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Time for joined up thinking
As more and more of us cope with budgets being squeezed and increased pressures on our time, could a more collegiate approach help to preserve our research activity?
Networking is the name of the game in business circles. Now it could have financial consequences for our teacher education research bodies, too. In the current climate, gloomy predictions are that research budgets already tight are bound to get tighter still.
Even before the economic recession, the number of university staff involved in teacher education research had been falling by about 15 per cent although the quality of research output was higher than in previous years. Research from England shows that working together to unlock funds would give Scotland's university researchers real advantage over institutions that continue to walk a lonely road in the hunt for research cash.
Professor Jean Murray from the University of East London uses, as the base for her argument, the recent pilot project run in the north-west of England, involving the area's seven teacher-education universities. The project, called the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN), aimed to bring universities and their staff together to research common issues in teacher education that had particular relevance to that region, as well as having national relevance. We drew on the strength of the seven institutions to produce a research development programme. The idea was that for the 44 research fellows who were involved, the programme would enhance their research skills and bring them together in small teams and groups with the view of fast-tracking research development. "Offering accelerated research techniques always raises interest among potential funders. Money talks in this kind of situation and it was money we needed to sustain the network." The project leaders had, first of all, to break through a barrier of resistance.
Prof Murray said: "Universities, particularly within a geographic region, often find themselves in real competition for available research resources. And often, that competition has a fierce edge.
"For a start, they are bidding to international funding agencies, and there's always been competition between institutions around student numbers and new initiatives." She added: "At TERN we were able to create a collaborative community of practice, and live with elements of competition.
Institutional goodwill and commitment helped of course; so did the idea of working together. Everyone came aboard from deans and managers to the researchers who actually took part in the programme. Without those levels of commitment it would not have worked. The creation of protected time in the project was crucial to its success and may have important implications for teachers in schools who wish to become involved in research programmes.
Prof Murray said: "What we did was to take people out of their normal work places, by providing a series of dates when they had to come together as researchers. That element of protected time for reflection and research activity was really important. "We set up some structures within each day, which meant that people had a balance between input time and discussion time, and plenty of space for collaboration. We also had research groups within the larger group which provided some interesting data. We found that five or six people were the ideal number in a group, and different groups found different ways to communicate with each other by email, telephone, and face to face.
The TERN experience is already bearing fruit. One group has won £66,000 of funding and another has just entered an ESRC bid. When she attended the Glasgow & Strathclyde TETW Joint Research Group last summer, Prof Murray hoped that Scots institutions would quickly see the potential of working as a group to win educational research funding.
Scotland is already relatively strong in terms of its research output. If you look at the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), you will see that all of the Scottish teacher education universities submitted projects and all received a good tranche of funding.
The big problem in the 2008 RAE was the fact that teacher education as a research area was less well represented than in previous RAEs. Prof Murray said: "Our TERN project identified a number of ways forward:
- Clarifying the differing types of scholarship and research in teacher education
- Articulating these types and how they are manifested as processes and product
- Developing a scholarly knowledge base about learning and teaching in teacher education
- Articulating what this means for practice and policy
- Using this to rethink academic work in teacher education
- Make sure that research is truly generative
- Creating scaffolds for research development from induction to experienced researcher/future research leader
- Rethinking conventional doctoral routes to expertise
Evolving one-to-many (not one-to-one) models of research monitoring - Involving school-based colleagues in collaborative projects.
The broad themes need to have a clear focus on research about professional learning and/or teacher education, and they need to be relevant. They also need to be relevant for research capability building and have significance and interest for the individuals in the research groups. And the work will clearly need to draw on individual and communal expertise.