WORKSHOP ON INTEGRATING ‘RESEARCH’ AND ‘PEDAGOGY’: APPROPRIATE CRITERIA AND PRACTICAL POSSIBILITIES

Dick Allwright

Abstract
This paper reports a workshop whose discussions informed the text overall. These discussions are also reported, from memory, in separate sections. The paper begins, like the workshop, with possible forms for the relationship between research, teaching, and development. Next come ten criteria relevant to any proposal for teacher-research, and a report of that workshop discussion. My own proposal for integration – ‘exploratory’ teaching and learning – follows, again with the workshop discussion on applying the criteria to that proposal. The paper concludes that ‘exploratory’ teaching and learning appears promising in respect of the stated criteria, and that hopefully the discussion will contribute to the continuing debates about the research-teaching-development relationship, and about the vital issue of ‘quality’.

1. Introduction
1.1 Background
It seems to have become almost commonplace for people to advocate that teachers should become researchers in their own classrooms. However, teachers who are attracted to the idea in principle face the risk of discovering the hard way that research can be an unacceptable burden to add to those they are already suffering from in their daily lives as classroom teachers. What is surely (and sorely?) needed is a way, not of adding research to teachers’ problems, but of fully integrating research into teachers’ normal pedagogic practices. Elsewhere (Allwright, 1991; Allwright and Bailey, 1991b) I have proposed ‘exploratory teaching’ as a potentially productive way of integrating research and pedagogy, and a very brief outline of that proposal may be helpful here. Broadly, it is that we should try exploiting already familiar and trusted classroom activities as ways of exploring the things that puzzle teachers and learners about what is happening in their own classrooms. For example, a teacher’s puzzle about his or her learners’ apparent dislike of group work might be initially explored simply by asking the learners to discuss it in class (rather than by conducting a questionnaire survey in the traditional academic way).
‘Exploratory teaching’ is being evolved specifically to deal with the problems teachers face in becoming researchers in their own classrooms. We already have a good idea of some of the major problems involved. We have also given considerable thought to the major aims that it is important to try to achieve. Together, the problems and the major aims constitute a set of criteria that it may be useful to apply to any proposal for teachers to become involved in research.
My aim in this workshop is to offer those criteria up for general discussion, and then to invite their application to my own proposal, for ‘exploratory’ language teaching and learning.
Before the discussion, however, it may be useful to fill in the background on the alternative possible relationships between research, teaching, and professional development.
1.2 The research/teaching/development relationship in principle
1.2.1 In terms of the potential types of relationship between research, teaching and professional development advocates of ‘the teacher as researcher’ could in principle be interpreted as adopting any one of at least three major positions.
1.2.1.1 Research as an (optional) extra
‘Teacher-researcher’ advocates could be seen as promoting research as something that teachers should in principle simply add to their lives as teachers. They could be arguing that teachers should join in the overall research enterprise by undertaking research projects, in addition to all their pedagogic work, as an extra burden whose rewards will lie in the contribution to knowledge that the research projects will bring, and therefore the potential improvement in practice that such a contribution to knowledge should in time make possible. Such a view would not necessarily have any place for professional development at all.
I am not aware of any advocates of ‘the teacher as researcher’ who would explicitly argue in this way (although I am aware, unfortunately, of academic researchers who appear to think that they can call their research work ‘collaborative’ simply because they have found teachers who are willing to undertake academe-inspired research projects on such terms), but I am concerned, as I suggested in my opening paragraph, that this may be an understandable, if not entirely fair, message for teachers to find in the work of people like myself, academics whose applied linguistics teaching involves helping teachers develop research skills, and who may be communicating a model of the research process that is seen as hopelessly out of touch with the everyday realities and practical constraints of a teacher’s normal working life.
