Researcher Skills



Researcher Skills

Introduction

For a long time, it is probably fair to say that there was very little formal in-service training. It was assumed that if we had a doctorate in our subject then we could - somehow- naturally teach it. After all, we had been taught ourselves, and we had the opportunity to take on role models, if not establish a mentoring relationship with such models.

My Research Skills

We may even had the opportunity to teach as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. However, we are now much more aware of our need to improve our teaching and our understanding of how students learn. The Institute of Learning and Teaching (ILT) is indicative of this (1). Similarly, increasingly over the past decade, institutions of higher education have taken staff (human resource) development to a level never previously seen, particularly concentrating on academics' administrative responsibilities, supporting -among other things- quality assurance. A particular focus is now given to induction - the process of becoming a university lecturer, although it assumes that this can be achieved quite quickly, and probably no more than the three-year probationary period that most new lecturers have to go through.

An interesting aspect of learning to teach is that typically (and hopefully) this will extend beyond technicism, and through the deconstruction of teaching and learning, we become aware of not only how to teach, but what it means to become and be a teacher: When teachers engage in those activities which define teaching, they are engaging in something more than a role to be set aside as will: they are constructing themselves as beings. (Pearce and Pickard 1987, 42) There is a growing literature that links the process of learning to be a teacher with the construction of identity (Ball and Goodson 1985, Sikes, Measor and Woods 1985) - a relationship that is explored through life history research (2). If we look at the second major role of faculty in higher education - research -there is an interesting contrast. Unlike the teaching role, there is an assumption that as researchers we have served our apprenticeship through graduate study, undertaken research methods training programmes and gained extensive experience of doing research through our graduate and postgraduate studies. But does that mean we see ourselves as researchers, and at what point in time do we come to accept a state of being a researcher? The polarisation of being and becoming a researcher is over-simplistic, since the process of becoming is also a state of being. The implications for this distinction are, however, important. One current in education in the UK is the argument that teachers in schools should also be researchers.

In the context of evaluating the impact of education research, the Teacher Training Agency seems to believe that the way to improve education research is to locate it with teachers (Reynolds 1998). I am not necessarily against the idea in principle; after all, action/practitioner/evidence based research has a long and fruitful history (Carr and Kemmis 1986, ERIC 1993, Jarvis ...