Abstract

This paper questions dominant ideas about what counts as valid research in education, how educational research is conducted and represented, who gets to conduct it and who can write, talk about , present and represent educational research in trustworthy, authentic, credible and meaningful ways. It reports the preliminary findings of a qualitative, empirical, study which explores if/how the use of visual and other forms of art, can mediate the acquisition and development of teachers’ understanding of theories, concepts, and practice in educational research. An aim of the study is to investigate the processes and stages in which the theories, concepts and practices underpinning educational research, academic writing and scholarship are understood and developed by teachers as they learn how to conduct systematic and rigorous educational research into their practice. A further aim is to identify aesthetic pedagogic principles and interventions which may be of interest and use to a wider audience of teacher-educators and others involved in supporting the improvement of educational practice through educational research.
Set in the context of the national Practitioner Research Programme (PRP) funded by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) in England and directed and delivered by the University of Sunderland, this study takes the works of Dewey (1934), Eisner (1993) as starting points. It then presents, analyses and critically discusses PRP practitioners’ accounts of their experiences of learning to become and knowing how to be (savoir être) educational researchers though a programme of intensive research training informed by the principles of Arts Based Educational Research (ABER) (Barone and Eisner, 2012).