Creating spaces for pedagogy : research as learning

As teacher-educators, the authors designed and implemented a small study that mapped teacher-education students' understandings of their own identities and how they made sense of ethnicity and class differences among their secondary students while on teaching rounds. While the authors did not set out to 'teach' their research participants, it was during the analysis of data from the research project, that they began to realise the potential of research to create opportunities for learning. In this paper the authors speculate on the 'conditions' of knowledge production and suggest that the dialogic nature of interviews and focus group discussions can offer pedagogical spaces for learning. Research designs that incorporate opportunities for participants to re-tell narratives over periods of time, may position participants as experts in knowledge production and may reposition them and researchers in more equitable power relations. The authors present an example of one participant's narrative together with their interpretations to explore how research potentially offers 'evidence' of learning. While this is tentative only, the authors suggest there is a need to create spaces for pedagogy in the design and execution of educational research.