Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education, 2022-2024

Adams, Gill and Burnett, Cathy and Gillen, Julia and Thompson, Terrie Lynn (2024). Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education, 2022-2024. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857296

Primary school literacy is a foundation of education and yet use of research-based evidence to inform teachers' professional decision-making in this area, while increasing, is piecemeal and varied in quality. This study explores how movements of research are significant to this pressing problem. While much has been written about how ideas move in a networked society, manifesting in concerns about fake news and the rapid, widespread circulation of ill-informed or prejudicial perspectives and practices, little is known about what happens to educational research evidence as it moves through complex and intersecting networks, movements that are complicated further by a shifting landscape for professional learning and changes in communication media facilitated by digital technologies. This study explores what happens as research evidence moves from research producers to research users, identifying the individual, organisational and technological brokers (such as literacy charities, social media influencers, algorithms and hashtags) that facilitate its movements or halt its progress, and any shifts in key messages as it moves.

We focus on literacy education in the primary phase (age 5-11) because literacy is a foundation of education and because international studies have highlighted the need for teachers to draw on a wide variety of research evidence generated through different research paradigms if literacy education is to be inclusive to all learners and fit for the 21st century. Teachers however must navigate a complex research environment, drawing on multiple sources accessed through diverse channels, often mediated by digital platforms. Against this background, research evidence can be distorted and some kinds of evidence gain greater traction than others - not necessarily in line with research merit but propelled by a proliferation of producers, strategies and channels of communication, diverse methods of uptake, and mixed messages in media discourse. There is therefore a pressing need for a better understanding of how literacy research evidence moves to teachers (or not) and what happens to it as it does so.

This study addresses this need by exploring the movements of research in primary literacy education (RPLE). It explores how multiple actors combine to mediate, broker, propel or stall research evidence, and investigates the meanings that evidence accrues or drops, the credibility it acquires (or not), and how it gains or loses momentum as this happens. The complexity of researching movements of research has led us to draw from across the social sciences in order to design effective, multi-layered methods, and we are developing our own multidisciplinary instruments to examine the interfaces of networks of individuals, organisations, communication channels and texts.

The project produced new important knowledge about the impact of movement on what is 'received' as research by teachers, and reinvigorates debate about the relationship between research and practice amongst stakeholders including educators, school leaders, policy-makers, literacy charities, teacher educators and other educational organisations. It developed new fora for enabling teachers to engage with researchers, and produced professional learning materials for use by teachers, schools and student-teachers that support a critical engagement with research that considers not just research evidence itself, but the broader networks that construct it in certain ways. These findings will also be valuable to researchers when planning dissemination activities and to the bodies, such as UKRI, that fund them. While the focus is RPLE, the study generated theoretical and methodological resources for understanding the movements of research across education and other social sciences, paving the way for a new programme of research into what we call 'research mobilities'.

Data description (abstract)

The Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education project (2022-2024) investigated the kinds of literacy research that teachers encounter and how literacy research moves to, among and around teachers.

The project aimed to:
A. Explore ways in which research in primary literacy education (RPLE) moves, mapping against the dynamic background of contemporary public discourses of primary literacy education, taking account of both planned dissemination activities and the other unanticipated movements.
B. Trace how human and digital actors combine to mobilise and mediate findings and interpretations.
C. Support teachers and those involved in teachers’ professional development to engage with a wide range of RPLE in informed and critical ways, including through the development of new materials and events.
D. Develop theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding research mobilities that are applicable elsewhere in education and the social sciences more broadly.
E. Demonstrate effective and innovate ways of sharing research using our immediate findings and data to model and explore different approaches as the project unfolds.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. Which topics, approaches, methodologies and social actors are of particular significance in the RPLE landscape in England today, and which are relatively marginalised and how?
2. Which circulation patterns can be discerned in the trajectories of RPLE evidence and interpretation and how are sociotechnical assemblages involved in these?
3. How can informed, critical engagement with RPLE by teachers be more fruitfully developed?
4. How can a creative, yet in broad terms replicable, methodology be developed for use by researchers to trace research mobilities across the social sciences?

OBJECTIVES

1.Identify and critically analyse the key discourses and social actors that influence movements of Research in Primary Literacy Education (RPLE) in England.
2.Track how examples of RPLE move to teachers through dissemination and mediation, investigating the contribution of planned communication activities, identifying shifts in meaning in RPLE and exploring any unplanned and/or unanticipated mobilisations.
3.Analyse the roles of individuals, organisations, texts and technologies in brokering research evidence linked to literacy in primary education.
4.Identify and critically analyse the role of personal, school/Trust and wider policy contexts in shaping teachers' access to, engagement with and experiences of RPLE.
5.Develop innovative models for engagement with RPLE, in partnership with teachers and educationalists.
6.Generate recommendations on mediation and engagement with RPLE for: a. teachers; b. educational leaders seeking to enhance staff engagement with RPLE (e.g. head teachers, multi-academy trust executives); c. research producers and disseminators, e.g. researchers, funders, dissemination platforms; d. research brokers, e.g. teacher educators, consultants, literacy charities, research schools, professional organisations; e. policy makers.
7.Create a replicable methodology for tracing how research discourses permeate into public and professional discourses in the social sciences.

Researchers used multiple methods including: interviews, focus groups and lifelogging with teachers, analyses of newspaper and social media and other approaches. These included: detailed interviews, lifelogging and focus groups involving 44 teachers working in a variety of settings; analysis of corpora including 426 newspaper articles and over 31600 twitter interactions; tracings of 9 examples of research/research related materials utilising a range of digital and qualitative methods.

Findings will be of interest to all those with an interest in strengthening relationships between research and education in including researchers within and outside universities, organisations that engage in research and research funding bodies.
The project focused on teachers’ encounters with literacy research in the primary phase but the recommendations are also relevant to other phases, curricular subjects and aspects of teaching.
The project found that:
1. Research is encountered in many ways in a variety of physical and digital spaces, driven by national, school and/or trust priorities as well as by teachers’ own interests and concerns.
2. Research findings are frequently presented in ways that make critical evaluation difficult and credibility hard to judge.
3. Teachers experience the relationship between research and practice in different ways and have different priorities, interests and concerns when they engage with research.
4. Successful mobilisation of research does not always reflect research quality and valuable research findings do not always reach the public eye.
5. The research that teachers encounter tends to relate a narrow range of topics, missing many relevant opportunities to offer additional insights.

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