Recently, we had a research mapping exercise in our school at my university. This meant that the four different clusters all worked individually and in small groups to cover questions about their motivations, impact, collaboration, methodologies and the theories that inform their research. It was a good activity, not least because it was a chance to be back in a room with colleagues that I hadn’t seen together for more than a year.
In the small group with whom I was working, we spent a great deal of time talking about who we collaborated with. Not surprisingly, in a school that incorporates Education, many of our collaboration partners were teachers or other educational professionals. However, the part that really surprised me was in terms of the outputs of these research collaborations: that is, who we wrote with. I’m using the term wrote her to talk about producing traditional research outputs, such as chapters, papers and conference presentations. Amongst my colleagues, I was the only person who actively worked with teachers to publish our research. That is, teachers were co-authors on articles that we had written.
Admittedly, this co-authoring with teachers is something that is new to me – but I think it speaks to an issue that I’ve found particularly concerned with recently. The question, to me, is who takes part in educational research – and who benefits from being seen to take part? I imagine that this is a similar conversation to that which takes part in other professions, but it’s new, for me, to talk about it in these terms, and I think I am coming to recognise one concern regarding the status of teachers within their profession is their lack of recognition as the experts within their own classrooms. Of course, teacher empowerment is a much bigger issue than this, but this may well be e a crucial part of the puzzle – after all, if teachers are to claim a place a the table, then they need to be part of the conversations related to their profession – and that applies at the level of research, too.