Date/Time
Date(s) - 15 June 2022
1:00 pm - 1:15 pm
Categories No Categories
Encounters with primary literacy research: Teachers as a community under duress
Cathy Burnett1, Gill Adams1, Petra Vackova1,
1Sheffield Hallam University
This presentation draws on initial findings from the first phase of a two year ESRC funded project Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education ((ES/W000571/1)). The project investigates the movements of literacy research to and among primary school teachers in England given a shifting, complex educational context complicated by changing communicative channels for research. Drawing on an innovative combination of methods – teachers’ lifelogging, corpus linguistics and sociomaterial tracings – it explores how literacy research moves and what happens to it as it does so. The first phase involves investigating teachers’ experiences of exchanging and engaging with research. We are identifying the types of research they have accessed and their perspectives on its significance and on the role of individuals, organisations, texts and technologies (such as educational leaders, literacy charities, consultants, social media influencers, algorithms and hashtags) in brokering research. In this presentation we use teachers’ narratives to reflect on how their encounters with research are inflected by personal, institutional, technological, commercial and political factors. This work raises questions about research mobilisation that are relevant not just to primary literacy education but to relationships between professionals and social science research more broadly. It also, we suggest, has implications for how we understand the nature and practice of contemporary professional communities. The presentation will generate inter-disciplinary reflection on the kinds of spaces and events that might be conducive to facilitating risk-free, creative and collaborative opportunities for professionals to engage with research.