Teacher Research and Gender Equity. Occasional Paper No. 143.

This paper examines the teacher research movement from feminist perspectives of achieving gender equity and social change in schools. The paper presents the personal experiences of two middle-class, Caucasian, women professors and teacher educators in their 40s, in a dialogue between the two. The paper discusses the complex role of women's values, relations, multiple identities, and political imperatives and their effects on educational research to improve students' educational opportunities. It examines how the issues of choice, opportunity, equal access, and equity can limit visions of what teacher research might address and enact within agendas for school reform and change, by defining them only in relation to already established male structures and practices. The paper argues that teacher research should question how roles as teachers, students, parents, or administrators are socially constructed in multiple ways, some of which involve gender. The paper concludes that such points of understanding as gender, class, race, or age are all in dynamic relationship to each other, to changing frameworks for work and life, and to the journey toward the "freedom of inclusion." (Contains 25 references.) (JDD)