Exploring Unanticipated Pathways: Teachers and Researchers Learning about Their Practices Through Classroom-based Research

When we engage as participants in educational research projects, either as teachers or researchers (or both), unintended but revealing pathways may be travelled. In this chapter, we consider the issue of how engagement and involvement in research can enhance the professional learning of both classroom teachers and teacher educators. In our cases, we did not set out with teacher professional learning, or our own learning as educators, as explicit aims. This issue of who learns in the process of conducting research, and the nature and content of that learning, is the focus of this chapter. We explore the ways in which researchers working in a classroom teacher’s presence, with the teacher involved to varying extents, contribute to professional learning and sustained changes in our teaching practices. We first consider three different research projects, describing the context and the roles of the researcher and teacher in each. Review of data and reflection generated two themes. The first theme relates to how the research process facilitated our learning as educators, as we developed relationships that led to sustained change in our practices. The second theme focuses on what we learnt about our professional selves in our different, but blurred, roles in the research projects. We conclude by considering what we have learnt about fostering genuine, ongoing research relationships between school-based practitioners and university-based researchers and the potential value in revisiting a project after we have been changed by participation in that project.