January 2023
Cathy Burnett
When we try to explain the focus for the Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education project, we often say that we are interested in ‘how research moves to, from and among teachers’. At this point in the project it is worth expanding on what we mean by this as we have found that this statement can be interpreted slightly differently from how we’ve intended it.
First of all, when we refer to ‘research’ we adopt an inclusive definition. In other posts I have made the point that we are interested in literacy research associated with a wide range of methodologies and topics. Here I want to emphasise that we are not just interested in research that originates in universities or other institutions but also in teacher-led research and enquiry and in research that is coproduced by academics and teachers[1] .
My second point is that, when we talk about research moving ‘to, from and among’ teachers we do not mean to imply that the recommendations from research can be parcelled up and distributed from researchers to teachers or handed from teacher to teacher simply to be acted upon. We don’t want to suggest that teachers are passive recipients of research. We know from our own work on this project and from prior studies that teachers find it hard to make time to engage with research (whether this is academic research or research conducted by themselves or by other teachers) (See Coldwell et al., 2017) . When they do, however, research appears to be most useful when combined with professional knowledge and interpreted in the light of teachers’ own contexts (Cain et al. 2016). This professional interpretation of research is hugely interesting – although it’s not something we’re looking at closely in our project.
We are however interested in how research findings gain traction (and within this, whether certain kinds of research findings gain more traction than others) – hence our focus on how research moves to, from and between teachers.
This focus on teachers is important. Other work has provided useful ways of thinking about how research moves to schools or districts and subsequently to teachers and into classrooms (Maxwell et al., 2022). And there have been attempts to map the routes by which research can move from universities to policy and to schools (British Academy, 2018).
In our project we are certainly interested in the kinds of research that reaches teachers via their schools – and how this links to national policy, local and national initiatives and the work of different research brokers.
But we are also interested in other ways in which teachers encounter research – e.g. through subject associations, Masters courses, on social media or through self-initiated internet searches driven by a particular interest or concern from their own classroom. These encounters are not always driven by national, local or school policy. If we are to understand which kinds of research are gaining traction we need not only to look at attempts to connect teachers with research led by policy, institutions or researchers. We need to explore teacher-led and teacher-to-teacher research encounters which research. These are driven by a wide variety of motivations and involve navigating a vast array of sources of information representing very different standpoints. We refer to these informal, serendipitous encounters with research as ‘research encounters in the wild’.
[1] The latter is far from common but there have been some promising recent developments which – such as launch of the United Kingdom Literacy Association Participatory Approaches to Literacy Research SIG and a recent special issue on Connecting Research and Practice in the Journal of Research in Reading.
References
British Academy (2018). Harnessing Educational Research. Available online at: HarnessingEducationalResearch_0.pdf (thebritishacademy.ac.uk)
Cain T. (2015). Teachers’ engagement with research texts: Beyond instrumental, conceptual or strategic use. Journal of Education for Teaching, 41(5): 478–492.
Coldwell M., Greaney T, Higgins S., Brown C., Maxwell B., Stiell B., Stoll L., Willis B., & Burns H. (2017). Evidence-informed teaching: an evaluation of progress in England: Research report. Department for Education. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/625007/Evide nce-informed_teaching_-_an_evaluation_of_progress_in_England.pdf
Maxwell, B., Sharples, J., & Coldwell, M. (2022). Developing a systems-based approach to research use in education. Review of Education, 10, e3368. https://doi-org.hallam.idm.oclc.org/10.1002/rev3.3368