Teaching is a hard profession, particularly in special education. I was recently challenged by one of my graduate professors to blog daily for a at least a month about the stresses of juggling graduate school, family demands, and teaching students with disabilities. After reading through my blog posts, I noticed that one of my greatest struggles…

This article examines the nature of, and need for, evaluation of community-engaged university teaching and research. The research was conducted as part of a larger project aimed at improving institutional understanding of how to best support community-engaged university people. We interviewed 25 community-engaged colleagues, and used a general…

In South African public higher education, the miseducative legacies of the past weigh heavily. This article offers our learning as leaders of a multicultural community of university educators that seeks to contribute towards repairing the damages of a divided and discriminatory past by means of self-study research. Through a collaborative…

This study describes a teacher-researcher's experience of scaffolding his business English learners in identifying, formulating, and exploring language learning puzzles using the principles of exploratory practice. Adopting both qualitative and quantitative methods, the teacher-researcher reflected upon the learner-initiated and learner-centred…

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…

What is the central research activity in modern universities? This paper uses a comprehensive survey among individuals from 15 countries to map differences in orientation towards basic/fundamental research, applied/practical research and a combination of the two. Despite some claims in the literature that basic research is no longer a…

Design research is usually motivated by university members with experience and interest in building theory and instructional designs in collaboration with one teacher. Typically, the teacher is considered as a member of the research team, with the primary responsibility of implementing instruction. However, in this chapter, I describe a Classroom…

Educators often wonder how to respond purposefully to vexing issues such as ecological sustainability, social justice and holistic health and wellness. The search for useful ways of proceeding can be addressed through engagement in the process of Transformative Inquiry (TI), a mode of inquiry for educators that resonates with indigenous views and…

This work explores real-life experiences around research. Thinking of the English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher as an inquirer of the academic reality, the study presents accounts of professional identity as narrated in the life histories of three EFL teachers-researchers in a private but non-profit institution in Bogota, Colombia. This…

There is growing interest in the effectiveness of practitioner research for promoting teachers' professional learning. It is important to determine if and why practitioner research is effective for teachers, however, it is also necessary to determine what support they need to develop research skills to design and implement practitioner research.…

This article responds to recent critiques of the usefulness of research findings to teaching, and the call for teachers to rely on their experiences and intuition. I discuss the fallibility of intuition and then examine the nature of research and of critical thinking and their importance for teachers and teacher education. I provide evidence of…

Researcher-practitioner partnerships have gained increasing prominence within education in recent years, yet scholarship on partnerships and tools to guide partnerships' work remain in their infancy. Drawing on our own work in a partnership as well as analysis of abstracts for the 41 partnerships funded by the Institute of Education Sciences and…

In this conceptual article, we draw upon recent literature to describe the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological anchors that can inform a working conception of practitioner-scholarship. We position practitioner-scholarship at the intersection of an individual's work as a practitioner and researcher, wherein a practitioner focuses on…

Our current education system depends exclusively on standardization, accountability, and test scores, which often limits the learning within the classroom. This type of curriculum does not include children as contributors, their lived cultural experiences, or their voices and cultural diversity. The intent of this dissertation was to connect…

This paper outlines a research study involving a University-School District partnership with the intent to increase the number of middle grades mathematics and science teachers by increasing content knowledge, self-efficacy, and interest in these content areas. The selected program component describes the authentic summer research experience that…