Brave Research as a means to transform teacher education

This chapter seeks to introduce and develop the concept of Brave Research (Swennen 2018), a new idea for teacher educator research. Brave Research is an idea we are beginning to conceptualize as teacher educator research that contributes towards the much needed transformation of teacher education, teacher educators, and the communities we serve. We suggest this transformation will happen when we, as teacher educators, seek to make changes, however small, to our practices and the places where we practice so that we contribute to making this world a more harmonious and better place to learn for our students, to teach for our teachers, and to live for those we live alongside. To this end, this chapter shares our and others’ ideas about what Brave Research is, could be and why it is important for us to reimagine why, how, and with whom we conduct it by suggesting how diverse and inclusive forms of research might positively change the world of teacher education, education, and the communities it serves. Then we a critical lens on our own practice as researchers to judge its bravery and what shaped this. From there, we suggest 9 possible features of Brave Research’s conceptual framework, the implications of this for teacher educators, the conditions that might enable or constrain it. We conclude the chapter with two invitations. The first urges teacher educators to be 10% braver and then for the reader to join us in our search for forms of Brave Research that might transform our work as teacher educators and contribute to the professional and academic knowledge of teacher education so our research is seen as being of value to government and policy makers and those who fund educational research.