Collaborative Teacher Inquiry Research Articles

(Re)imagining translanguaging pedagogies through teacher-researcher collaboration

(Re)imagining translanguaging pedagogies through teacher-researcher collaboration

Fostering language awareness for integration through teacher-researcher collaboration in a Spanish bilingual education context

Research on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes has shown that teachers find it difficult to integrate content and language in their teaching, and that this may be due to a lack of a specific type of teacher language awareness (TLA) for this type of teaching. This study explores how TLA for CLIL is manifested in metatalk in the context of a collaborative professional development activity, which took place in a bilingual secondary school in Madrid (Spain). Content and language teachers in pairs designed content and language integrated instructional sequences, implemented them, and assessed the students’ output. Four sessions in which teachers reflected on the activity, in collaboration with researchers, were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. The data were analyzed using a social realist framework for investigating knowledge-building practices, Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). The analysis showed how content and language teachers refer to three types of knowledge (content, language, and language and content integration) in terms of ‘what’ is known (conceptual frameworks) and ‘how’ it is approached (following specific methods). The results confirm the importance of developing CLIL teachers’ language awareness through on-site collaboration which is closely linked to their normal teaching activities.

The importance of organizational capacities for collaborative research: boundary crossings within a Swedish research–practice partnership

ABSTRACT Research – practice partnerships (RPPs) in education have been on the political agenda in Sweden during the last years. RPPs are long-term collaborations between higher education institutions and school districts (municipalities) and schools which intend to facilitate teacher-researcher collaboration in close relation to the teaching practice. This study focuses on a Swedish RPP between one university and multiple municipalities. It explores why two comparable municipalities differed in their success in the partnership’s core activity: calls for funding for collaborative research. Using the theoretical framework of absorptive capacity and boundary infrastructure, the internal organization of the two municipalities and how the RPP-initiative was docked into these organizations were analysed. We interviewed municipal- and school-level actors involved in the application processes within the two municipalities. Significant results include that for equal opportunities for teacher – researcher collaboration, municipalities must develop an organizational capacity that allows them to learn productively from external partners and recognize the knowledge provided by boundary spanners. This study contributes to the expanding literature on partners’ strategies to address emerging challenges of RPPs. It expands our understanding of how municipalities’ internal organization facilitates or hinders collaborative research within RPPs in education.

Teachers’ professional development for inclusion of experimental mathematics and interactive resources in the classroom

Information technology enhances the nature of mathematics as an empirical discipline, leading to an approach called “experimental mathematics” (EM). It fosters the use of technology-based interactive resources (IRs) in mathematics education, giving mathematics an experimental dimension and reflecting a tension between the empirical-inductive nature of IRs and formal mathematics (FM). Our qualitative research focused on professional development (PD) for IR-based teaching of EM intertwined with FM based on a threefold theoretical framework that combines the mathematical knowledge required by EM, the pedagogical functionality of IRs, and instrumental orchestration. The research analyzed 14 high school teachers’ documents generated in the course of a PD program, revealing the evolution of their orientation. We argue that teachers’ evolving orientation toward IR-based EM inclusion in school mathematics is the result of meticulous dynamic PD design implementing three key aspects framed by the threefold theoretical framework: teachers playing various roles during the PD, teacher-researcher collaboration, and theoretical support. The beginning of the evolution of the teachers’ orientation toward IR-based EM inclusion in school mathematics was made possible by a design grounded in the above theoretical framework and observed through its lens.