1.2.1.2 Research as the driving force for development
An alternative view of the research/teaching/development relationship is to see the research element in a teacher’s life, not as a contribution to some overall research enterprise, but as the driving force for that teacher’s personal professional development. Following this view the research element can be seen as central to the pedagogy itself. It is there in order to enable the teacher to better understand what is happening in the classroom (and elsewhere in the overall pedagogic enterprise). In making possible this enhanced personal pedagogic understanding it becomes central to professional development.
This is probably the view that the majority of advocates of ‘the teacher as researcher’ would wish to convey, but there is a third position to consider.
1.2.1.3 Research as the driving force for development and development as the driving force for research progress
This third position, and my own preference, is to go one step further and suggest that if teacher research is made central to the pedagogy, and is in fact successful in enhancing teachers’ understanding of classroom language pedagogy, then not only will the professional development aim be well served, but so will potentially an additional aim of general ‘research progress’. By ‘research progress’ I mean a sense that the profession as a whole is developing its general understanding of classroom language learning and teaching.
My position here is based on the view that significant development in our general understanding of the relevant phenomena is likely to be dependent upon our ability to build upon the individual understandings of the various participants in the enterprise (principally the teachers and the learners). Prabhu, in a recent and very stimulating contribution to the debate (Prabhu, 1992) seems pessimistic about our ability ever to go beyond the notion of individual teachers developing their own personal theories of language pedagogy, but I see no reason in principle why individual understandings should be incapable of being brought together towards some sort of overall synthesis. Teachers’ theories may perhaps be developable on a highly individual and personal basis, but it does seem at least arguable that the process might be assisted if teachers have colleagues to discuss their developing understandings with, and colleagues working together might surely be capable of developing a theoretical position of some generality, one not limited in relevance to just one teacher’s experience. If that logic is accepted, then it seems also conceivable that someone in my position as an academic researcher, with potential access to the theory-building work of many different groups of teachers in many different countries (see, for example, the work of the English Language Teaching Community, Bangalore, in Naidu et al 1991, Naidu et al, 1992, Rao and Prakash, 1991, and also discussed in Allwright, 1991a) might be able to make connections that result in even more general theory-building.
1.2.2 The logic of my position with regard to the three possible research/ teaching/development relationships outlined above is that the first position, putting research as a priority in itself, is clearly an obstacle to the other two, but that the second position is in an important sense a pre-requisite for the third. That is to say, if research is seen primarily as an extra burden then it just will not get done. If, however, it is seen primarily as a way of serving the pedagogy by helping teachers understand their work (and that of their learners) more adequately, then not only will the pedagogy be enhanced but the needs of professional development will also be well served. And, further, if professional development is secured through research then general research progress itself will become possible, through a process of building upon individual and group understandings.
1.3 The implications so far
I think it follows from the above that any proposal for teacher-research (especially any such proposal coming from an ‘academic’ like myself), must be extremely mindful of what it might communicate to the teachers it is addressed to. It must at the very least seek to present research, convincingly, as something that a teacher can reasonably expect to be able to integrate with pedagogy, at the service of the pedagogy, and therefore at the service of the teacher’s professional development. It must also try at least to present convincingly the prospect that success on these two fronts will bring with it the potential for the development of a more general understanding of classroom language learning and teaching.
I have been trying for some time to develop such a proposal convincingly, and to make it work, under the heading of ‘exploratory teaching’ (for the first treatment in print see Allwright and Bailey, 1991b). Most of the development work has been done in Brazil, by people at the Cultura Inglesa in Rio de Janeiro (notably Rosa Lenzuen), and by people in the PIMEI project (a teacher association-based project for secondary school language teacher development, co-ordinated nationally by Vilma Sampaio in Natal). I will present later the broad outlines of the proposal, and illustrate the work done so far (see also Allwright 1991b & c and 1992a for fuller accounts), but for now I wish to concentrate on the criteria that this work has suggested to be the most important ones for us to try to meet along the way.

