In this article, we contest globalised notions of data as 'universally' beneficial, necessary and 'evidence-based'. We do so by drawing upon narrative accounts of the problematic ways data impact educators researching and working in university and schooling settings over time and in varied national contexts. We reveal how data are transient and…

This study describes the experiences of teachers during a data-driven inquiry process to improve literacy-related practices. This action research was initiated at an international English immersion school for native Chinese speakers. Two 9th grade professional learning communities (PLC) from the English and Social Studies departments…

Scholars have theorized about the growing movement of teacher research, where school-based practitioners engage in systematic examinations of their own work. They have argued that teacher research challenges relationships of knowledge and practice, as teacher-researchers are likely to ask different questions and offer different perspectives…

This ethnographic study explores teacher experiences with vocabulary instruction, specifically as it relates to oral language-use and literacy practices. Utilizing an integrated compilation of cognitive, socio-cultural and poststructural theory, this study looks at teacher perspectives in relation to their experiences with language and literacy…

Building on the rich tradition of 'teacher as researcher' in mathematics education, I describe a study undertaken whilst working as a mathematics specialist in an Australian primary school. The focus of the study was on examining whether explicitly teaching students test-taking strategies ('test-wiseness') improved their performance on a…

Teacher/practitioner research, with its emphasis on the intimate relationship between knowledge and teaching, can be a methodological basis for developing rich conceptions of literacy and alternative practices. Teacher researchers theorize from the thick of things, from actual educational contexts that they shape daily. This informs new practices…

This chapter discusses a case study based on six-week teacher placement in a bachelor program. The placement, which provides training to students who will become primary school teachers in the future, is treated at the same time as a research project in which data are collected from participants' reflective journals. The purpose of the study is to…

This article focuses on the meaning and practice of publicly engaged scholarship. The authors use examples of research in partnership with communities to demonstrate what it means to be "with" or "in" a community, how mutuality can be established, and how trust can be earned. The article addresses how university-based…

This article describes five middle school students' experiences as they moved with mobile devices to produce digital narratives in a twelve-week digital media enrichment course designed and led by the authors. In the course, iPod Touches were often the exclusive tool for media composition. The authors, as teacher-researchers, designed the…

Voice in mobile texts has received attention lately among scholars in literacy, sociolinguistics, and rhetoric. Some sociolinguists of globalisation have argued that uptake is shaped by the norms of each literacy regime. Though texts of non-western communities will gain positive uptake in local literacy regimes according to their own norms and…

A teacher study group explores issues of home and community literacies with a goal of utilizing out-of-school literacies to support in-school literacy learning. The result was the beginning of a new mindfulness that allowed them to begin to recognize the existence and legitimacy of home and community literacies. They explored how their own biases…

In this article we look at how a community of practice in one midsize urban K-12 school district engaged in a community mapping process to discover, gather, and analyze a rich array of community and home resources in order to create classroom practices and curriculum that integrated the literacies of home and school and led to transformed student…

As educators encounter a policy landscape where increasingly the education lexicon includes keywords such as data, evidence, quality, and standards, it is interesting to revisit Garth Boomer's contribution regarding teachers as researchers. In "Fair Dinkum Teaching and Learning," Boomer (1985) clearly named at least two key problems that…

This research study examines the impact of teacher research on participants in a large-scale educational reform initiative in the United States, No Child Left Behind, and its strand for reading teachers, Reading First. Reading First supported professional development for teachers in order to increase student scores on standardized tests. The…

In the light of wide recognition that the traffic between home and school is traditionally one-way, this article reports on a deliberately counter-cultural project that involved teachers in researching children's everyday literacy practices and "funds of knowledge" (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) over a year. Eighteen primary…