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Numerous studies have shown how pre-service teachers struggle with a research-practice or theory-practice gap: they find it difficult to implement insights from educational theory within their real-world classroom practices. As a result, student teachers rapidly return to deeply and often traditional rooted beliefs and attitudes. Teacher education institutes, therefore, are challenged to prepare student teachers for seeing the value of educational theory and research for teachers’ classroom practices. In this chapter, we focus on bridging the theory-to-practice gap within initial teacher training, by educating student teachers about research through research. More specifically, we evaluated the implementation of a research-training module in the final year of teacher training. This module was characterised as a collaborative research partnership (between student teachers, in-service teachers, teacher educators, and researchers) and focused on developing and evaluating teaching scenarios. Data collection combined focus groups (N = 23 primary school student teachers) with the analysis of student teachers’ teaching portfolios. The study findings illustrate how participation in a collaborative research project contributed to student teachers’ research conceptions and reflexivity skills. Moreover, collaborative research partnerships enabled to bridge the world of practitioners and researchers, leading them to work together on questions that both consider as being relevant. Our study contributes to the reflection on how to strengthen the quality of teaching and teacher training, by showing how collaborative research can be seen as a valuable professional learning activity. |
