on becoming edGe-ucated

When I was guiding teachers on doing their own research within their classrooms, I seldom referred them to my research because I wanted them to focus on, share, and discuss each other’s work, not mine. But with one group, I did. This group of 16 teachers were sharing the difficulties and hard work that reviewing the literature on their specific research topic was requiring, and they were wondering if it was worth all the trouble. I told them that the time they were putting in and the troubles they were encountering meant that they were engaged in serious inquiry. They were not only collecting data on their own; they were analyzing examples of similar work and lessons learned from other researchers in order to become better informed about what their data and experience might be telling them.
I then brought up my own current problem doing the same part of my research that they were. I described how I was looking for past experiences of, and educational connections to, bringing untrained individuals to work at the edges of expert inquiry. One of my main problems, I told them, was my inability to come up with a word for what I was looking for and what it was that I was trying to analyze.
“How about edge-ucating?” a teacher immediately blurted. Her suggestion stuck.