Studies in Critical Teacher Research: Teacher Voice and the Classroom

Teacher research, a method within educational research, is lacking an authentic voice spoken from the classroom. By telling the stories of the classroom teacher, educational research is offered a practical voice while considering theoretical methods. Through the incorporation of multiple, similar teacher classroom narratives, the narratives could be presented as data sets regarding classroom practices, educational theory, method, and student learning.

This study in experiential teacher research found its framework by using both narrative inquiry as well as teacher research methods. Emihovich (1997) suggests that narrative inquiry allows social science comfort in assigning behaviors meanings through multiple voices. Likewise, teacher research maintains that its methods provide teachers with resources and theoretical understandings of their teacher knowledge (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, 1993; Kincheloe, 2003). Teacher research theoretically connects teachers’ narrative of experience.

In this study, a workshop was conducted inquiring into English teacher dispositions towards research written by them. All workshop proceedings were voice recorded and transcribed. Additionally, field notes in a ninth grade classroom and an interview with the classroom teacher was recorded and transcribed. Each workshop session, interview, and observation, comprised the data sources applied as evidence of a common disposition among classroom teachers in regards to research about them and for them.

The analyzed conversations about teaching methods crowded around English/ Language arts curriculum standards, continuing to repeat the same narrative—that there is a gap between theories taught in the university methods classroom and practices in teachers’ classrooms. Teachers’ feelings of isolation and disconnection from their learned theory were consistently grounded in the prescriptive curriculum standards assigned by their state. As students of teaching, the participants were taught to afford their students all learning opportunities, as well they were taught that teacher knowledge would push these opportunities forward. However, once in the classroom, these teachers learned that the prescribed texts and objectives represented teacher knowledge, and that their creativity and the student body were not the center of their content design. The contradiction between their learned theory and their classroom practice presents itself as a field-based problem (Bloom, et al., 2008). Whether a problem or a disposition, the disconnection is worthy of further research.

Dewey’s Education and Experience (1938) presented the disconnection between educational research and teacher experience. He stressed that pre-service teachers needed narratives of experience in connection to the educational shift from traditional educational paradigms to progressive ones. Dewey observed that without the discussion of practiced or experienced progressive educational techniques pre-service teachers created divisions between theory and practice, which consequently meant that they were susceptible to feeling isolated from their theory. Additionally, Loughran (2002) suggests that effective reflection techniques are taught through anecdote and arrative. As a proposed approach to teacher research, experiential teacher research could result in teachers’ frustrations and successes could become part of a collective consciousness concerned with experienced educational theory and classroom practice. Such a consciousness could provide meaningful narratives for pre-service teachers and educational researchers alike.