MULTIFILE
Nomination Best Research & Practice Project Award at the EAPRIL conference, Jyväskylä, Finland. Hybrid forms of learning environments in vocational education are central to the two projects of this application: a design-oriented, applied research project from the Centre for Expertise in Vocational Education (ecbo-project) and an educational innovation/practitioner-research project (hpboproject). A PhD-research project is closely related.
Teacher educators' role in in being an active researcher is more and more acknowledged: teacher educators need to be able to do practioner research themselves and they are expected to support student teachers in doing research as well. This is a rather new role for most teacher educators and therefore there is a need to develop research competencies (Lunenberg et al, 2014). There are several opportunities to develop research competencies (Willemse & Boei, 2013) and one of them is to participate in a research group. As Boei et al (2014) suggest, it is beneficial to start with small research projects with a focus in one's own practice and to collaborate with others. In our institute, several research groups exist. In these groups, 5 to 8 teacher educators participate. They all receive 4 to 6 hours per week to work on their own inquiry and they discuss their work in monthly group meetings. The group is supervised and guided by a senior researcher (professor). The central question in our study is: 'what do participants learn from participating in a research group?
