In this essay, Rachel Schachter and Donald Freeman present the familiar problem in studying and improving teaching: how to connect what teachers know and think with what they do as they teach. They outline how research on the public and private worlds of teaching has become bifurcated, with the private side of the work often disconnected from…

In this autoethnographic study, I identify and critique the ethical dimensions of the research relationship from a narrative inquiry into a transgender student's experience in school music. Josselson notes that while many scholars have discussed conducting ethical research in theoretical terms, actual dilemmas of practice are seldom written about.…

As a field, Teacher Education has lived with continued criticism from governmental and research bodies on the quality of professional preparation and the lack of a strong research base. We respond to such criticisms by considering possibilities for further exploration of the "research of practice" and the "practice of research"…

In this paper, we weave the auto-ethnographic narratives of the two authors with Bourdieu's key concepts of "habitus," "field" and "capital," as we seek to bring to a level of explicitness the reflexive lens which has shaped our scholarly work. In particular, we examine the process of becoming educational…

This article presents the author's response to comments on her article, "Will a Clinical Approach Make Education Research More Relevant for Practice?", which focused on the question of whether a clinical research practice might make education research more relevant for practice. The characteristics of a clinical approach are: (1) an overlap in the…

Three issues emanating from the Bulterman-Bos article (2008) form the core of this commentary. First, the issue of relevancy is addressed from the standpoint of action research and other forms of practitioner inquiry. From this perspective, the divisions between the cultures of university and school are addressed both ways: Each can potentially be…

Responding to Bulterman-Bos (2008), the author argues that the effort to make education research more relevant is counterproductive. Teachers and researchers have different orientations toward education that arise from different institutional settings, occupational constraints, daily work demands, and professional incentives. These are not…

In this article, three theoretical perspectives are used to extend Bulterman-Bos's (2008) argument regarding a clinical approach to education research. First, three intellectual virtues identified by Aristotle--"episteme," "techne," and "phronesis"--are related to the requirements of the "pure" education researcher, the skilled practitioner, and…

Environmental education is an important strategy in addressing environmental problems faced by communities around the world. In this article, the author particularly keen to know how the act of "doing research" will advance the field of environmental education and as such contribute to the solution of broader environmental problems. The author…

Arguably, performance assessment is an integral element of all human educative endeavors. It is the centerpiece of the standards-based reforms movement of the 1990s and continues to be a dominant feature of curriculum planning today. Using performance assessment as a lens, this article addresses the concerns and cautions offered by seminal…

This article summarizes the breadth, diversity, and significance of the international movement to recognize, prepare, and learn from teachers as researchers from three interrelated standpoints: curriculum improvement, professional critique, and societal reform. A derivative of action research, teacher research from a curriculum improvement stance…