Date/Time
Date(s) - 1 July 2022
11:15 am - 12:30 pm
Categories No Categories
How does research reach teachers? Investigating research mobilities in primary literacy education
Cathy Burnett1 , Julia Gillen2 , Petra Vackova1
1 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom. 2 Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
In England several developments have combined in powerful ways to sustain certain ideas about literacy and research in education. These include the promotFion of ‘evidence–based practice’, reductive frameworks for initial teacher education and early career professional development, and a strong accountability framework via inspection. However to suggest that such discourses are all pervasive is to ignore other, less predictable, ways in which research circulates. Teachers, researchers and others working in literacy education, combined with the work of digital actors, assist the movement of ideas in sometimes unpredictable ways. We argue that, if we are to understand how teachers encounter research, we need a better understanding of how research moves, and suggest that such movements are produced through shifting assemblages of human and non–human actors that combine to mobilise literacy research evidence. In this presentation we draw on examples of activity on Twitter and preliminary work on an ESRC funded project- Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education – to explore the varied ways in which research moves to and between teachers, and what happens as it does so.