My Research Agenda: Perspectives and Projects
Over the last few years I have tried to maintain a mosaic-like research and writing agenda in which I try to integrate individual projects that are often independent of each other but when viewed together provide a richer image of what I am trying to become as a scholar and teacher. The agenda is typically four-fold in nature and, most likely, I am at some stage of a project in each of those four areas at any given time. While that might seem too scattered or fragmented for some people, it is a concession to my need to have several things going at once and the reluctance to give up my reading and thinking in any one area for any amount of time.
Primary Agenda
First, I maintain one dominant, long-term project that expands as new questions or problems arise in that area. For much of the past decade that project has been in the area of Professional Development School (PDS) research. My PDS-related projects go back farther than that -- into the mid 1990s when I did the initial evaluation of our PDSs at the University of Indianapolis. However, beginning in about 2002 my wife (Donna Adair Breault) and I began a large review and critique of the research and writing on PDSs. The core of that review involved first 200 (later expanded to 250) papers, articles, and reports related to the PDS movement that were produced between 2000 and 2006. That project has spun off into a number of conference papers and articles that are discussed in the link titled PDS Research. Our work, we are happy to say, has culminated in a book published by Rowman & Littlefield, Professional Development Schools: Lessons from the Field.
The new directions in which I am heading in this "Primary" category are emerging teacher identity, imagination in teacher education, and the neglected role of "place" in educational research.
Exploratory Agenda
This is what I call my "for fun" projects. These projects explore and integrate my various areas of interest -- theology, aesthetics, popular culture, the arts -- into education-related topics. I cannot consider myself a "scholar" in any one of those areas but I think I can safely say I'm a well-informed fan or patron of those disciplines. To whatever extent that's true I try to use those disciplines to inform the way we analyze issues and conditions in schools and teacher education. For instance, one of my favorite articles to write was one in which I used a metaphor involving the blues and blues musicians to explore the nature of teachers and their work. Another example is a conference paper (as yet unpublished) in which I used the characteristics of fundamentalist theology to critique the dogmatic aspects of postmodern/critical thought. Currently I have turned my interests in this category toward the performing arts and am exploring what we might learn from choreography, Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" and so on.
Scholarship of Teaching
I also try to maintain my commitment to and interest in teaching through self-study projects in which I explore some dimension of my practice in a scholarly way. At times this agenda overlaps with the others (my PDS research has been incorporated into graduate teacher education courses or research methodology courses and methods of aesthetic education I learned at the Lincoln Center Institutes have been integrated into various classes) but other projects take their own direction. The largest of those is the Trio-Ethnography that has its own link on this site. Much of this work can now be found in a chapter of the newly released book, Duoethnography: Dialogic Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research (Left Coast Press). I have extended that work now into how duoethnography can be used with preservice teachers, some of the challenges involved with duoethnography as a research method, and the implications of my own earlier trio-ethnography.
Most recently, I am experimenting with the use of preservice teacher storytelling as a way of helping induct new teacher education students into the PDS experience, with the use of duoethnography to explore preservice teacher identity, and with more directed, systematic and developmental ways to help teacher education students create belief statements.
Serendipitous and Opportunistic Projects
Writing in this area is prompted by one of two events. "Opportunistic" projects are those that arise when I am invited to take part in other people's work -- grant-related research, encyclopedia entries, book chapters. Those projects are always related to areas of expertise and interest but they were not initiated by me and may not fit into any other current interest. The other types of research/writing that I put into this category are things like writing op-ed pieces for newspapers or interesting research opportunities that arise as a result of something we are doing in a class or in conversation with a colleague.
Primary Agenda
First, I maintain one dominant, long-term project that expands as new questions or problems arise in that area. For much of the past decade that project has been in the area of Professional Development School (PDS) research. My PDS-related projects go back farther than that -- into the mid 1990s when I did the initial evaluation of our PDSs at the University of Indianapolis. However, beginning in about 2002 my wife (Donna Adair Breault) and I began a large review and critique of the research and writing on PDSs. The core of that review involved first 200 (later expanded to 250) papers, articles, and reports related to the PDS movement that were produced between 2000 and 2006. That project has spun off into a number of conference papers and articles that are discussed in the link titled PDS Research. Our work, we are happy to say, has culminated in a book published by Rowman & Littlefield, Professional Development Schools: Lessons from the Field.
The new directions in which I am heading in this "Primary" category are emerging teacher identity, imagination in teacher education, and the neglected role of "place" in educational research.
Exploratory Agenda
This is what I call my "for fun" projects. These projects explore and integrate my various areas of interest -- theology, aesthetics, popular culture, the arts -- into education-related topics. I cannot consider myself a "scholar" in any one of those areas but I think I can safely say I'm a well-informed fan or patron of those disciplines. To whatever extent that's true I try to use those disciplines to inform the way we analyze issues and conditions in schools and teacher education. For instance, one of my favorite articles to write was one in which I used a metaphor involving the blues and blues musicians to explore the nature of teachers and their work. Another example is a conference paper (as yet unpublished) in which I used the characteristics of fundamentalist theology to critique the dogmatic aspects of postmodern/critical thought. Currently I have turned my interests in this category toward the performing arts and am exploring what we might learn from choreography, Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" and so on.
Scholarship of Teaching
I also try to maintain my commitment to and interest in teaching through self-study projects in which I explore some dimension of my practice in a scholarly way. At times this agenda overlaps with the others (my PDS research has been incorporated into graduate teacher education courses or research methodology courses and methods of aesthetic education I learned at the Lincoln Center Institutes have been integrated into various classes) but other projects take their own direction. The largest of those is the Trio-Ethnography that has its own link on this site. Much of this work can now be found in a chapter of the newly released book, Duoethnography: Dialogic Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research (Left Coast Press). I have extended that work now into how duoethnography can be used with preservice teachers, some of the challenges involved with duoethnography as a research method, and the implications of my own earlier trio-ethnography.
Most recently, I am experimenting with the use of preservice teacher storytelling as a way of helping induct new teacher education students into the PDS experience, with the use of duoethnography to explore preservice teacher identity, and with more directed, systematic and developmental ways to help teacher education students create belief statements.
Serendipitous and Opportunistic Projects
Writing in this area is prompted by one of two events. "Opportunistic" projects are those that arise when I am invited to take part in other people's work -- grant-related research, encyclopedia entries, book chapters. Those projects are always related to areas of expertise and interest but they were not initiated by me and may not fit into any other current interest. The other types of research/writing that I put into this category are things like writing op-ed pieces for newspapers or interesting research opportunities that arise as a result of something we are doing in a class or in conversation with a colleague.