Opinion with Jill Lloyd-Jones

Last year at a conference, I was surprised to see a strategy I had been using in the classroom for 20 years presented as ‘new’ in an academic context. To me, it felt like a concrete example of the gap between academia and pedagogy. It's been my experience that often academics are more interested in research which furthers their careers rather than improving classroom pedagogy, while teachers are interested in learning how research can impact on their teaching and learning in the classroom.

While teachers are avid educational book readers, they aren't encouraged to read academic journals. For those teachers keen to bridge the gap and share their work by publishing, access to knowledge is often closed by the gatekeepers, with institutional/university access required to read journals or pay to purchase. Even then, the language in academic journals is often full of hyperbole, unintelligible to the average teacher. This creates a climate in which the language is only understood by those in academia, rather than those practising it in classrooms. There continues to be an unequal and unfair playing field in academia between the value of teacher practitioner research vs academic research. As a result, open access to knowledge between academics and teachers is effectively blocked and gaps are widened.

In the past, I was keen to collaborate with academic researchers – that was until my work in the classroom was published under the researcher's name, with mine simply reduced to ‘the teacher’. It seemed logical to me that the researchers' role would be to respect teachers' work and form a collegial, cooperative relationship where everyone would benefit. Research could flow in both directions and reworked in a collaborative enquiry back and forth.

Perhaps it's my ongoing optimism that still believes this is possible, but there has to be the will to change, and it's up to the institutional construct of academia to build those bridges. Let's value the work of teachers. Let's develop teams in which academic researchers and teacher practitioners share knowledge and understanding.

Jill Lloyd-Jones is a drama specialist and a passionate workshop leader. Her major interest and focus is in employing meaningful drama strategies to explore issues of social justice through collaborative enquiry. Most recently she worked with pre-service education students at Birmingham Newman University.