Research that serves: building active teacher-researcher partnerships
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Date
2017-12-01
DOI
Authors
Smith, Tawnya D.
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
T. Smith. 2017. "Research that serves: Building active teacher-researcher partnerships.." Massachusetts Music Educators Journal, Volume 66, Issue 2, p. 32.
Abstract
The impact of scholarly research in education on educational practice in classrooms
remains low (Admiraal, Buijs, Claessens, Honing, & Karkdijk, 2017). As a result, educational
practices in schools remain tied to practical wisdom, rather than educational theories that have
been developed and tested in classrooms. This research to practice gap, as it is widely known, is
attributed to beliefs that scholars in higher education tend to examine problems that teachers in
schools find irrelevant. Classroom teachers contend that because scholars’ primary purpose is to
publish, they tend to aim toward generalizations rather than to focus on the improvement of
relevant educational practice. Gore and Gitlin (2004) argued that existing tensions between
researchers and practitioners may be related to long-standing traditions of framing educational
research in such a way that classroom teachers are positioned as “users” rather than “producers”
of knowledge.