For three days this summer, teachers and IU researchers and faculty came together to create resources that will be used in classrooms during the school year. It’s the third year for the writing intensive called Hearing Each Other’s Voices, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and it’s a project that continues to grow: from three pairs of teachers and STEM coaches the first year to 15 pairs now. Originally, organizers didn’t know how many people would remain interested in being a part of the project and work with their partners on these problems, even after their initial year and the writing intensive. But as more teams signed up, they found the number of repeating participants to be a welcomed and pleasant surprise.

The focus of the writing intensive together was to let the practitioners and researchers who have been working together for at least a year to get together and produce some sort of shared product together, explained Wendy Walter, Associate Director, Center for Research on Learning and Technology. Participants spent the week brainstorming ideas, presenting their work, and providing feedback, all while learning from each other.

When the teachers were recruited for the project, they were asked to define a problem or possible space for change and improvement in their practice as a whole: for example, some teachers identified teachers having difficulty implanting technology in their classrooms across their buildings and districts. The teachers were then matched with researchers based on their mutual areas of interest.

“The hope is that the shared product that they create together will be a resource for the practitioners to use in some capacity with the teachers that they coach and work within their district and that the researchers can use it in their own research capacities,” Walter said.

Walter pointed out that oftentimes, what happens in academic research and what happens in K-12 school environments are mismatched when researchers and teachers don’t talk to one another: “The hope is that through allowing researchers to see what practitioners’ jobs really look like from day to day, visit their buildings and districts, and hear what is relevant to them that their research will be guided to be more useful and directly applicable for teachers and coaches. Simultaneously, by bringing researchers’ work and expertise directly to teachers, we hope this project helps to bring great research off the shelf and into the field, helping to fill practitioner toolboxes with more evidence-based practices.”

As a researcher, Walter pointed out how important it is for her to feel like the work she does in academia is useful and applicable in the contexts that it is hopefully applied to - but she also has the perspective of being a former teacher. 

“It is also really important to me that researchers and research projects do not just assume that they know what is needed in school contexts without being present in those spaces, speaking with teachers, admin, students, and other relevant parties. This project for me addresses both of those needs and to be a researcher who hopefully gets to contribute to opening more lines of communication between research and practice makes me feel like both my identities as a researcher and an educator are honored and valued. I hope that our participants feel similarly.”