Content area
Abstract
In recent years, efforts at expanding the knowledge base for teaching to include the insights of teachers have become increasingly prominent in the discourse on educational reform. Advocates of such a plan suggest that knowledge developed by teachers can provide insights into the particulars of teaching, revealing authentic dilemmas and challenges of practice, as well as corresponding solutions and insights. Infusing practitioner-generated knowledge into the existing knowledge base, however, requires first imagining, then institutionalizing, ways for teachers to share the ideas and insights that they generate through classroom-based research and other forms of professional inquiry.
This study aimed to investigate these issues, concentrating on the ways in which teacher researchers codify and share what they come to know about their students, practice, and contexts; the channels through which this work reaches its audiences; and how others in the education community subsequently translate it. The research followed an embedded case study design to guide data collection and analysis, and an overarching analytic strategy rooted in analytic induction and grounded theory.
The study suggests a conceptualization of knowledge codification that accounts for the wide range of representations—including Web sites, manuscripts, narratives, videos and presentations—that teacher research can produce. The content of the representations includes research findings, instructional strategies, stances toward students and teaching, and the concept and process of teacher research. Dissemination channels provide a medium for the conceptual and material representations to travel to outside audiences.
Using translation theory, the study demonstrates how two teachers have found ways to actively integrate practice-based knowledge into the field of education and to contribute to local reform efforts that may help to close achievement gaps at their schools. Analysis of these teachers' efforts has indicated possibilities open to other teachers interested in disseminating teacher research and highlights the conditions that may promote or impede their efforts.