Exploring roles in teacher–researcher collaboration: examples from a Swedish research–practice partnership in education

ABSTRACT Research – practice partnerships (RPPs) engage the diverse perspectives of researchers and teachers, transforming both educational research and practice. However, an increased understanding of the day-to-day activities of research conducted within RPPs, and of the role of teachers and researchers in this research, is needed. In this study, teachers and researchers involved in research projects framed by a Swedish RPP between a university and thirteen municipalities were interviewed. In total, we interviewed twelve teachers and researchers in a selection of four research projects in this RPP. We studied how teachers’ and researchers’ roles evolved over the phases of the research process and found that collaboration was more extensive during the data collection phase than during project initiation and data analysis and reporting. We also found that characteristics of the project’s initialising phase were consequential to the evolution of teachers’ and researchers’ roles in later phases. This study contributes to the literature on collaborative research by elaborating on teacher and researcher roles across the research process. This knowledge will assist the development of strategies for conducting collaborative research in education.

“Going around it to go into it”: tensions and questions in teacher–researcher work towards a critical translanguaging stance

Abstract This article blends autoethnography with other qualitative research methods to address the following question: what tensions and questions emerged as a white, English-dominant researcher and white, English-dominant teachers co-developed a critical, anti-racist translanguaging stance? The co-development of such a stance occurred through a year-long professional development (PD) series on critical translingual approaches to English teaching (Seltzer, Kate. 2020. “My English is its own rule”: Voicing a translingual sensibility through poetry. Journal of Language, Identity and Education 19(5). 297–311), which, unlike many traditional teacher education and development programs, shifted away from “strategies” and “best practices” and instead centered and aimed to unpack ideologies that lead to deficit perceptions and ways of teaching racialized bi/multilingual students. By drawing on three moments from this PD series, I explore and raise questions about how (or whether) the translanguaging co-stance (García, Ofelia, Susana Johnson & Kate Seltzer. 2017. Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 18(3). 203–228; Tian, Zhongfeng & Leah Shepard‐Carey. 2020. (Re) imagining the future of translanguaging pedagogies in TESOL through teacher–researcher collaboration. Tesol Quarterly 54(4). 1131–1143) the teachers and I were developing was as explicitly critical and anti-racist as I intended. To delve into these moments, I mesh data from the PD project with scholarship on whiteness, translanguaging, and raciolinguistic ideologies to explore these tensions and reflect critically on my own ways forward in collaborative translanguaging research with teachers.

Using teacher-researcher collaborations to respond to the demands of ‘real-world’ EAL/D learning contexts across the curriculum

Using teacher-researcher collaborations to respond to the demands of ‘real-world’ EAL/D learning contexts across the curriculum

Overcoming Obstacles for the Inclusion of Visually Impaired Learners through Teacher–Researcher Collaborative Design and Implementation

Teacher preparation to address the needs of disabled learners in mainstream mathematics classrooms is quintessential for the implementation of the inclusive educational policies that governments are often committed to. To identify teacher preparation needs, we draw on data and analyses from the doctoral study of the first author, who endorsed sociocultural and embodied perspectives in an investigation—first exploratory, then interventional—of visually impaired (VI) learners’ experiences and their teachers’ inclusion discourses. Here, we focus on the intertwined contributions of physical and digital resources in the mathematical learning experiences of VI pupils, as these resources co-existed simultaneously in the observed mathematics lessons. We first summarise findings from the exploratory phase that highlighted inclusion issues related to resource use in the mathematics classroom. We then offer a critical account of the circumstantial and systemic obstacles that impeded the successful intertwinement of digital and physical resources and discuss teacher–researcher collaborative design and implementation of classroom tasks (auditory, tactile) in the intervention phase. We conclude by making the case that well-meaning individual teacher–researcher collaboration is a necessary condition for such interventions to succeed but not a sufficient condition for these interventions to be scaled up and have longevity.

Developing mathematical whole-class discussions: An exploratory study of teachers’ learning paths

In this study, we aimed to map out teachers' learning in a developmental teacher-researcher collaboration that focused on developing lessons with whole-class discussions in design cycles of preparation, enactment, and reflection. Analysis of data produced during these cycles resulted in detailed learning paths to account for how two teachers' teaching developed toward exemplary lessons in which students presented multiple solution methods and also engaged with each other's thinking. Our findings suggest teachers' learning evolves across multiple settings – including individual lesson preparation and reflection, is personal, and involves three interrelated subpractices: teacher moves, teacher noticing, and teacher mathematical thinking.