2. Appropriate criteria for any proposal to integrate research and pedagogy
2.1 The criteria
The criteria that have emerged from development work so far take two forms: seven things we have realised we are trying to achieve, and three sets of problems that we are consciously trying to bear in mind and to minimise. No particular originality is claimed for these two lists, rather I am presenting them here in order to find out if others also find them relevant and important.
2.1.1 The seven major aims
2.1.1.1 RELEVANCE
The least to hope for from our work is that teachers bringing research into their own teaching will ensure that what they explore is relevant to themselves, regardless of what concerns academic researchers, and of course that it is also relevant to their learners, who may well have interesting puzzles of their own to explore.
2.1.1.2 REFLECTION
We can also, again at the very least, work towards ensuring that integrating research and pedagogy promotes reflection, by both teachers and learners, given how powerful reflection seems to be as a motive force for development.
2.1.1.3 CONTINUITY
In addition it seems very important to try to ensure that integrating research and pedagogy is a continuous enterprise, not something that a teacher will try once and then drop for ever. Countless teachers on pre-service and in-service courses must have conducted mini research projects that have taken over their lives and convinced them that if that is what research means, then it is not for them. We must somehow encourage continuity.
2.1.1.4 COLLEGIALITY
Teaching is often seen as an isolating sort of job, and we could therefore surely aim to use the integration of research and pedagogy to bring teachers together more, to bring teachers closer to learners. Even more pertinently in the present context, we could (I am sure ‘should’) try to use the integration of research and pedagogy to try to heal the highly damaging rift that has frequently been noted between teachers and academic researchers.
2.1.1.5 LEARNER DEVELOPMENT
At the same time, it seems very important not to miss any opportunity to help learners develop as learners. Ensuring that the questions asked are seen as relevant by learners as well as teachers, and that learners, like teachers, are prompted to reflect on their experiences, should help learner development. We could of course take it much further, towards ‘exploratory’ learning as well as ‘exploratory’ teaching, as is already being done in, for example, autonomy projects in Europe (see Holec, 1988 for a valuable compendium of project reports).
2.1.1.6 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
I see little point in a teacher integrating research into his or her teaching unless it contributes to that teacher’s own development, and to the more general professional development of the field (leaving aside for the moment any problems we might have about ‘professionalisation’ as a potential threat to some of our broader values). As noted earlier, teacher development, whether seen as personal or collective, across the professional community, is not necessarily the only ultimate aim, however. There remains the further aim of theory-building.
2.1.1.7 THEORY-BUILDING
All of which should enable us to develop our general understanding of classroom language teaching and learning, by building upon the articulated understandings of the people most closely involved: the teachers and the learners, working together to develop their own understandings of their own experiences.
2.1.2 The major problems to be expected
This list is short, but the problems involved are extremely important.
2.1.2.1 THE TIME COMMITMENT
Doing research in the language classroom is time-consuming, at all points. It will increase preparation time, for example, if lessons must be altered to accommodate a research activity, and it will probably also take up classroom learning time (both a practical and an ethical issue). Afterwards it will then be necessary to spend time sorting out what has been learned. We must be highly sensitive to this time issue, or teachers will simply find the burden unacceptable, and stop the research.
2.1.2.2 THE SKILLS-LEARNING BURDEN
Becoming a classroom researcher also seems inevitably to involve the learning of new skills – specifically the skills required to conduct research satisfactorily, skills lying outside the normal repertoire of classroom teachers. Acquiring them will take time, and intellectual effort, effort which will no longer be available to be put into more directly pedagogic concerns. Some of the skills involved may be useful ones in any case (see the discussion of Steps 2 and 7 in Section 3 below) but many (for example perhaps the complex of skills required for the construction of successful questionnaires) may not be at all easily related to the other skill requirements for a classroom language teacher. Again this burden, particularly in regard to skills that are not likely to be more generally useful, needs to be minimised or it may prove fatal. ‘Exploratory’ teaching aims to achieve this minimisation by proposing, as already noted, that the investigative activities should be based on pedagogic activities that the teacher (and the learners) already know and trust.
