The Teachers’ Research Exchange (T-REX): Connecting Teaching, Research and Practice in Initial Teacher Education

About this initiative

The Teachers’ Research Exchange is an online community of practice for educational research in Ireland. It provides a platform for increasing research literacy and engagement through collaboration between pre-service teachers, working teachers, and professionals in higher education. The project builds on a foundation laid by the Research Expertise Exchange (REX), a project funded by the National Forum in 2015. Through a programme of professional development and module re-design, this NF project seeks to build on existing assets and resources to facilitate the maturation of an online community of practice and the embedding of research practice into module design in Initial Teacher Education; connecting research, teaching and practice (Fung, 2017). There are three core elements to the Project.

• Embedding research in ITE through T-REX engagement. A series of workshops and ongoing support will be provided for the re-development of existing ITE modules to integrate T-REX into module activities and develop resources to enable other ITE module coordinators to adopt similar approaches.

• Building & connecting the community. The growth of the community will be scaffolded through a series of structured events to engage members, bring like-minded members together and to ignite research dialogues.

• Software development. On the basis of ongoing feedback from users, feature improvements to the core website software will be undertaken.

This project runs parallel to the T-REX initiative to support research amongst teachers and schools which is funded by the Research Alive! Group (Teaching Council, National Council for Curriculum and Assessment and the Centre for Effective Services).