Searching for a Center

At the April 2000 American Educational Research Association meeting in New Orleans, Walter Doyle organized a symposium designed to rebuild a center that would hold theory and research on teaching together. In the description of the symposium , he pointed to the reduction of research on classroom processes and structures and the increase in studies that focus on teachers' beliefs, cognitions, and conceptions through teacher interviews and teacher research. Researching Teaching: Methodologies and Practices for Understanding Pedagogy, a book edited by John Loughran, represents these newer forms of research on teaching. There is little in this volume that examines classroom processes and structures, and the focus throughout is on teachers' thought processes and learning. For those of you who wonder`where did research on teaching go?a, this edited book provides several clues. Overall, one would conclude from this volume that research on teaching is hale and hearty, but looks considerably di!erent than it did several years ago. I will "rst provide a description of the sections and chapters in the book, and then return to some overall themes of research on teaching as characterized by the work in this volume. Researching Teaching consists of 12 chapters in four sections, preceded by an introductory chapter by Loughran. As Loughran writes in his introduction , the book focuses on developing an understanding of pedagogy through various forms of research. The "rst section concentrates directly on pedagogy, the second on collaboration, the third on context, and the fourth section, conclusion, consists of a chapter by Richard White who describes changes in research on teaching since the 1960s. John Loughran's chapter introduces the other chapters in the book, but also describes a number of themes that characterize the chapters that follow. For example, he is deeply concerned about the relationship between research and practice, particularly given that teacher knowledge is di!erent than research knowledge in the way it is developed and used. He focuses on teacher cognitions, self-study, and long-term research projects that are collaborative and action oriented. He sees the chapters in this book as developing stronger links between research and practice through forms of inquiry that reframe our thinking about research * particularly toward collaborative research and self-study. Section 1 contains three chapters, the "rst of which is an analytic chapter by Max van Manen on the language of pedagogy. He de"nes the term pedagogy as thènormativitya (moral, relational, ethical) of determining the …