Professional development opportunities provide teachers with enhanced learning experiences, deeper subject knowledge, and improvement of their teaching practices, all for the goal of increasing student achievement (Nelson, 2009). Unfortunately, most rural teachers have much less access to professional development opportunities compared to their…

We discuss democratizing knowledge production and dissemination in education illustrated in two parts that challenge the current knowledge monopoly. Our discourse includes (a) problematic cultivation of the status quo in the hierarchy of knowledge value in the U.S. as a component of civic illiteracy and (b) the need for more evidence through…

The theme of both "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement" volume 12 issues 1 and 2 collectively, is "Faculty Motivation for Engagement in Public Scholarship." Herein Dwight Giles, Jr. touches upon each article in issue 2, specifically, noting the variability of the central terminology that is used across authors…

In this commentary, author Dwight Giles, Jr. reflects on his 2008 article, "Understanding an Emerging Field of Scholarship: Toward a Research Agenda for Engaged, Public Scholarship," reprinted in this 20th anniversary issue of "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement." In his original article, Giles argued that…

The internationalization of research has increasingly become an area of focus for higher education institutions but has received less scholarly attention in the study of internationalization in higher education. Drawing on the literature, this article outlines a range of key considerations and concerns for the continued internationalization of…

As part of the Community College Research Center's (CCRC) Analysis of Statewide Developmental Education Reform Learning Assessment Study, Wake Technical Community College's partner team believes the recommendation and implications in the CCRC's Developmental Reading and English Assessment in a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership. Working Paper No.…

In this article I argue for the defining importance of document study for researchers in curriculum. Two examples of previous analyses are provided, one demonstrating an approach to language analysis of the "Australian Curriculum: English" from the Literature strand, the other a study of the relationship of curricula to each other in…

In this article, we argue not only for more research "into" English language teacher associations (TAs) but also for research to be carried out "by" and "within" TAs. That is, we advocate their becoming "Researching TAs" themselves. This suggestion derives from our recent collaborative work with/within the…

One of the current challenges facing many universities is how to support teachers in becoming researchers. This article discusses the experiences at a small private Chilean university of a new action research programme that was developed as a vehicle for helping teachers to become involved in research and write a research publication for…

The act of engaging in sound and ethical practitioner research, regardless of context, encourages and indeed demands an alignment between the ethical framework employed in the research enterprise and the "everyday ethics" of practice. This paper explores the ethical dimensions of what Cochran-Smith and Lytle have termed the dialectic of…

This article considers second wave critical Whiteness pedagogy by examining the author's teacher-researcher implementation of teaching project about Whiteness in a large, suburban high school near a major city in the Midwest. The author relies on narrative scholarship in order to both tell and interpret stories about a yearlong project that used…

The [National Council of Teachers of Mathematics] NCTM research committee made a recent, urgent call for mathematics education researchers to "examine and deeply reflect on our research practices through an equity lens." With this in mind, we use this paper to reflect on the ways in which Steffe's work has contributed to three facets of…

Much of the literature in the field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) discusses the need for SoTL and how critical inquiry can support teaching and learning. This article supports much that has been said before but further suggests that, in order for SoTL to fulfil its ambitions, practitioner-researchers should consider the way…

Practitioner research, as Ravitch (2014) writes in the previous issue of "Perspectives on Urban Education," holds the unique possibility of "generating local, practice-based knowledge that is deeply contextualized and meaningfully embedded in a specific milieu" while spurring a "counter-hegemonic way of thinking about and…

Practitioner inquiry provides a powerful tool for improving practice and addressing critical issues in classrooms, schools, and broader communities. However, it also raises unique ethical challenges that often go unrecognized and unresolved. Structured Ethical Reflection (SER) provides teacher researchers with a process for identifying core values…