Andrea Stairs-Davenport
Abstract
I describe my approach to guiding graduate students in a teacher research course to pursue inquiry as stance, a theory that values insiders as knowledge generators and supports their ability to think critically and solve problems of practice. I emphasize inquiry as stance as a worldview, over inquiry as a project to complete.
For the last two decades, I have been teaching graduate students in education fields, most recently at the University of Southern Maine (USM). In Teacher Research in Literacy and Language Development, a course I regularly teach at USM, within the graduate Literacy Education and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) programs, students are expected to frame a research question, collect and analyze classroom-based data, and report on findings and implications from their studies.
One thing I have learned over the years of teaching this course, in person and online, is that some students view the research project as just a project to complete as part of their graduate studies. As someone who honors teachers as knowledge generators, I decided I wanted to emphasize the importance of inquiry as integral to an educator’s work. With this goal in mind, I lead my students through steps for conducting a teacher research project using activities from Dana and Yendol-Hoppey’s text (2020), which is grounded in Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (2009) inquiry as stance framework.
How could I foster the notion that my students’ assignment was a rehearsal for a career-long way of thinking about their role as educators – educators who make instructional decisions, based not only on research conducted by outsiders, but also by their own pursuits of what works for their students in their context at that point in time?
In their book, Inquiry as Stance, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) promote the value of practitioners also assuming the role of researchers working from the inside, rather than serving as “objects of someone else’s inquiry, or the informants and subjects of research conducted by outsiders” (p. 41). They reject the concepts of “teacher as technician, consumer, receiver, transmitter, and implementer of other people’s knowledge” (p. 93). They assume that “those who work in particular educational contexts and/or who live in particular social situations have significant knowledge about those situations,” which means that “participants in inquiry communities are regarded as knowers, learners, and researchers” (p. 42).
Teachers’ Insights
To foster inquiry as stance, I begin explaining the research assignment with a discussion of how my students’ subjectivity is an asset to their work and their ability to think critically and creatively to solve problems. I emphasize their insider’s knowledge is valuable, that local context matters, that they know their students better than anyone, that no practice has been found to work 100% of the time with 100% of students.
I have my students explore teacher research as a genre compared with other studies they have read. I allow them a choice of readings from teacher researcher peer-reviewed articles, primarily from Networks: An Online Journal of Teacher Research. I share examples of research questions other teacher researchers have pursued in the Teacher Research in Literacy and Language Development course. In the first few weeks, I lead them through an exploration of their dilemmas of practice. I ask my students to brainstorm possible research topics, journal, discuss, reflect, and problem-pose with one another.
The first journal prompt in the course asks the following:
What are real dilemmas of practice that teachers face each day, and what types of questions do these dilemmas raise? What topics have you become interested in during your graduate studies? That is, what topics have you written papers about? Completed projects on? Read books and articles about? What teacher research questions might be pursued about these topics of personal interest to you?
I have noticed that teachers, as a group, are naturally reflective and are willing to share their ideas about areas they feel they could improve upon for the sake of their students’ learning.
Dana and Yendol-Hoppey (2020) suggest that there are at least eight “passions” one might explore in a teacher research project; these passions serve as “triggers for you to explore dilemmas that may be surfacing in your teaching practice from which questions worthy of study may emerge” (p. 28). These passions include 1) A Child, 2) Curriculum, 3) Content Knowledge, 4) Teaching Strategies/Techniques, 5) Beliefs About Practice, 6) Personal/Professional Identities, 7) Equity/Social Justice, and 8) Context.
The second journal prompt asks my students to read and write about at least two of the passions and then share their thinking with their classmates:
Which of the eight passions do you feel will serve as the most important trigger to explore potential wonderings at this time in your professional lifetime? Why? What open-ended research questions could you pose related to your wonderings? Share your potential research topics and comment on each other’s emerging topics.
I find it is important to emphasize the students’ research question can be about any dilemma of practice in their classrooms. I suggest question stems with open-ended questions, to allow them the most flexibility in designing and conducting their research, for example, What Happens When…? How do I…? Allowing choice and flexibility represents my belief that inquiry as stance is best fostered in a flexible environment that encourages creativity to address tensions and wonderings of personal interest.
Collaborative Discussions
I have discovered one of the most effective scaffolds for students’ development are well organized, collaborative discussions. Whether I am teaching this course online or on campus, having students discuss their dilemmas of practice from the very first class meeting extends their thinking about the direction of the project they wish to pursue that semester; it also illustrates the promise of critical friends to extend our thinking. When my class meets online, I ask that students post their wonderings and join in at least three other classmates’ threads, to provide reactions and feedback and pose questions about their topics. When my class meets on campus, it is a similar structure with small groups of three-four, and timed sharing opportunities, so all students have a chance to verbally work through their ideas. In these small group meetings, students are engaging in the types of problem posing conversations that foster an inquiry stance.