2.1.2.3 THREATS TO SELF-ESTEEM
Conducting research in and into your classroom means running the risk of discovering things that you would perhaps rather not have to face. It therefore poses a potential threat to your self-esteem. It may be much less of a threat than if an academic researcher comes into your classroom and produces a damaging report about you, but it is still a threat, and one that we need to work to minimise.
A further possibility in some work situations is that getting involved in research might actually endanger continued employment. One possible way this might happen would be if a teacher began research by identifying a ‘problem’ in his or her classroom, and was then him or herself identified as ‘having problems’ as compared to other teachers in the same institution who are careful to not get involved in research activity and therefore to not put themselves in a position to reveal whatever ‘problems’ they may actually be experiencing. ‘Exploratory’ teaching’s suggestion is to start with ‘puzzles’, rather than ‘problems’, wherever this might help.
2.2 Workshop discussion of the criteria
The above text is to a large extent the product of immediate reflection on the events of the workshop itself. What follows is an attempt to capture at least some of the points that have not been incorporated already in some way.
2.2.1 Comments on relevance, redundancy, and omissions
The criteria (the seven aims and three sets of problems) were generally seen all to be relevant and important, with no major omissions or particular redundancies to be noted. It was, however, pointed out that the first three aims seemed to be of a different order entirely from the last four, and that the last four could perhaps be summarised (even collapsed) under the heading of ‘learning development’.
It was also suggested that discussion was difficult, perhaps meaningless, without prior agreement on definitions of the central terms ‘research’ and ‘pedagogy’, but this was countered with the suggestion that a better understanding of what we might mean by the two terms could perhaps be expected to come from the work to integrate them, rather than be seen as a necessary input to that integration work.
2.2.2 ‘Horror’ stories and ‘success’ stories
Participants had some ‘horror stories’ to tell about how in their experience the criteria had on occasions not been met. Typically these centred on situations in which classroom teachers found themselves at risk of official disapproval if they conducted research in their classrooms (for example, if they wanted to elicit learner opinion in a context where it would be considered a professional weakness to appear to need help of any sort from learners). Other participants, however, insisted that opportunities for teachers to conduct research in their own classrooms could be found in all circumstances.
‘Success stories’ were surprisingly, and gratifyingly, numerous, suggesting that at least some of the criteria (for example ‘relevance’, ‘reflection’, and ‘teacher development’) may represent entirely realistic aims in many situations, although ‘learner development’ seems less commonly achieved, and ‘continuity’ and ‘collegiality’ represent more distant aims. ‘Theory-building’ no doubt remains the remotest of them all, if only because we still need to do so much work to understand what we mean by it.
2.2.3 Comments on the three problem areas
Meanwhile, ‘time’ is clearly the great enemy for all, while the ‘skills-learning burden’ seems perhaps not as problematic as I have myself so far thought. In my own work with Brazilian teachers of English (see also the discussion of exploratory teaching’s Steps 2 and 7 in Section 3 below), it appears that the principle skills-learning needs for teachers working within the ‘exploratory teaching’ framework lie in the areas of question formation and information interpretation, two key conceptual areas, it seems to me, both for any research enterprise and for any pedagogic enterprise. The issue of research representing a threat to self-esteem (and perhaps to a teacher’s employability if classroom problems are not kept confidential) was discussed but not pursued in depth.

3. ‘Exploratory’ teaching and learning as one way of trying to integrate research and pedagogy
It is time to describe ‘exploratory’ language teaching and learning in more detail, before considering how it matches up to the criteria we have established for it.
3.1 The basic concept of ‘exploratory’ teaching and learning
The central concern of what I am calling ‘exploratory’ language teaching and learning, as noted in the opening paragraphs of this paper, is a wish to offer a practical way of bringing the research perspective properly into the classroom, without adding significantly and unacceptably to teachers’ workloads, so as to contribute both to professional development and to theory-building within and across the profession.
