While academic debates on the importance of pedagogical-research context(s) abound (e.g., Ushioda, 2009), and despite the well-documented scholarship which points to the inclusivity and diversity of practitioner research (Hanks, 2019), there is a need to unpack the various perspectives which different agents with varying positionalities may have on the practice and utility of practitioner research. This enhanced understanding of the nature, use, and ramifications of practitioner research will strengthen our ability to better understand and, if need be, improve our teaching, learning, and research realities.
I will begin with a reference to Ortega (2005) who made a compelling argument for researchers to orient our investigations towards learners' and teachers' practical needs. More than 15 years later, discourses continue to reiterate the necessity of a stronger teaching-research nexus (McKinley, 2019) and a more dialogic synergy between academic research and pedagogical praxis (Rose, 2019). Against this backdrop, I will explore the often-cited statements that language teachers have no interest in research, least of all a desire to conduct 'their own' practitioner research.
I will draw on a project about mentoring pre-service teachers to do practitioner research in a challenging context in Southern Argentina. I will advance the argument that teachers who may initially display all the symptoms of disengagement with research can indeed see the benefits of empirical work if this is made relevant to and reflective of their classroom realities. In particular, this study examined the experience of mentoring a group of primary and secondary school student-teachers completing a teacher preparation programme that included a course on teacher research. Despite their initial hesitation about language education research that, to them, seemed unable to help them 'become teachers', these student-teachers engaged in several classroom research projects.
In the end, they revealed various benefits from this experience including, inter alia, an identity transformation from student-teachers to teachers who felt part of a wider international community of practitioners, and the development of a reflective attitude towards their own teaching. These practitioner views may chime or contrast with scholars' and academic mentors' perspectives. This paper will therefore analyse this case study of practitioner research from the perspectives and positionalities of the teaching practitioners and academic mentors. I will finally reiterate that practitioner research may reconcile the disconnect between research and praxis by prioritizing teachers' and learners' needs, through valuing their life capitals (Consoli, 2022) and, ultimately, yield direct implications for language pedagogy.
Consoli, S. (2022). Life capital: An epistemic and methodological lens for TESOL research. TESOL Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3154
Hanks, J. (2019). From research-as-practice to exploratory practice-as-research in language teaching and beyond. Language Teaching, 52(2), 143-187.
McKinley, J. (2019). Evolving the TESOL teaching-research nexus. TESOL Quarterly, 53(3), 875–884.
Ortega, L. (2005). For what and for whom is our research? The ethical as transformative lens in instructed SLA. Modern Language Journal, 89(3), 427–443.
Rose, H. (2019). Dismantling the ivory tower in TESOL: A renewed call for teaching-informed research. TESOL Quarterly, 53 (3), 875–884.
Ushioda, E. (2009) A person-in-context relational view of emergent motivation, self andidentity. In Z. Dörnyei and E. Ushioda (eds) Motivation, Language Identity and theL2 Self (pp. 215–228). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
