Teacher Research and the Rockefellers

I visited the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) to begin research on my next monograph, which I am currently titling "Teachers of Action: The History of Teacher Participation in the Production of Education Research". As a teacher educator, I value the research that teachers produce and publish out of data they collect from their own classrooms both because it is good for teachers' professional development and because it can reveal information that is unique and distinct from other forms of education research. As someone who also studies education policy, however, I know teacher research holds virtually no currency amongst policy makers and many groups of education reformers. I hypothesize that this disregard for teacher research stems in part from the social status of teachers as well as a wide skepticism of teacher knowledge shared both by people inside and outside of education. In Teachers of Action, I want to challenge this skepticism by examining the historical roots of teacher research and what it has contributed, not just to the field of education but for the practice of teaching and to the ways in which we conceptualize teacher development.