Welcome to XMCA!
At 03:49 PM 10/2/97 -0500, you wrote:
>I am a doctoral student interested in communities of practice that develop
>between/among university researchers and public school teachers.
>
What are your specific interests in the relations between university
researchers and public school teachers? Do you feel that these relations
are unilateral and uneven? Why are you interested in this topic? Have you
been a teacher (or are you a teacher)?
I've heard that Sam Wineburg (wineburg who-is-at u.washington.edu) and Pam Grossman
from University of Washington do extremely interesting project and research
on the relationship between university researchers and public school
teachers. Let me try to reconstruct their study (I probably will
misconstrue it as well because I heard the report about the study two years
ago).
They successfully (at the moment of their presentation) tried to organize
the high school teachers to discuss educational issues. The idea was to
share ownership for the project with the teacher with consecutive
transference of all responsibility to the teachers. One of their many
interesting findings is that Sam and Pam found that it was very difficult
to organize the teachers divided by academic areas (i.e., departments) and
educational philosophies (which in many cases, but not always, overlap with
departmental division). Sam and Pam found a solution in moving away from
explicit focus on educational issues and instead they (together with
teacher leaders) introduced an idea of discussion contemporary highly
contraductional fictional literature. Teachers' participation was fully
voluntarily, so, initially some teachers (especially from science
departments) drop from the discussions (many re-joined later). The
discussion of the literature created "safe environment" for introducing
philosophical differences between the teachers that extended to educational
issues.
I remember that Sam and Pam discussed in their presentation their role as
researchers who tried to move from "center" to the remote periphery of
their participation in organization of teachers' discussion.
Eugene
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Eugene Matusov
Willard Hall Educational Bldg., Room 206G
Department of Educational Studies
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716-2920
Phone: (302) 831-1266
Fax: (302) 831-4445
e-mail: ematusov who-is-at udel.edu
http://www.ematusov.com
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