Preparing Teachers-as-Researchers: A Framework for Conceptualizing Research Preparation in Initial Teacher Education

• In Event: Interrogating Educational Possibilities Through Teacher Education and Development

Abstract

Recent policy reform in teacher education in Ireland has followed the UK, Scandinavia and the US, in advocating for an enquiry-oriented, evidence-informed vision of the profession. Teachers in Ireland are expected to become reflective practitioners who are actively engaged in and with research to develop their practice on a regular basis. This shift towards research-based teaching and teacher education is a return to teacher agency (Biesta et al 2015) and a move towards establishing a foundation for a research active teaching profession. In countries where student outcomes are high, teacher education is required to be research driven and ‘graduate teachers are capable of applying research to their work in a reflective way’ (Sahlberg et al., 2012, p.15). However, across both policy and practice in initial teacher education, there is significant variation in the ways in which students are prepared for research-engagement; in the ways policymakers conceptualise teachers as researchers; and in the research competencies that are assumed important for classroom based research. Furthermore, scholarship the preparation of teachers as researchers is scare (van der Liden et al., 2015), and the extent to which practitioners should engage with and in research varies across and within EU countries (Leat et al., 2015).
Focusing on three geographical case studies (Ireland, UK, Norway), this paper identifies variations and commonalities in conceptualisations, standards and implementation of teacher-researcher preparation. Drawing on policy and literature on research competency in undergraduate higher education (Griffiths 2004; Healy and Jenkins 2009), and qualitative empirical data on self-perception of research competency from student teachers during the final year of their programme – the scholarly output of this paper is a framework which integrates research competencies for the purpose of preparing teachers to be research active professionals. Empirical data emphasizes the importance of giving students an opportunity to engage in, as well as with, research during their initial teacher education (Brennan, 2019). The framework plots a range of research competencies on a continuum of teacher research preparation from; research literacy, research engagement, applied research, and research dissemination with a view to preparing teachers who are research active, rather than research literate, and to contribute to discourse on conceptualisations of teachers-as-researchers.
References
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Author

• Aimie Brennan, Marino Institute of Education