ABSTRACT
These quotations, culled from Hubbard and Power’s book The Art of Classroom Inquiry: A Handbook for Teacher Researchers (1993), cut to the heart of the challenges and spirit of renewal inherent in teacher research. Much has been written in praise of teacher research (see Bissex and Bullock, 1987; Goswami and Stillman, 1987; Hubbard and Brown, 1993), but little has been written about student-teacher research (see Cochran-Smith, 1991). What if the same opportunities for doing action research existed for ‘working student teachers? There is nothing in this challenge that is necessarily outside the realm of possibilities for beginning professional teachers in teacher education preparation programs? Avoiding the invidious traps of ‘pseudo-scientific horseracing’, globs of unintelligible data, and the failure to make connections with ‘real world’ pedagogical practices are pervasive threats in all fieldwork projects. These concerns put in fundamental terms ‘how,’ ‘why,’ and ‘for whom’ we should pursue all meaningful research activity. The existence of so many schooluniversity partnerships dedicated to the renewal of teaching and the education of educators (Goodlad, 1994) would appear to be a logical context for incorporating action research into student teachers’ everyday beginning professional experiences. There is clearly a common-sense argument for ‘getting started’ early.
