps encounter more research than somebody else in a similar position to me, working in schools. I do also feel that the research that makes its way to schools is very highly scripted and edited; usually by needing to come through the filter of Ofsted or the inspectorate or coming through the filter of the DfE or coming through the filter of some very specific bodies endorsed by the DfE. And I don’t feel that most of my colleagues can actually get into the broader church of research which I think is one of the interesting things that’s come out of this project.
JG: Yes. Thank you very much, that does align a lot with our findings. I was really struck by a beautiful way that you expressed it in your blog post. You said, “most of what makes it into schools feels either like a show, ‘we did this in our school and look what’s happened’ or a tell, ‘this is some truth about pedagogy or cognition that I’m going to hand down to you’.” And I really thought that was a wonderful example of what we’re hearing about both the narrowness but also the narrowness in how research is transmitted really or broadcast to people in schools, rather than being kind of dialogic as perhaps the profession might expect.
D: Yeah, absolutely and I think there’s an added aspect to that, which is that whether it be a show like “you try this in your school, it worked for us” or a tell as in “latest thinking says this”, from the perspective of those receiving it or kind of imbibing it at the school end, there’s also the constant time management pressures. And the kind of searing question, “Is this relevant to me? Will I be able to do anything with this research?”
So I don’t know if, you’re aware, but after my initial involvement with the project at the kind of interview and group stage, I’ve been working with Pari and with Cathy to produce some resources to do with how teachers engage with research. And we – the group of teachers that I was working with – came up with a kind of card game where it’s sort of striving to provide teachers with a series of critical questions to ask of the research they encounter. Which I actually intend to try out in a staff meeting at my school next week.
But I can already predict that some of the responses will be, “I don’t want to engage with this critically. I don’t have time. I simply need you to tell me what it is that I need to know.” Or “Somebody needs to decide what it is that I need to know so that I can action it in my classroom.” And I don’t know whether that is ever an element that kind of informs the research when it’s conducted. So what is the intention behind research when it’s conducted? Is its intention that it should reach classroom practitioners? What do researchers want them to do with it, I suppose is my interest as well.
JG: That’s a very good point and a critical question down to the producers of research. But before that, it’s both completely understandable given the kind of recent history of the way in which primary education has been made … let’s say coherent to use the kind of neutral term – in a kind of alignment between initial teacher training, Ofsted expectations and all the rest of it, but perhaps less rich than it might be. So then it becomes completely understandable, given all the pressures on teachers to say, “I just want a sort of quick fix.”
And yet it’s also quite sad, isn’t it? For those of us who’ve been round education a long time and kind of recognise the greater desire for professionalism. Because at the very heart of professionalism is making decisions I suppose based on your own expertise, experience and critical thinking.
D: Completely. And I was, just as you were talking then, thinking about often from within the system, on the teaching end, you don’t necessarily see the phases or the fads or the kind of movements in educational thinking. I mean, you do to a degree. There are some things that are in [laughs] and some things that are out. But those are kind of received as practice or tips towards best practice rather than always engaged with in the sense of why has this change happened, what specific research has pushed in this direction? Your research spans back over – especially your research into kind of the digital interactions between learners and kind of digital … if digital literacies the best word maybe? And I just wonder how that for you has changed in the process of you being someone generating this research and driving this research. How much has change on the educational side changed what you choose to research or what’s available for you to research?
JG: I think that’s a very good point and it’s a very critical question. I mean I suppose one bright sign is that the Economic Social and Research Council (ESRC) considered this project worthy of funding. So obviously we went to them with our aims, which included investigating a diversity of research that’s out there, investigating how research reaches teachers, how research moves; looking at research from the different places in which it might be encountered indeed. So it was kind of a spark of encouragement that at least the ESRC thought it was funding.
And similarly, my work with young children and digital technologies at home, I’ve been fortunate enough to get funded. So I can see a kind of political desire to … perhaps a recognition in some quarters – I’m not kind of claiming that it’s at the heart of policymaking or anything [laughs]. But at least there’s a recognition in some quarters that if, for example, we neglect children’s practices with digital technologies outside school and don’t take account of them at all or even before they come to school, then maybe we’re missing something. So I guess that gives me a bit of hope.
On the other hand, I probably haven’t – well, I’m sure I haven’t – gone as far as I should to try to tailor my research so that it directly reaches people who might find it useful. I’ve probably been too weak at doing that. So if I think about the project I did a while ago in a couple of schools in the North East, for example, then I think in the end I was content to let it be a research report and a journal article and then kind of “oh let’s turn on to the next thing.” And maybe I should think harder about how, if findings in research are worthwhile, you know I should do more to try to communicate them, I suppose.
D: I’m very interested in your use there of the word weak. ’Cause I think in my personal experience, there’s a shared sense in both teaching and in academia –which I have a much more limited experience of – but there’s often a sort of quite ambitious sense of what you’d like your work to achieve in contrast sometimes to what it is possible to achieve with a certain piece of work or a certain aspect of your teaching practice. Also I feel that in what we’ve just been discussing, there is sometimes a sense as a teacher that you are weak in that your interests, the interests of individual teachers, don’t appear to drive kind of what the research councils are funding or what their political agenda is moving towards.
