Skip to content
2018
Volume 60, Issue 3
  • ISSN: 0034-527X
  • E-ISSN: 1943-2348

Abstract

After 40-plus years, I retired from my professorship and returned to my first role as a teacher of children (kindergarteners through second graders, now at a neighborhood after-school center). As an academic researcher, an ethnographer, I had spent years with children as a “friend” as they often described me. But at the center, I was a teacher, expected to promote the children’s composing. In this role, I experienced at first a sharp shift in my relationship to children. The question arose: What is the relationship between being a researcher and being a teacher? I compared my responses to and from three selected center children and three research project children; data (field notes, written products) for each center child was compared to that of a research project child with similar composing characteristics. All children were urban and African American. Among my findings were that, first, my observations of center children were not the data-filled field notes of project children, and, second, that the teacher me was more attuned to the writing community in formation. Children expected our routine prac-tices, they were eager to share their work, and, moreover, they were ready responders to each other. By the school year’s end, I knew that all who teach must blend the roles of researcher and teacher: We are curious about those we teach; we work to study them the best we can by observing their responses to our efforts, and what we thereby learn feeds into how we teach and how our students learn.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.58680/rte2026603253
2026-02-01
2026-06-18
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Abdurraqib H. (2022) Sing, Aretha, sing!: Aretha Franklin, “Respect,” and the Civil Rights Movement. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Ahearn L. M. (2017) Living language: An introduction to linguistic anthropology. Wiley-Blackwell.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Au W. (2016) Meritocracy 2.0: High-stakes, standardized testing as a racial project of neoliberal multiculturalism. Educational Policy, 30(1), 39–62.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Bakhtin M. (1981) Discourse in the novel. In Holquist M. (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin (pp. 254–422). University of Texas Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Bergmark U. (2019) Rethinking researcher-teacher roles and relationships in educational action research through the use of Nel Noddings’ ethics of care. Educational Action Research, 28(3), 331–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2019.1567367
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Blommaert J. (2013) Writing as a sociolinguistic object. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(4), 440–459.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Brown-Wood J. (2024) Jam, too? (Alcantara, J. Illus.). Nancy Paulsen Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Clay M. (1975) What did I write?. Heinemann.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Decaire-Goldin C., & Simmons R. (2021, May 27) Embracing teachers as researchers. ASCD Express. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/embracing-teachers-as-researchers
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Dyson A. H. (1989) Multiple worlds of child writers: Friends learning to write. Teachers College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Dyson A. H. (1993) Social worlds of children learning to write in an urban primary school. Teachers College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Dyson A. H. (1997) Writing superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy. Teachers College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Dyson A. H. (2003) The brothers and sisters learn to write: Popular literacies in childhood and school cultures. Teachers College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Dyson A. H. (2005) Crafting “the humble prose of living”: Rethinking oral/written relations in the echoes of spoken word. English Education, 37(2), 149–164.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Dyson A. H. (2013) Rewriting the basics: Literacy learning in children’s cultures. Teachers College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Dyson A. H. (2021) Writing the school house blues: Literacy, equity, and belonging in a child’s early schooling. Teacher’s College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Dyson A. H. (2024) Following the sounds of children’s “voices”: A researcher’s portfolio. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 25(3), 523–555. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984241265067
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Erickson F. (1986) Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In Wittrock M. C. (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 119–161). Macmillan.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Hymes D. (1972) Introduction. In Cazden C., John V., & Hymes D. (Eds.), Functions of language in the classroom (pp. xi–lvii). Teachers College Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Hymes D. (1974) Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. University of Pennsylvania Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Jarl M., Taube M., & Björklund C. (2024) Exploring roles in teacher-researcher collaboration: Examples from a Swedish research-practice partnership in education. Education Inquiry, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/20004508.2024.2324518
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Massey D. (1994) Space, place, and gender. University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Massey D. (2005) For space. SAGE.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Rowe D. W., Shimizu A. Y., & Davis Z. G. (2021) Essential practices for engaging young children as writers: Lessons from expert early writing teachers. The Reading Teacher, 75(4), 485–494.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Sawchuk S. (2023, January 17) How does writing fit into the “science of reading”?Education Week.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Soja E. W. (2010) Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Street B. (2014) Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Tortorelli L. S., Gerde H. K., Rohloff R., & Bingham G. E. (2021) Ready, set, write: Early learning standards for writing in the Common Core era. Reading Research Quarterly, 57(2), 729–752.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Vygotsky L. S. (1978) Mind in society. Harvard University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Vygotsky L. S. (1981) The genesis of higher mental functions. In Wertsch J. V. (Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 144–188). M. E. Sharpe.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Willems M. (2003-present) The Pigeon series. Hyperion Books for Children.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.58680/rte2026603253
Loading
  • Article Type: Research Article
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
Please enter a valid_number test