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Introducing Our Practitioners and Their Research

This special issue of the Journal of Jewish Education marks a double milestone: one for the Journal itself, and one for the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute (MTEI), whose graduates are this issue’s authors. For the JJE, this is the first volume entirely devoted to practitioner research. For MTEI, this is the first publication of research done by graduates. I will share a bit about each of these enterprises before I introduce the articles which make up this special issue. The history of practitioner/action research in JJE has been complicated. As an associate editor for a decade, I saw that while practitioners submitted, the journal’s guidelines to authors and the articles that were submitted were not a good fit. As a result, except for a few notable exceptions, practitioner/action research has been absent from our journal. Practitioner research has had a voice in the field of education research since the 1980s, with a more prominent voice in the last two decades. Journals such as Education Action Research and the “Voices: Inside Schools” series in the Harvard Education Review appeared during the 1990s and reflected a new place for “insider” studies in education. The American Educational Research Association created an Action Research Special Interest Group (SIG) as well as Teacher As Researcher and Self-Study SIGs. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009), educational leaders in theorizing and promoting practitioner research, describe this process. When practitioners investigate their practice and their students’ learning, the boundaries between research and practice and between the roles of researcher and practitioner blur. Inquiry and practice become interdependent and mutually informing. At its best, practitioner research not only generates local knowledge to improve local practice; it also generates formal knowledge that can contribute to broader understandings beyond the local context where the research was conducted. Often this takes the form of new concepts, distinctions, or interpretive frameworks, which offer new ways of thinking. In addition, Cochran-Smith, Lytle and others also highlight the benefits of practitioner research as a form of professional development. When practitioners investigate problems of practice in the company of colleagues, they