Teacher Education Research IS Teacher Education Practice

• In Event: Collaborative Self-Study as Co-construction of Embodied Knowledge in Teacher Education

Abstract

Purposes
This paper explores the role of performing teacher education research as a formative component of teacher educator preparation and development.
Perspective(s)
This paper builds upon the substantial literature base seeking to understand what skills, knowledge, dispositions, and habits of mind teacher educators need in order to do their work, and what experiences might best help teacher educators to acquire those elements (Cochran-Smith, 2003; Cochran-Smith et al., 2019; Goodwin, 2014; Stillman et al., 2019). It is grounded in Dewey’s (1938) conceptualization of educative experience. Dewey (1938, 1963) proposed that educative experience increases persons’ powers to act in and on behalf of their own future experiences, and widens the scope of those experiences, whereas miseducative experience tends towards constriction of persons’ vision and range.
Methods
This inquiry builds from our prior collaborative self-study research into professional learning of teacher educators. We expanded our group of teacher educator researchers and surveyed a wider audience to collect more perspectives on felt preparation as a teacher educator. In particular, this study draws from the data corpus of a larger mixed methods study of preparation for work in teacher education and teacher educator leadership.
Data sources
Both qualitative and quantitative data for the larger study were collected via survey, and additional qualitative data were collected via post-survey group interviews. Quantitative survey data were primarily analyzed using both descriptive and statistics for non-parametric data sets, as the data was not guaranteed to produce a normal distribution. Qualitative data were analyzed via constant comparison and open coding, allowing themes to emerge from the data (Corbin & Strauss, 2014). Discussion in our community of inquiry around the key findings from the survey was recorded and informed future studies connected to teacher educator professional learning.
Results
Analysis of the data suggests that engaging in the practice of researching teacher education was a central educative experience for many participants, particularly for those participants engaging in significant teacher education leadership activities. Additionally, the data indicates that formative research experience for teacher educators is often not meaningfully separable from the emergent teacher educator’s engagement in some of the activities, processes, phenomena, etc., they are studying. That is, many participants saw their engagement in teacher education research as intrinsic to the practice of teacher education. This is particularly interesting, as it contrasts with Goodwin and colleagues (2014) finding that most of their participants saw their educational research as unrelated to their work as teacher educators.
Significance
An increasing number of teachers are educated in alternative settings, by school and community-based teacher educators who, in many cases, have not gone through doctoral programs that are most likely to prepare prospective teacher educators to engage in meaningful research and inquiry. If, as this study suggests, engagement in substantive, rigorous inquiry into teacher education is both an essential function of the teacher educator and an important mechanism for embodying the knowledge of teacher education, then this shift of teacher education out of institutions of higher learning may have significant unintended consequences.

Authors

• Connor Warner, University of Utah

• Dirck Roosevelt, Independent Scholar