A research project funded by the Spencer Foundation; directed by Virginia Richardson and Gary Fenstermacher, with assistance from the following doctoral candidates and colleagues: Catherine Fallona, Todd Chow Hoy, Alexandra Miletta, Richard Osguthorpe, Charlotte Ratzlaff, Matthew Sanger, Jilo Williams, and Nicola Williams. The duration of the Project was from 1997 to December, 2000.

The purpose of the Manner in Teaching Project is to gain a better understanding of what is morally salient in the work of classroom teachers, to locate the moral grounding of what takes place in classrooms and schools, and to advance our understanding of how teachers foster the moral development of their students.

"Manner" is the term we give to the relatively stable dispositions of a teacher, expressive of his or her character as person and professional. We study the manner of the teacher in relation to two other features of teacher conduct, method and style. These categories of conduct are fully explained in "Method, Style and Manner," and in "Making Manner Visible." Additional information and data are found at AERA 2000.

The research foci of the Project are both philosophical and empirical. On the philosophical side, we are engaged in concept analysis, the study of moral conduct and moral development, normative ethics, and meta-ethics. On the empirical side, we use qualitative and interpretive methods to study the work of teachers in the classroom and school settings. Our efforts in this regard are collaborative, in that the participating teachers are regarded as partners in the endeavor. Eleven teachers from two school sites participate in the study: four are located in a mixed-ethnicity, lower to middle class elementary school in a mid-size city; seven are located in an African-centered public school of choice in a large urban setting. The teachers are compensated for their participation.

The Project is a data-intensive endeavor, using school and classroom artifacts; observations in classrooms, with audio and video taping; audio and video-taped interviews; site-level meetings, and project-level conferences; and teacher-generated data including diaries, taped conversations, presentations to other staff, and papers presented at state and national conferences. If you would like to know more about how we collected and stored our data, including our procedures for acquiring high quality audio and video in school classrooms, see our Guide to Data and the Gear (a PDF document).