三野宮 春子
Evidence and Resource Utilized in Material Development by Practitioners and Researchers
Haruko Sannomiya
April, 2019
Abstract
The purpose of the current study is to understand what evidence can be like that educational research should aim to produce in order to support practitioners’ professional decision-making. This study problematizes the lack of practitioners’ perspectives in the heated debate over how research findings can benefit practitioners. As an attempt to envision an alternative, it takes a heuristic approach, starting with a set of working definitions, which wait for revisions to follow when fuller accounts become available in the future.
The author conducted seven semi-structured interviews with five teachers/researchers, who had been members of her project on creative language activity development, to understand what kinds of theories, research findings, and other resources were available and useful for them. As a result, four participants intentionally chose to make subjective judgements informed by reflection on their first-hand experiences along with research-based suggestions. Only one participant, who highly valued objectivity, refrained from using his felt sense and intuition in his decision-making, avoiding personal commitment to his students’ learning.
The study proposes that education researchers themselves experience using their and others’ research findings to improve their own teaching, especially in university teacher training courses, so they free themselves from the objectivity bias and explore what evidence can be like that really contributes to practice.
