Action research is characterized by research that is done by teachers for themselves. It allows teachers to study their own classrooms in order to better understand them and to be able to improve their quality or effectiveness. Montessori modeled and laid the foundation for teachers to carefully observe, reflect on their observations, plan for…

In this article we present two narratives that have generated pedagogical insights into our identities in becoming researchers. We are concerned with the interaction of the self-as-researcher in a context, over time, with others who also have an expressed commitment to the educational world. Our commitment to better understanding educational…

Background/Context: High quality early education, preschool through third grade, has received significant attention as a vehicle for addressing academic disparities. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) offer a promising strategy for improving early education and closing the gap between research and practice; however, RPPs in the early learning…

This paper contributes an autoethnographic account of how Paulo Freire's work shapes understandings of education, social change and the possibilities and practices of social research. Drawing on connections between anthropology and education (Schultz, 2014) that underpin "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (McKenna, 2013), I explore spaces and…

Inspired by Freire's principle of dialogue, in this article we present a series of dialogues and critical syntheses between a science teacher-researcher with 35 years of experience and an early-career science teacher-researcher. We explore being in-between academic research in science education and high school teaching. Following Anzaldúa's…

This paper focuses on a teacher educator's professional learning gained while facilitating teacher research with teachers in Ireland. The teachers were engaged in a teaching portfolio development process, while the teacher educator conducted a concurrent self-study. Qualitative data was gathered and analysed from the teacher interviews, the…

The author poses the following questions: (1) Are teachers making the impact that they think they are making? (2) Through teachers' intellectual writing, have they closed or widened the theory-practice gap in educational studies? (3) Are they fulfilling the mission of the organization? and (4) Does the mission of the organization need to be…

Research practice partnerships (RPP) intend to blur the lines of traditional teacher and researcher roles. Teachers who participate in RPPs gain experiences in research activities such as identifying problems of practice, designing research methods and data collection tools, collecting and analyzing data. They learn to be critical consumers of…

In his 2018 American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Presidential Address, Hilton Kelly (2019) called the AESA membership to both individual and collective moratoria. He asserted that the purpose of the moratoria is "to reacquaint ourselves with the mission, purpose, and history of the AESA and to understand who we are and what we do…

Teachers have tended to be underestimated as experts of their own practice and relegated to a technical role. In this context, action research appears as a form to legitimate teachers as active agents and producers of educational knowledge. This article aims to examine how a collaborative research-practice partnership between schools and…

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…

We offer an account of how we, a research team of three South African academics, have dialogued with multiculturalism and equity through collective poetic autoethnographic inquiry. The focus of the article is on our learning through reading and responding to published autoethnographies by three other South African academics. We share our learning…

This article reports on a systematic review of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices research literature published between 1990 and 2012. Self-study research refers to teacher educators researching their practice with the purpose of improving it, making explicit and validating their professional expertise and, at the same time,…

This article reports on a study of teachers who have engaged in systematic research about their practice. It describes the inquiries of two urban teachers into challenges and dilemmas common to many who work with diverse groups of students. The accounts presented reveal how teachers are able to construct new knowledge about teaching when they…

This paper argues the need for coherent, holistic frameworks offering insightful understandings as well as viable, connected and synergistic solutions to schools in addressing pressing problems arising from the acknowledged gaps between research, practice and professional development. There is a need to conceptualise a comprehensive conceptual…