But I don’t know to what degree that is true or not true. You know on a personal note, I don’t have any particular links or networks that enable me to kind of get my specific voice heard in the world of research [laughs]. Is there a mechanism, is there a feedback loop somewhere? You’d like to think that there was where [laughs] somebody was saying, you know, “what do teachers need more help with and what do they need less help with?” Or “what’s a good area for guidance?” Recently various kind of training and professional development events I’ve been to, it’s a profession where it’s quite easy to kind of rail against what’s annoying you [laughs] in the way that it’s governed and regulated. But I don’t know if there is a kind of yeah a mechanism for mutual information. Perhaps this is it. Perhaps this project is the only mechanism that’s operating out there at the moment. [laughs]
JG: Well, I hope not. I mean, for me, I’d like to see the trade unions have a voice.
D: Hmm!
JG: I also think associations like the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) is kind of very worthwhile. And that is one venue where I feel you know, thank goodness I do get to meet some teachers as well as teacher educators and other researchers and also people interested in things like children’s literature, you know, which can be so overlooked. And that perhaps places like that can also provide a route to being invited, for example, to participate in a funding council panel or as a reviewer and so forth. So I think these professional associations like the National Literacy Trust and so forth have some capacity to be mediators.
D: I agree. And for me they indeed have been the main route of mediation. It felt a bit like a sabbatical when we were all on lockdown four years ago. And it was the first time in my teaching career that there was really time – this was before online school had really taken off – there was a sense of space in the day. And at that point my involvement with subject associations kind of really started as well as for example the Chartered College and yeah, the UKLA. And they have from that point really been my go-to place to start hares of thought. And they’ve also put me in contact with people who are conducting research or who are working in their own subject-related organisations. I found that once I started seeking it out, there’s a big world that you can easily get your foot into.
I suppose my question is, for those people who haven’t sought it out yet, or haven’t got the kind of luxury of time in which to think, “how could I engage with this?”, access to research seems to rely on individual interest on the part of teachers. Or perhaps again, perhaps I’m being slightly unfair because within a school structure, there’s also the hierarchy of a kind of leadership strategy and vision and in some cases that also might lead to specific interactions. I do know of schools where, for example, action research projects are expected of their staff within structures that they create for themselves. But it does still feel slightly arbitrary at the moment in terms of whether or not that might be happening in any given setting.
JG: Yes. It does indeed. And one just has to think, if we take it back to children and the tremendous diversity and range of opportunities and challenges, how much better – you know, it would be good, wouldn’t it, if the system was resourced so that teachers could find the time and the space to engage with more research.
D: So maybe a final thought, Julia. We’ve been talking about research and the kind of hugeness of it and the way that it takes many different forms and also the constant time pressures that teachers face and the way that sometimes research might need to be something that you do for the sake of it. [laughs] So, “oh, I need to engage with some research because it’s on my personal development plan.” So just maybe if you have any comments about accessibility not in terms of locating and sharing research but in terms of actually reading, viewing, understanding research. Because there’s this whole spectrum from a Twitter post or a post on X to an academic journal article and some people might be able to locate themselves on that spectrum in terms of what they would find easy to engage with and other people might find the whole thing very overfacing. I wonder if you have any thoughts on the final form of research and the publication and how that looks and how it can reach other people?
JG: Yes, I think that’s a really good question. The advantage of social media can be that it gives you a sort of a signpost to somewhere else you might find interesting. But at the same time, for various reasons, I spend phases when I’m engaging in social media and phases when I absolutely don’t. There are phases when I am perhaps a fan of a particular website and follow it for a while and then I’ll probably leave it. And then a lot of the time, you’re driven by a particular question at the time and so you’re kind of pursuing that. And let’s face it, we use Google and I use Wikipedia as well because I’m conscious of the fact that many people, including myself actually, edit Wikipedia and try to build links to useful places. So that’s another place.
I’d like to sort of perhaps blow the trumpet though for our project PI Cathy Burnett because I think she’s done a great job in writing the scoping report about the diversity of research in primary literacy. So she’s really written about the different approaches and orientations. And it is an open access academic paper. But she’s also now written a shorter sort of accessible version. And I think that just might, I hope, be helpful to people in giving them some clue about the range of things that’s out there in terms of topic, methods and so forth. And hopefully that will spark some kind of routes for people’s own curiosity-driven research as well as be useful for people who were organising continuing professional developments or initial teacher training or even policymakers interested in that. So I’m really hoping that that will be, along with the resources on this website, might be a lasting contribution that perhaps the project can make. Which is very much down to the energies of yourself and other teachers as well that we’ve been working with.
D: I’d definitely like to join in on blowing the trumpet for Cathy, ’cause I think participation in this project has been really interesting and really stimulating for me professionally and personally. And these are the kind of questions and concepts that there isn’t always time to bandy about within my normal work setting and it’s been really enjoyable to have the space to consider them. And I certainly think something like Cathy’s – I would maybe call it a guide – is going to be a useful starting point as I try and kind of persuade some of my colleagues that this has been a fruitful line of inquiry. So yeah, thank you very much to the project.
JG: Thank you very much, Daisy. It’s been lovely talking to you today. Thank you.
D: Thank you, Julia. Lovely to meet you.
JG: Okay, bye.
D: Bye!
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