thesisthoughts

This book describes another example of university-school collaboration project aimed at teacher learning.

A unique feature here is that the teachers determined the direction of inquiry and not the academic researchers.

The term collaborative here is used to describe the way the teacher researchers learned to work with the uni researchers AND how they learned to involve their students more in their whole language classrooms.

The authors discuss the production of knowledge about teaching and quote Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993, who explain that often knowledge about teaching is formulated in academic frameworks and then transmitted to teachers.

Pappas and Zecker also cite Gitlin (1990) who points out that most in most educational research, issues studied are almost never initiated by teachers. This balance of power in research implies that teachers have nothing to contribute from their professional knowledge.

“Teacher research promotes a new, distinctive way of knowledge of teaching because it privileges teachers as those with the authority to know about teaching” (p. 4).  

“Showing and talking about particular features of their teaching that were working well gave the teachers feelings of accomplishment and demonstrated strategies that others might try… On the other hand, airing difficulties or vulnerabilities in inquiries afforded opportunities to obtain new ideas or directions to consider” (p. 6).

The theory that all humans construct knowledge through social interactions = “socioconstructivist perspective on literacy” (p. 7).

• Wells, 1994b
• Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992

Vygotsky – 1962, 1978

• Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995
• Moll, 1990
• Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989
• Wells, 1994a, 1994b, 1998
• Wertsch, 1985, 1989, 1991

Pappas, C. C., & Zecker, L. B. (2001). Introduction: Creating collaborative relations of power in literacy teaching-learning. In C. C. Pappas, & L. B. Zecker (Eds.), Teacher inquiries in literacy teaching-learning: Learning to collaborate in elementary urban classrooms (pp. 1-13). Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates.

Today I reread the first chapter of Doecke and Parr and was surprised that the notes I had made previously didn’t make the blog or the methodology chapter.

Points I will add are:

• Through writing teachers can explore their professional lives and “refine their understandings of the complexities of teaching and learning” (p. 9).
• “This is obviously of benefit to the students in their classes, although those benefits do not necessarily translate into tangible outcomes that can be easily measured” (p. 9).
• “… qualities that teachers value most in their students’ learning-intellectual curiosity, a willingness to engage in exploratory talk, imagination, a preparedness to collaborate while also accepting a degree of autonomy, a capacity to engage in metacognition and reflexivity-are the very same qualities that characterize their own professional learning. Teachers who engage in practitioner inquiry are much more likely to be able to generate a ‘culture of inquiry’ in their own classrooms” (Reid 2004, p. 12 as cited here p. 12).
•  writing 3 fold: writing as artefact, writing as process, writing as medium – see p. 13. I can link the writing in my thesis to these concepts.

Doecke, B., & Parr, G. (2005). Writing: A common project. In B. Doecke, & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing = Learning (pp. 1-16). South Australia: Wakefield Press.

It is amazing that you can read a text and not really understand much of it and then reread it a month or so later and find that it is totally comprehensible. This is exactly what happened to me now with Smith’s article. I had no idea why my supervisor had recommended it to me – I just couldn’t see the link to my work and today it’s perfectly clear.

Smiths comparison between the state-of-mind which embraces us in our home life as women and the state-of-mind in the context of university.

Home – local, connected to a particular place and time, particular familiar people

Uni – impersonal, people are known through “printed names on texts”, classed

Institutional ethnography… begins with the issues and problems of people’s lives and develops inquiry from the standpoint of their experience in and of the actualities of their everyday living… It conceives of the social as actually happening among people who are situated in particular places at particular times and not as ‘meaning’ or ‘norms’ ” (p. 18-19).

Practitioners are seen as knowing best how to describe their experiences, they understand their own practice. It is the researchers role to investigate how this local knowledge joins knowledge created in other contexts.

Institutional ethnography is grounded in the understanding that each individual experiences events in a unique way.

People are always acting in a particular context – place and time.

“In Institutional ethnography, the researcher is permitted to learn, perhaps must learn, from each interview what may inform and change the subsequent.”

“But institutional ethnographers are actively seeking to be changed, to discover not only what they did not know but also, as they go about their work, how to think differently about what they are learning” (p. 28).