Teachers’ practices and resources in the Hungarian “Guided Discovery” approach to teaching mathematics: presenting and representing “series of problems”

In the Hungarian “Guided Discovery” approach to teaching mathematics, teachers’ planning work plays a crucial role. Teachers following the approach develop teaching trajectories based on “series of problems”. This work includes the choice, creation, transformation, organization and networking of problems with regard to various teaching objectives. However, most of this planning work remains implicit; the structure and rationale of the teaching trajectories are often inaccessible for an external observer (including, for example, student teachers). An ongoing project based on teacher–researcher collaboration aims to reveal the hidden characteristics and principles of teachers’ work with series of problems through the creation of innovative resources for teachers. In this paper, we present the design of this collaborative work, a process we designate “reverse engineering”, and analyse the development process of resources, focusing particularly on the emergence of new vocabulary and representation tools serving as mediators in the communication between teachers and researchers.

An intersectional framework for anti-racist pedagogy in uncertain times

ABSTRACT Anti-racism is an imperative for those committed to a world and planet free of the manifestations of racial oppression. This correspondence between two critical women teacher educators illustrates ideologically aligned ‘work friends’ theorising anti-racist pedagogy in the context of heightened sociopolitical uncertainty. We explore creative possibilities for uncertainty-oriented anti-racist pedagogy vis-à-vis the aims of inquiry-based, social justice teacher preparation. We co-develop pedagogical insights using an anti-racist intersectional frame as an analytical lens for re-viewing teaching artefacts, reflecting on lived experiences, and posing probing questions. Eschewing feigning pedagogical mastery, we employ the epistolary form to reflexively interrogate the nexus of anti-racism, pedagogy, uncertainty, and teacher education. This exchange contributes (a) an intersectional framework for the practice of antiracist pedagogy, and (b) a model for the emergent, dialogic process of letter writing as a tool for critical collaborative teacher inquiry.

Translanguaging pedagogies in a Mandarin-English dual language bilingual education classroom: contextualised learning from teacher-researcher collaboration

ABSTRACT Teacher-researcher collaborative inquiry helps illuminate contextual demands and affordances of teaching and learning and how they shape and inform theory and practice. Elaborating on a university-school study in a Mandarin-English dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programme in the U.S., we examine how the researcher worked alongside a Grade 3 Mandarin teacher in implementing translanguaging approaches across different content areas. We focus particularly on critical moments of dissonance in their research partnership that capture their changing understandings and constant negotiations of translanguaging stance, design, and shifts. Through open and focused coding of qualitative data, we identified both parties’ evolving perspectives and teaching/research practices. Ambivalence, doubts, and contradictions characterised their collaboration process as both researcher and teacher wrestled with what translanguaging means to Chinese education within a DLBE context where English hegemony reigns both inside and outside school. Important critical moments are highlighted to illuminate how the pair gradually developed a shared understanding about the need for a more comprehensive, critical, and contextualised lens to translanguaging pedagogies and to learn how to orchestrate translanguaging spaces in DLBE programmes while privileging students’ use of Mandarin.

In it Together: Teachers, Researchers, and Classroom SLA

AbstractIn discussions about relationships between research and pedagogy, teachers and researchers are often characterized as facing each other across a “gap” that separates them. Teachers are described as having practical concerns about their own classrooms and little patience for “theoretical” issues. Researchers are described as removed from day‐to‐day classroom concerns and oriented to more abstract factors that, if not “universal,” are at least “generalizable.” In reality, many researchers share with teachers the goal of making teaching and learning as successful as possible. What they learn from each other can help them reach that goal. In this article, we discuss 3 guiding principles that help to create the conditions for productive collaboration: (a) build trust and long‐term relationships, (b) build and share knowledge, and (c) follow up and provide feedback. We describe how the cycle of observation, correlation, and experimentation influenced our research and created opportunities to investigate questions that were of interest to us as researchers and relevant to teachers’ goals. We use examples of our own studies and those of other researchers who have engaged in long‐term teacher–researcher collaborations, illustrating how the research–pedagogy link can be strengthened.

