If you exist within the microcosm that is twitter, you cannot fail to have to have noted the flavour of the (academic) year is research. My timeline is full of tweets about research – how to do it – when is it rigorous – how can we learn from it as practitioners.
No bad thing. I can’t escape the feeling that just like other fads before it, research is a bandwagon, a flavour of the month, that is order for us to feel validated by the external educational community, our ideas or experiences must be some how validated by research. No easy thing when critics shoot down much as ‘anecdotal’, and data appears to have to be quantifiable when operationalizing learning is near on impossible. I see lots of research being held up for the sole reason it is easy to shoot down. Real research is longitudinal, and the outcomes of projects starting now will not be known for many years. Can we wait that long? Can we trust the future governments or even future teaching communities will treasure the results of long laboured research? As a time investment, I seriously wonder if teacher have the job security or the motivation to work beyond the next round of curriculum change.
‘Research’ and I have been friends, or at least acquaintances for a long time. During my PhD the research phase was the fun part, at least compared to the writing up. I then spent ten year or more teaching ‘research methods’ to A-level students so I am interested to see an essentially a non-academic community flocking to research as the provider of answers, when many academics would argue the more you research, the less you find you actually know.
Of course there are now conferences dedicated to ‘research,’ I have attended and enjoyed them a lot, but not as much as the ones involved sharing of classroom practice. I have seen presented top down research dictated from SMT, as well as a more teacher led research movement, and a growing assumption that unless you are involved in action research you are somehow lacking as a teaching practitioner. Part of me, the bit trained for years to research and critique agrees with that, the other part of me, up to my eyeballs in UCAS, reports, and normal teaching, screams that this is madness. That this is in many ways an extra self-inflicted pressure that exists alongside all the existing joys of targets, OFTSED, league tables…. Really? Do you really think teachers can’t be brilliant without research to quantity their ideas? I don’t think many classrooms teachers have the time, or schools money for research to be the only way forward for teachers as a profession.
Here is the problem. The tendency has been to dismiss qualitative ideas in favour of quantitative data. To dismiss the case study in favour of more reliable data, but as any good sociologist would tell you this doesn’t make the data valid.
As a teaching profession are we working towards treasuring one type of data- I can certainly see the advantages in reliable data, however for my money the real impact and inspiration comes from valid data, which gives not only insight but also empathy with those studied. I see no reason why research should indicate a clinical and cold approach to those studies and some pale grasp of objectivity, which can only be a fallacy as we are all subjects of our own view point.
So yes, teaching community, by all means go and research and use this as a yard stick – but please beware there is more than one way to research, and of course the really important issue is about impact. Research can only be of use if we can adapt it to have impact in the classroom, and for me, this is the real key.