3.2 The basic process
The basic process advocated for ‘exploratory’ work, again as noted above, is one of using already familiar pedagogic activities to investigate teacher and learner ‘puzzles’.
3.3 The procedures
Work over the last two years or so in Brazil has suggested the following list of general procedures for teachers engaged in ‘exploratory’ work in their classrooms. (For a fuller discussion of these procedures, though inevitably at an earlier stage in the development of the ideas involved, the reader is referred to Allwright, 1991c.)
Step 1 Identify a puzzle area
This is the starting point, with the term ‘puzzle’ deliberately chosen in preference to the more usual ‘problem’ to avoid the potential threat to self-esteem that admitting to having ‘problems’ might represent, and to capture the important possibility that productive investigations might well start from poorly-understood successes just as much as from poorly-understood failures.
Step 2 Refine your thinking about that puzzle area
This is increasingly establishing itself as a key stage, and one for which people do not feel prepared by their previous experiences and by their prior training. For me it revolves around developing the ability to mentally ‘explore’ an issue, and not to accept a first interpretation of it. For example, a group of teachers in Brazil identified as ‘puzzling’ their perception that their learners insisted on knowing the meaning of every word in a text before they would feel that they understood it. In their first interpretation this ‘puzzle’ was clearly also a practical ‘problem’ (something they wished to change) and equally clearly a problem that they saw as located in the heads of their learners. It did not take much more thinking, however, to refine that position towards one where there were several possible locations for the problem – including the texts themselves, and the tasks that were typically associated with those texts.
Step 3 Select a particular topic to focus upon
This is also a key step, and one that workshop discussion at Aston suggested might be a terminal one for some teachers, who might feel paralysed by the complexities revealed at the puzzle refinement stage. My own experience has not yet produced evidence for such pessimism, but it is clear that choices of focus may sometimes have to be dictated by immediate practicalities, rather than by the centrality of the chosen subtopic to the overall issue at the origin of the work.
Step 4 Find appropriate classroom procedures to explore it
In my experience, teachers have not found it difficult to list a good number of classroom procedures, pedagogic activities they already know and trust, that they can imagine exploiting for investigative as well as for narrowly pedagogic purposes. The following is a selected list from the thirty or so ideas that different teachers’ groups have offered. It is presented here by way of illustration, in the hope that it will not need further clarification:
1. Group work discussions.
2. Pair work discussions.
3. Surveys.
4. Interviews.
5. Simulations.
6. Role-plays.
7. Role-exchanging.
8. Diaries.
9. Dialogue journal writing.
10. Projects.
11. Poster sessions.
12. Learner to learner correspondence.
Step 5 Adapt them to the particular puzzle you want to explore
This seems to be a relatively unproblematic stage, consisting simply of putting learning ‘on the classroom agenda’ by, for example, substituting discussion of the chosen puzzle for more traditional (but not necessarily more engaging) topics such as ‘pollution’, or ‘holidays’. In retrospect it seems entirely bizarre, as well as unfortunate, that the language teaching profession should have taken so long to think of putting learning itself ‘on the agenda’, given the amount of agonising that language teachers, and textbook writers, must have gone through over the years in their efforts to find topics that might conceivably interest learners, and especially given their probable advantage over teachers and textbook writers for other subjects, who cannot so easily move away from the confines of their ostensible subject matter. The advocates of ‘learner training’ have of course been putting learning on the classroom agenda for some years now (see Ellis and Sinclair, 1989 for a thoroughgoing example of an entire coursebook devoted to the topic).
Step 6 Use them in class
Again this seems to be a relatively unproblematic stage, although I am not convinced that we have done nearly enough work on helping teachers develop the monitoring skills they will probably need if they are to use activities both for their pedagogic potential and simultaneously for what are essentially data collection purposes.
