Creating Collaborative Cultures for Educational Change

Abstract

Teacher-researcher communities constitute an imporant forum for change in the educational reform movement. yet little is known about the construction of these communities in special education contexts. in the early literacy project, we found that the discourse inthe teacher-researcher community provided a public space in which participants constructed new literacy meanings. a more careful examination of the discourse revealed that talk related to six issues: theoretical principles, teaching practice, problem solving about difficulties related to curricular enactments, the effects of the literacy curriculum on students, case studies of particular children, and references to prior events in the community. further, talk about principles and teaching practice formed a tightly woven braid ofmeaning that came to represent common assumptions about ways-of-doing and ways-of-thinking about literacy.