Teachers and researchers negotiating data-sharing sessions

This article describes two pilot studies of teacher feedback elicited during two data-sharing sessions in two different colleges in the Northeastern United States. The main goal of the pilots was to understand the extent to which a discourse study’s findings obtained from different educational settings are relevant to the daily practices of active language teachers. The researchers created feedback-collection tools in the form of questionnaires and simplified datasets, and staged small informal data-sharing/feedback-gathering sessions that carefully followed a construct called Framework for Application. The practitioners were college language and writing teachers and tutors with TESOL or similar educational backgrounds, representing different degrees of expertise and experience. The preliminary findings reveal deep complexities of research sharing, confirming the reiterative nature of reflexive processes and the need for continuous revision of the feedback tools, for a more comprehensive understanding of teachers’ educational backgrounds, and for a far more extensive investment in time and resources than initially anticipated. The study concludes that a fuller understanding of the nature of practitioners’ language-teaching expertise in the classroom would be more likely to bring higher levels of mutual trust and stronger reflexive practices.