Teacher-researchers’ Quality Concerns for Practice-oriented Educational Research

Abstract

Practice-oriented educational research is increasingly gaining traction in educational research due to its intention to contribute to both educational research and educational practice. Educational researchers have established quality concerns that practice-oriented educational research should meet in order to realise this intention. We argue that teachers’ quality concerns probably differ from researchers’ concerns. This may explain why practice-oriented educational research faces challenges concerning its contribution to educational practice. The aim of this study is to identify teacher-researchers’ perspectives on the quality of practice-oriented educational research and to analyse how these differ from the research perspective. In a qualitative empirical study, individual reflections, small-group discussions and semi-structured interviews of ten purposefully selected teacher-researchers are analysed following a so-called informed grounded theory approach. The results of this study show that the teacher-researchers’ quality concerns overlap with the quality concerns commonly held by researchers, but they broaden the meaning of some quality concerns, add new concerns and exclude others. Taking their common quality concerns as a starting point, close collaboration between researchers and teachers could decrease researchers’ challenges concerning legitimacy and relevance of their work and increase teachers’ use of research in educational practice.