The authors argue that teacher research has been devalued because
university researchers control the discourse about research.
Historical ideas such as the importance of reproducing results
has worked against the highly contextualized research teachers
conduct on their own classes. Their argument is much more
complete, but I doubt if many here would dispute them. They
further identify 4 types of teacher research modes, falling
in 2 categories:
Empirical: Journals, oral inquiries, and classroom/school studies
Conceptual: Essays
Their view liberates teachers from the idea that they need to
write journal-style articles in order to have their inquiries
classified as "research." Instead, a journal that interrogates,
reflects on, and records classroom life is a medium for
conducting and reporting research. Oral inquiry can come through
face-to-face inquiry or something like the xstar e-mail network.
Classroom studies are more like conventional research; essays
are reflective or theoretical pieces about classroom practice.
The first half of their book is about their conception of teacher
research. The second half consists of teacher research from
the different modes they identify, reported by teachers mainly
from the Philadelphia-area teacher research group (the authors
are at Penn).
That's a capsule review of a terrific book. I said in my intro
that they helped me see that I'd been a teacher-researcher
throughout my teaching; by that I mean that I'd done a lot
of semi-formal and informal inquiry about my own teaching,
but rarely finalized it the way I learned "research" ought
to look when I took my doctoral classes.
Peter Smagorinsky