Bridging theory and practice: Towards a professional scholarship of pedagogy

Pedagogical practice provides university and school personnel with an arena of common concern with the potential for building collaborative communities of inquiry. This paper articulates the efforts of two school teachers and a curriculum professor in a graduate seminar focused on the analysis and improvement of instruction to develop a scholarship of pedagogy. Their experience points to a variety of factors that are important in this kind of inquiry: (a) the importance of detailed records of instruction; (b) the potential of formal theoretical perspectives for surfacing and articulating practice; and (c) the centrality of a critical community of inquiry embracing both researchers' formal theory and practitioners' practical theory. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.