A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

15 
| What is teacher-research?
2.1 Demystifying research
In the last chapter, we showed how, by collecting information, 
you can explore and understand your practice in more depth, 
and potentially change things for the better. Collecting 
information or ‘data’ is an important feature of research. 
However, many teachers have an image of research which 
differs from the process we are explaining in this book. 
Here are some of the images teachers say they have
of research: 
Teachers often associate research with scientists, and with 
science. However, research is not just done in laboratories 
and universities or for ‘scientific purposes’ only – it can
also be done by teachers and learners to gain a better 
understanding of the dynamic nature of classroom life and 
possibly to bring about change. 
Here is an alternative image to represent better the nature 
of research into classroom life:
In this picture, the diver is carefully looking at a richly 
diverse and beautiful coral reef, something which needs
to be explored in its real surroundings not in a laboratory. 
Now, how about this one?:
Here you can see learners talking to one another in a real 
classroom environment. Exploring what they do, what they 
say, and what they think, is as fascinating and rich as 
examining the coral reef under the sea’s surface. The fact 
that we see our students every day doesn’t make them less 
interesting! In fact, we recently came across this quotation: 
“Where the classroom has a culture as complex as the 
coral reef, the teacher cannot afford to be anything but
a researcher.”
1
So, we hope you can see that a laboratory is not the only 
place where research can be carried out. And in this book 
we are stressing the idea that teachers themselves can 
research their own teaching and learning situations. 
However, there are two further common misconceptions 
about research that we need to address. Below, you can see 
two more images that teachers often associate with 
research: