A Commentary on Research that Serves Teacher Education

Abstract

What kind of research best serves teacher education? The question seems sensible enough, one we ought to be able to answer without too much gnashing of teeth. Unfortunately, this presumptive straightforwardness of task is not within our grasp, for there are numerous impediments to progress. Among these are finding a widely shared conception of what counts as research, agreeing on criteria that adequately distinguish one kind of research from another, and determining Who should be served by research. In addition to these challenges, there is also a powerful normative issue: What are the purposes of teacher education and what kind of research best serves the attainment of these purposes? As the two lead articles in this issue of the Journal of Teacher Education are set side-by-side, the questions just posed are given a clear context. Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy (2002 [this issue]) attempt to determine whether there is research available to answer five questions of interest to educational policy makers. Among these are questions about the nature of pedagogical and subject matter preparation needed by prospective teachers and about the approaches most likely to yield high-quality results in both collegiate and alternative teacher preparation sites. Florio-Ruane (2002 [this issue]) has a quite different purpose. She offers an argument to safeguard research on teaching and teacher education from being constrained by too narrow a conception of scholarly inquiry or too simple a view of the nature of teaching. Florio-Ruane urges an appreciation of research that reveals the complexity and subtlety of educational practice and illuminates this practice for those who seek a deeper understanding of it. One finds different conceptions of research in these two articles, as well as different views of who is to be served and how that service is to be rendered. For example, Wilson et al. developed a set of criteria for adequate research on teacher education that led them to reject 80% of the studies they initially perceived as relevant to the questions they addressed. One readily infers that most of the studies that would count as research for Florio-Ruane may not make the first cut in the Wilson et al. analysis. There is a decided tension between these two pieces, a tension that is, perhaps, more obvious in the cautionary concerns expressed by Florio-Ruane than in the tough-minded approach to research taken by Wilson et al. I believe this tension, however, can be markedly reduced, perhaps even converted to a compatibility of sorts. In this article, I try to resolve this tension by developing two separate lines of argument. First is to show how a formal conception of large-scale social science research (here abbreviated SSR) might be compatibly situated within a larger frame of research that also recognizes certain varieties of interpretive and narrative research (here abbreviated INR). If successful in this endeavor, then the research programs advocated by Florio-Ruane could comfortably coexist with those that are valued in the work of Wilson et al. The second goal is to advance an argument that the policy-making enterprise may justifiably delimit, often to a narrow range, the kinds of research that are appropriate to its interests. In narrowing the range of acceptable research, policy making may indeed privilege some forms of research over others. That such privileging may occur is an inevitable consequence of some kinds of research being better suited to generating knowledge applicable to large populations or multiple settings. ON THE COMPATIBILITY OF RESEARCH PROGRAMS Formally conceived, large-scale SSR is subject to the criticism that it lacks sensitivity to context, is inattentive to the intentionality of the participants, and employs wrenching reconstructions of natural settings. These are among the reasons that some researchers prefer to do research that is dialogical, intertextual, interpretive, multiply voiced, or narrative in form (INR). …