This paper presents the main elements connected to the implementation of a project (“REP-Synergy: Towards improvement of Research capacities essential for teacher Education and Practices in Serbia and Estonia”, grant n. IZ74Z0_160511, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation within the SCOPES programme) aiming at supporting tertiary institutions to strengthen relationships and synergies between teacher education, research and teaching practices. Considering the paradigm emphasizing that educational research should be firstly in service of practice (Meijer, 2010), through the implementation of the research-based design of our project we aim to highlight the main aspects that should be considered in order to enhance young researchers’ and future teachers’ research skills, mainly related to qualitative, mixed methods and novel quantitative methods. In fact, pre- and in-service teachers, as well as young researchers need to be trained in order to build capacities for practice-led research and to use research results to improve their professional practices (Brookfield, 1995; Loughran, Mitchell & Mitchell, 2002; McNamara, 2002; Korthagen, 2004; Pollard et al., 2008).

The project concerns the challenge in integrating research and teacher education in practice (McNamara, 2002; Pollard et al., 2008; Brew, 2010) within Eastern European countries currently going through a process of comprehensive social transition in changing education systems, policies and practices of research education. More particularly, in this paper we intend to shed light on the implementation of a based-research design for teachers and young researchers in Serbia, where the education system is in the process of a comprehensive reform struggling with a transition from an education system mainly focused on the transmission of knowledge to an education system focused on the learning and development of professional key competencies (Pantić, 2009). The goal of the paper is to report experiences and findings from the first stage of the implementation of this design, consisted of the workshops with young researchers and pre-and in-service teachers in Serbia. The main objective is to analyse the participants’ beliefs, meanings and identities that might prevent and support the process of building a fruitful and professional collaboration among them. This can contribute to illuminate the need to re-think the way in which educational research, teacher education, and practice are connected, by fostering practice-led research activities during the initial teacher education and in the context of training of young researchers in educational sciences.

The research questions connected to the implementation of our research-based design are the following: How educational research can sustain the development of teacher professional education and practice? How the improvement of pre-service teacher education increases the use of research in their professional activities? 

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