I spent much of the past three days putting together a proposal for the major conference on education. In documenting teacher work, I based my argument on the notion that the only way to explain how it feels to teach is to actually teach.

Today I got the link for the new TCRecord and the lead article was a statistical analysis of survey data taken from thousands of teachers. I just can’t help but feel that no matter how clever the survey author, and no matter how clever the analyst, you miss something by not talking to teachers directly.

Similarly, the summer issue of the HER features some great articles gathered under the heading of VIS (voices inside schools). Wonderful — the words and thoughts of students, counselors, and teachers ! Maybe in four years we’ll see another edition that embraces a similar approach.

I suppose it’s just my own wariness regarding how certain kinds of “research” are perceived and my fears that now matter how rigorous and theoretically grounded, the kids of teacher research that I think actually helps folks in the field will continue to be forced underground.