Step 7 Interpret the outcomes
This stage is seen as at least as problematic as that of refining puzzles in the first place. My only comfort is that effort expended in these two areas, as I have already begun to indicate above in Section 2.1.2, can be of real practical value to the teachers (and hopefully also to the learners) involved, since it is central to learning from any experience. At the moment this remains speculation, however, so future development work needs to focus on this stage, alongside Step 2 of course.
Step 8 Decide on their implications and plan accordingly
There seem to be four very different, though clearly related, possibilities for work following an initial exploratory investigation. The most obvious is that the original puzzle will have been refined in the process of investigation, and that it will now seem necessary to move on to some slightly different conception of it – a new puzzle emerging from the old one. The second possibility, but not a high probability, is that enough will have been learned to justify moving in some other direction with an entirely new puzzle. A third possibility is that enough will have been learned to justify trying out pedagogic changes in the classroom (if these are indicated). This will of course bring the enterprise much closer to the ‘action research’ model, with its focus on trying change as a way of investigating classroom language learning and teaching. The fourth possibility, compatible with any or all of the others, is that enough will have been learned, in some sense at least, for the teacher or teachers involved to want to share their work with others, most probably not as a set of findings, but more as a ‘recruiting’ measure, aimed at bringing more people into the investigation, for the very probable benefit of having more brains involved, and of therefore being perhaps able to come to more convincing interpretations, and perhaps even more convincing contributions to general theory-building. The teachers at the Cultura Inglesa in Rio de Janeiro have approached this set of possibilities by converting their annual conference into a collective poster session, and by using their in-house newsletter (Views and News) to keep each other in touch with what they are all doing. There is an instructive parallel in the extremely interesting work of the English Language Teaching Community, Bangalore, also reported by poster, as well as by publications (see Naidu et al, 1991, Naidu et al 1992, and Rao and Prakash, 1991).

4. Applying the criteria to ‘exploratory’ language teaching and learning
The workshop group was asked to address two questions, from their necessarily very limited exposure to the ideas and development work of ‘exploratory’ teaching and learning: ‘Where are the major strengths?’ and ‘Where are the major weaknesses?’.
4.1 The criteria applied to ‘exploratory’ language teaching and learning
4.1.1 General comments
For at least one participant the suggested procedures for ‘exploratory’ language teaching and learning coincided almost exactly with those she had been using in her own work, but under the heading of ‘action research’. Space precludes an adequate discussion here of the potentially important differences between the two concepts, differences which reside most obviously (but by no means exclusively or most importantly) in different views on how to achieve the major aims, but I would suggest that if the criteria set out and discussed above are met, then labels are in any case unimportant.
4.1.2 Potential ‘strengths’ and ‘weaknesses’
The major strength of ‘exploratory’ language teaching and learning as presented, was seen (as I hoped, of course) to be its potential for offering teachers a minimum-cost way of integrating research and teaching. A potential major weakness was noted in that the suggestions for learner involvement seemed typically to rely strongly on learners having a well-established command of the target language. It was extremely difficult therefore to see how the suggestions for investigative classroom procedures could be employed with beginners, or even near-beginners. The counter-suggestion was made, however, that even beginners’ opinions could be elicited successfully by means of checklists of isolated words (in the target language), with an agreement/disagreement scale.

5. Final comments
The workshop on which this paper is based was addressed to the discussion and further elaboration of a set of criteria for any proposal for teacher research, and to the application of that set of criteria to my own specific proposal for ‘exploratory’ language teaching and learning. The workshop took place in the context of a meeting devoted to the relationship between teacher research and teacher development. I hope this report will make a useful contribution to the continuing debate about that relationship. I hope that it also has something to say, given its focus on appropriate criteria, about another theme of the meeting, as emphasised in Bridget Somekh’s plenary – the elusive but central issue of ‘quality’.