Teacher research as creative disruption

Abstract

For most of my teaching career, the term ‘disruption’ had negative connotations. When I was a student teacher, one of the foci of my PGCE course was classroom management, which is the process by which teachers minimise disruptive behaviour so that lessons go according to plan. Disruption in the classroom was one of the things that created a lot of stress for me as a novice teacher. This is an experience shared by many educators and has long been reported in the research literature, from Dunham’s (1977) study on the effects of disruptive behaviour on teachers, to a study investigating how teachers’ classroom management strategies are related to stress and student behaviour. Despite the fact that many teachers of English are likely to associate ‘disruption’ with something negative, the term has taken on positive connotations in a number of disciplines and industries.