Being in an education-related task, there’s a need for professional development in order to help administrators, co-teachers, and other educators improve professional knowledge, competence, skill, and effectiveness. One way of doing such is coming up for an action research. This is believed as a process of improving and increasing capabilities of teachers, and helps build and maintain morale.
It is known that action research is an attractive option for teacher researchers in the teaching and learning environment to consider. Specifically, it is defined as the process of studying a school situation to understand and improve the quality of the educative process. It provides teachers with new knowledge and understanding about how to improve educational practices or resolve significant problems in classrooms and schools.
Moreover, it uses a systematic process and offers beneficial opportunities within the teaching professions increase teacher empowerment, and bridging the gap between research and practice.
Knowing all of these, and thinking that within education, the main goal of action research is to determine ways to enhance the lives of children at the same time enhance the lives of the teachers; I still find it ironic because I’ve got no interest of doing action researches especially when it’s mandated to come up with such within a year.
I don’t feel as if engaging with research is worth my time because for me, there’s a difference of a teacher researcher and education researcher. The goal of a teacher is to find out what works to help students learn best; for the latter is to play the game of academia in order to climb up the academic career ladder. According to Gary Davies, informing and changing teacher practice is only a secondary goal for education researchers: it’s a nicety rather than a necessity.
Davies also added that publish world-view which explains why research or stuff we know is rubbish still gets done and still gets published. We can see why lack of expertise is a big problem when people parrot off studies they’ve read in defence of their arguments or belief systems. This is really depressing part because I can’t really see how things are going to change in the long run.
As long as we can’t determine the difference between teacher researcher and education researcher, education research will continue to be less relevant than it could be. Living to be education researcher, we just try to write review papers that impress education researcher’s friends and colleagues. One reason why teachers have lack of research engagement is because of workloads.
By Marissa Rimando David