Research


Brad Olsen on his research: My research looks at teachers, teaching, teacher education, and school reform. As someone who studies teaching, I want to better understand how teachers combine prior and present experiences, knowledges, context, and their professional preparation as they continually construct new understandings, practices, and career shapes.

This ecological view informs my research methods. I conduct qualitative research at the convergence of ethnographic, interactionist, and sociolinguistic methods. I mostly study teachers, teaching, and teacher education inside multiple (sometimes competing) contexts of practice and frames of inquiry. Because I view teacher knowledge as a situated, holistic process—rather than a mental, singular thing—I frequently employ teacher identity as analytical frame. Not only do educators learn within disparate sites, they learn (which is to say that they develop and enrich new professional identities) as they move across sites and within newly constructed sites. The sites for my investigations are university teacher education; new teacher networks and institutes; K-12 schools; and current policy arenas.

Recently, I have been studying and reporting on the role of teachers and teacher educators in the contemporary education reform debate. I want to better understand intersections among professional research, policy perspectives on teachers, the current reform climate, and politics. I have also been studying the professional development of university teacher educators. And I am beginning to use Complexity Theory to investigate the knotty landscape of teaching, teachers and school reform as its own complicated eco-system.



Updated 10/12/2015