Author Biographies

Author Biographies

“Our country has gained independence, but we haven't”: Collaborative translanguaging to decolonize English language teaching

AbstractThe colonial history of many English language teaching (ELT) contexts has shaped how the concept of language is understood, how language policies are constructed, and how language education is organized. Various aspects of ELT in countries that were colonized continue to promote the imperialism of English (Motha, 2014) through the naming (i.e., labeling of linguistic phenomena as distinct languages, dialects, and language varieties), separation and hierarchization of languages, and the dominance of monolingual policies and practices in the classroom. Translanguaging, a theory and pedagogy that challenges colonial understandings of language and monoglossic norms in language teaching, has the transformative potential to liberate language practices that have been rendered invisible by abyssal thinking in ELT (García et al., 2021). Translanguaging as a theory posits that multilingual learners do not possess two or more autonomous language systems but rather that they select and deploy linguistic features from a unitary linguistic repertoire (Vogel & García, 2017). Translanguaging as a pedagogy urges educators to leverage learners’ entire linguistic and semiotic repertoires to support their learning instead of requiring them to keep certain languages outside the classroom. However, in educational contexts that respond to socially and politically imposed boundaries between languages, there are ideological and systemic challenges to the enactment of translanguaging as a pedagogy. This paper discusses these challenges with reference to the Malaysian language education context and draws on data from a collaborative translanguaging pedagogy designed through teacher-researcher collaboration and implemented in two Malaysian elementary English classrooms to offer recommendations for how ELT can be decolonized.

Collaborative Design as a Context for Teacher and Researcher Learning: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue joins the recent but growing effort to expand knowledge in the learning sciences, by examining the notion of participation in teacher-researcher collaborative design (co-design). Co-design is not just a means to an end; it is a context where professional learning happens. Each of the seven papers describes teacher-researcher collaborations focusing on the professional learning of both teachers and researchers engaged in jointly designing learning environments. Central questions of interest are: What do teachers and researchers learn from each other, how, and why? What kinds of activities and opportunities support what kinds of learning and for whom? What can we learn from these collaborations about how to support these partnerships? The commentary addresses the importance of both multiple perspectives (alterity, meaning that the researcher and teacher perspectives are distinct), their affinity (common purpose), and the mutuality that these entail.

Teacher-researcher collaboration in animal-assisted education: Co-designing a reading to dogs intervention

ABSTRACT Background Animal-assisted Education (AAE), including Reading to Dogs (RTD), is an area of growing interest internationally across all phases of education, and increasingly considered an innovative approach to improving pupil outcomes. As creating RTD interventions necessitates a combination of expertise from the fields of education and human-animal interactions, finding effective ways to achieve collaboration in RTD intervention design is imperative. Purpose We sought to develop and work within a collaborative framework in order to co-design an AAE intervention, drawing upon researcher and teacher knowledge, experience and expertise. Our specific collaboration had the goal of co-designing an RTD intervention focused on supporting primary-aged children’s reading and wellbeing. This paper describes the co-design process, and our evaluation of the collaborative process and framework. Methods Three teachers, from different school contexts and educational authorities, and a researcher engaged in a structured co-design process to create the RTD intervention. A three-phase co-design framework was developed, implemented and evaluated. The framework ensured that theoretical and empirical research (via the researcher) and professional and pedagogical expertise (via three teachers) informed the intervention design. Findings The three-phase framework – initial preparation, recruitment and online platform creation, and intervention co-design – enabled a productive and meaningful collaborative process which led to the development of an RTD intervention informed by a synthesis of research and practice. In our evaluation, the collaborating teachers were very positive about the framework, reflecting that it provided effective facilitation of the co-design and observing that working with teachers from other authorities offered a valuable and motivating learning opportunity. Conclusions The co-design of interventions by researchers and teachers offers a way to synthesise theoretical and empirical research insights with professional and pedagogical expertise. It can help to create interventions that are research-informed but also more likely to be acceptable to the education community and feasible for classroom practice. This framework could be drawn upon by researchers, teachers and school leaders across a range of disciplines who seek to develop AAE and other interventions collaboratively.

