Volume 4, Number 2 (September 2005): Focus: English teachers as researchers

Co-editors: Sue Brindley (University of Cambridge, UK) and Mary Hill (Faculty of Education, University of Auckland)

Rationale: In New Zealand, the recent Teaching and Learning Research Initiative has injected $1-2 million per year into research involving teachers as researchers. In the UK, the government have just ended a popular and successful Best Practice Research Scheme, which offered a grant of (up to) 2000 UK sterling to support teacher research. How can such a wide diversity of expectations and practices co-exist? In part, it seems to relate to the ways in which research is constructed (and used) by policy-makers. Is research about improving classroom practice? Is it about teachers developing personal and professional identities? Is it about challenging prevailing orthodoxies? Or about confirming how government initiatives "raise standards". Differing viewpoints provide different lenses to analyse widely differing policy positions and these views will no doubt differ as widely as governments do. But what we might well agree on is that research is a powerful experience. Those undertaking it rarely remain unmoved by the experience.

English/literacy teachers at all levels of education can benefit in a range of ways, not least because becoming researchers of their own practice opens spaces to document what actually goes on in their schools, and to resist outsider views that can presume what might or should be happening. As Hammersley (1999) reminds us, teacher researchers see the complexity of practice and are reluctant to reduce that complexity to simplistic schemes. This, in turn, produces a recognition of diversity, change and potential for actual conflict (p. 2). The aim of this issue has been to stimulate debate and critique about the practice of teachers researching their own practice with respect to the English/literacy classroom. More than just a description of research methods and findings, the article and narratives in this issue raise issues about being both English teachers and   researchers simultaneously, about the challenges associated with being a teacher and a writer, and about the kinds of knowledge that such research about practice might (or might not) produce.

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