Throughout the course, the participants collaborate on developing questions, methods for collecting and analyzing data, and articulating findings and how to display them in ways that will help them, as practitioners, understand their research’s results and the implications of the results. When individuals ask me about changing their methods based on emergent findings, I support them in doing what seems like the next best thing in terms of instruction, data collection, and data analysis. Reinforcing their decision making and judgment is an important element of growing my students’ confidence as teacher researchers grounded in an inquiry stance for deeper learning.
Reinforcing their decision making and judgment is an important element of growing my students’ confidence as teacher researchers grounded in an inquiry stance for deeper learning.
After the first few weeks of class, when students frame the research question they will pursue for the remainder of the semester, the collaboration turns to new small groups. I am very intentional about the groups I create, as these will be their professional learning communities and writing groups for the rest of the term.
Grouping students who are pursuing similar lines of inquiry, no matter the grade level or student population, has been effective for the sharing of ideas and resources, for example, identifying scholars and published literature on their inquiry topics. I have witnessed particularly generative discussions among teachers who do have varied grade levels in the same group. For example, I have noticed the value of a first-grade teacher discussing her dilemmas in teaching writing and motivating her writers with a seventh-grade teacher facing a similar dilemma with her students.
Ongoing Dialogue Between Students and Instructor
While students are having their collaborative discussions with classmates, a parallel process is happening with me, as their instructor. I ask the course participants every week what they are learning and scaffold each step in the course participants’ research. The journal prompts that are submitted to me allow me to dialogue with each student. I do this with focused marginal comments in the shared document, which I expect them to respond to, either in the document or in an email or in a one-on-one conference with me.
Support for Continual Professional Inquiry
As we move throughout the course, I take opportunities to emphasize inquiry as a natural part of the teaching and learning cycle for teachers. Near the conclusion of the course, there are a few ways I emphasize the usefulness of inquiry as a mindset, beyond the current research they are conducting. The expectations for the final paper’s Discussion section includes a reflection that asks students to discuss implications for classroom practice, including how their findings have or will influence their teaching.
The format of course participants’ final small group discussions, is another way inquiry as stance is fostered. Earlier in my career, I asked all students to formally present their research projects to the whole class. Over the years, I have moved to a small group sharing format to mimic roundtable presentations at professional conferences. I provide a conference schedule with three – four concurrent presentations (typically, the writing group members present at the same time) and invite students to choose a table that interests them.
Roundtable presenters create a one-page handout or brochure that summarizes their project to provide for their roundtable audience participants. Roundtable presenters share their learning from the teacher research study, including how they will use inquiry in the future to inform their teaching and enhance their professional growth. I have adapted the same format for the online section so that the final discussion is this sharing of handouts and how course participants plan to use inquiry in the future.
I encourage my students to make their work public in their schools and districts,
at relevant conferences, and in publications.
Even though the course participants’ work is not generalizable in the traditional sense, it is likely transferable to similar contexts and populations of students, and I encourage my students to make their work public in their schools and districts, at relevant conferences, and in publications. I invite my students to offer inquiry as an option for professional development days at schools. I encourage them to approach their school’s leadership and suggest collaborative inquiry in professional learning communities to examine dilemmas of practice as their formal professional development. I continually remind my students that inquiry is something they can and should do naturally, as part of their teaching, not apart from their teaching, and they may seek out like-minded colleagues who also value inquiry as stance as collaborators and thought partners.
Reflections
Inquiry as stance provides an important approach for professional development and professional learning communities. It supports evidence-based education with teachers as knowledge generators. Am I developing teachers who embrace inquiry as stance? As I reflect on my approach in this course, I see that the course’s students begin to realize what classroom-based research can afford them in terms of determining what works in practical, immediately applicable ways. They learn that problem posing is as important as problem solving.
Though oftentimes I need to work through students’ preconceived notions of “what counts” as research, I have noticed that teachers, as a group, are naturally reflective and are willing to share their ideas about areas they feel they could improve upon for the sake of their students’ learning. They come to see conducting systematic data collection and analysis in their classrooms as a viable and useful way to take control of their professional learning and their students’ learning.
My students’ adoption of an inquiry stance is varied, and their development is uneven, just as their starting points for learning at the beginning of the course are uneven. However, I feel confident that sharing this theory and putting it into practice serves my students well, as they complete their graduate studies and develop as teacher leaders in their schools and districts. Deeper learning as professional, reflective educators is an outcome that is worth the investment in my graduate students, as educators who can affect positive change for students in schools.
References
Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. Teachers
College Press.
Dana, N. F., & Yendol-Hoppey, D. (2020). The reflective educator’s guide to classroom research: Learning to teach and
teaching to learn through practitioner inquiry (4th ed.). Corwin.
Andrea Stairs-Davenport, PhD is Professor in the Department of Literacy, Language, and Culture and Associate Dean of the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Southern Maine, Gorham, Maine. Her research interests include examining how teachers learn to teach culturally and linguistically diverse students, literacy education, teacher research, and qualitative research methods.
Andrea Stairs-Davenport can be reached at andrea.stairs@maine.edu.