Investigating the Processes of Teacher and Researcher Empowerment and Learning in Co-design Settings

Discussions about power have only recently begun to appear in the learning sciences literature. Most of this important work takes a critical perspective; the present work complements these efforts by examining power sharing as a catalyst for empowerment in teacher-researcher co-design. Even though teacher-researcher collaborations are discussed in the literature as contexts for empowerment, less is known about the processes that enable empowerment and their connection to learning. This case study examined co-design interactions to identify processes and conditions of empowerment in the context of designing a module to integrate Responsible Research and Innovation in elementary school science education. The co-design team consisted of seven in-service science teachers and one researcher. The main data corpus included ten face to face and online co-design meetings of over 13 hours of video, supplemented by co-design documentation, teacher interviews, and survey data. The analysis of the co-design interactions identified facilitating conditions for supporting power sharing during the co-design, which attended to socio-structural conditions to support the co-design activities and included the anticipation of real-world impact through classroom implementations. Findings suggest that teacher and researcher empowerment develop through power sharing which helps increase access to information and resources and the development of knowledge and skills, thus enabling teachers to make decisions on what and how to teach and researchers to provide just-in-time support.

Conceptualising translational research in schools: A systematic literature review

Since Stenhouse (1975) called for teachers to have ownership of research, there have been initial forays into teacher led research and evidence-based practice in schools. However, the notion of translational research in schools remains contested, in significant part because it still has not been rigorously conceptualised. This is an issue of increasing concern, in our rapidly developing world. Now, more than ever, we need research-informed education, to address the complex challenges faced by school communities, and those with the most significant role in supporting them: teachers. To address the gap in understanding how best to promote translational research in schools, this systematic literature review asked, what do innovative and impactful translational, teacher research infrastructures look like? By translational research, we mean a process of agentic and agonistic democracy within which teachers critically develop and, or use research to support their classroom practice. The purpose and focus of this paper therefore, is to present the current extent and form of translational research practices in schools by undertaking a comprehensive, systematic review of the published literature on the issue. We found that the potential for translational research in education can be considerably enhanced when five key themes are taken into consideration, these being: Teacher-Researcher Collaboration; Teachers as Researchers; Research Cultures in Schools; Teacher Agency; Sharing, Accessing and Utilizing Research. The notion of technology - as a theme in its own right - was notable by its absence. From the findings we have been able to propose a foundational framework of translational research in schools. To date there have been no other systematic literature reviews on translational research in education, nor any frameworks proposed; and thus this paper addresses a significant gap in the field.

Classroom Development Through Teacher-Researcher Collaboration: Bridging the Rural Urban Divide in Norway?

Norwegian rural schools experience difficulties establishing teacher-researcher collaboration. It is well documented that these schools are described as needing urban development approaches. This study aims to understand if collaborative inquiry can function as a joint learning arena for the development of teachers' and researchers' capacity. Specifically, this approach might enable teachers to develop their teaching independently from urban-placed researchers. The study investigates how the collaborative approach, which is mainly driven by the teachers, bridges the urban-rural divide regarding both professional development and research. Expert interview data were analysed, guided by the principles of grounded theory. Regarding teachers' participation and inquiry, they show a rather passive role. Teacher-researcher co-operation is created through agency and ownership. Conclusively, both teachers and researchers are involved in building the bridge and learning from one another.