Children have many different educational, social and emotional needs, and early years practitioners face a number of challenges in developing their practice to support individual needs within complex local community settings. As a potential researcher, you may have reflected on how an investigation could be designed to examine how practitioners design their curriculum to support individual children’s needs, particularly bilingual support. Yet language education is only one feature of a child’s educational experience; practitioners deal with an array of issues simultaneously, and it is often difficult to separate one distinct feature of educational experience from another. You may also have considered how practice is situated within a local, cultural context and how important this is in influencing practice experiences. Researchers interested in practice often choose to focus on one particular area and examine it in some detail. In contrast, practitioners balance complex learning needs within diverse social contexts on a daily basis. Practitioners face daily challenges and have to respond in a timely way as situations occur. Research, in contrast, is often a lengthy process and cannot always anticipate the range of issues that practitioners face.
exactly! practitioners are at the front line and must react and respond. Research is proposed as 'timely' yet process is so slow may have moved on!!? Does instinct and experience not count for anything these days?
I think every setting should be expert on the demographic that attends. Research conducted in another setting will unlikely be relevant across the board so if put into a policy it stipulates it must be adhered to but is fitting square pegs in round holes.
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What is wrong with experienced teachers using their experiences to feed into their practice? Does everyone need everything laid out to them?
an overriding emphasis on research feeding into practice – based on the assumption that research can solve practice-based problems – can set research an impossible task.(Hammersley, 2005 cited in MM) . . . research cannot generate all of the information that practitioners might need: the range of information involved in practice is very wide.