Composing Teacher-Research: A Prosaic History (S U N Y SERIES IN TEACHER PREPARATION AND DEVELOPMENT)

This story of a teacher's growth as a researcher in the classroom reflects the larger issues of the debate about this kind of research during the last decade.

In Composing Teacher-Research the author provides a much needed critical look at the teacher-research movement by recounting her own experiences over the past decade. Informed by readings in a number of disciplines and by her own classroom practice, Fleischer documents the shifts and changes she made as a teacher when she took on the additional role of researcher. The book presents four case studies of classrooms and students, at both the high school and college level, focusing on the ways students see their own literacy in and out of school. Fleischer not only reproduces these case studies as they were written at various points in her journey, but provides commentary through pre- and post-scripts in which she points out particular issues of concern for those who practice classroom research: what it means to represent others’ experiences, how we can create research which is at the same time ethical and pedagogically sound, how the stakes for being a teacher-researcher have changed in a postmodern world.