Smith, D.  E. (2002). Institutional ethnography. In T. May (Ed.) Qualitative research in action (pp. 17-52). London: Sage.

image: http://www.rcs.k12.va.us/gifted/gifted/Graphics/insight.jpg

Lather wrote this article in an attempt to understand the US government push for “evidence-based” scientific research in education. In this move, “the reductionisms of positivism, empiricism, and objectivism are assumed” (p. 16).

The author sees the return to the mandate of scientific research to be a reaction to the growth of alternative research methods and their use by women and political and cultural minorities.

Lather  explains that this is not the first time that scientific method as a solitary research path has been critiqued. She admits that she believed that there was a chance for policy to be shaped by non-traditional research.

Addressing this restricting connection between government policy and scientific research , Cochran-Smith (2002) wrote that in order to be financially supported “educational research must be evaluated “using experimental or quasi-experimental designs… with a preference for random-assignment experiments (Cochran-Smith , 2002, as cited in Lather, 2004, p. 18).

Lather reminds us that “The shift to qualitative methods in the 1970s was related to the difficulties of measuring what is educationally significant and th limits of causal models given the preponderance of interaction effects” (p. 20).

Which organizations are running after research money?

Which studies are encouraged and for what purposes?

Who pays for research grants and why?

Lather calls for educational researchers to refrain from following the natural sciences. She encourages researchers to ask complex questions, those that do not have single dimensional answers and in doing so, to “foster understanding, reflection, and action instead of a narrow translation of research into practice” (p. 23).

Lather sets out to disrupt the dominance of the white, male, academic voice in the production of educational knowledge.

Lather argues that although non-traditional research cannot be judged on “objectivity and systematicity” (p. 24), it is no less capable of valid knowledge production.

Lather optimistically remarks that “A rich production of counter-narratives is alive and kicking” (p. 26).

I believe I am part of this movement, making an effort to make other, more diverse voices heard in the production of educational knowledge.

Lather explains “… there is virtually no agreement … as to what constitutes science except, increasingly, the view that science is, like all human endeavor, a cultural practice and practice of culture” (p. 28).

Lather, P. (2004). This IS your father’s paradigm: Government intrusion and the case of qualitative research in education. Qualitative Inquiry,10(1), 15-34. doi:10:10.1177/1077800403256154

After reading the article I’m not sure I know where to start, there’s just so much relevant material contained in these few pages. It worries me that I didn’t come across this article in my searches, there are probably many more…

Carter deals with the political contexts of story telling and issues of gender, power, ownership and voice in particular.

She points out that narratives “ have an implicit or explicit observer or witness who tells or recounts the events…” (p. 6).

 In my narratives,  I am telling my story, from my point of view. There is no doubt that other teachers would tell the same stories differently with different highlights and details.

“In constructing stories…authors attempt to convey their intentions by selecting incidents and details, arranging time and sequence, and employing a variety of codes and conventions that exist in a culture” (p. 6).

“…readers, in turn, seek coherence and causal connections among these incidents and conventions as they construct for themselves, often retrospectively, the meaning or theme of the story” (p. 6).

In 1986, Martin wrote:

“story represents a way of knowing and thinking that is particularly suited to explicating the issues with which we deal” (p. 6).

Carter explains that a story is “characterized by an intrinsic multiplicity of meanings” (p. 6).

The narratives I have written in the past few months are “coloured” by the intensive learning I have been doing.  As I learn new theories or gain new insights, I remember additional incidents and enrich my stories.

In teaching, knowledge is created through practice. “Teachers’ knowledge is, in other words, event structured (Carter & Doyle, 1987) and stories, therefore, would seem to provide special access to that knowledge” Carter (p. 7).

“teachers’ knowledge in its own terms is ordered by story and can best be understood in this way”(Elbaz, 1991, as cited by Carter, 1993, p. 7).

Olson contended that when teaching incidents are entered into narrative structure, they are made more understandable, lasting and presentable to others (1990, as cited in Carter, 1993).

Carter discusses using narrative to understand and develop thought. She quots Robinson and Hawpe (1986):

“Narrative thinking resembles other acts of comprehension and problem solving currently studied by cognitive psychologists” (p. 112, as cited in Carter, 1993, p. 7).

Carter uses the term “well remembered events” when describing significant teaching incidents.

Teachers store significant events as stories and through those narratives it is possible to recognize teacher knowledge and how it changes with additional experience. (Carter, 1993).

Most of the interest in teacher stories was in teachers telling their narratives to researchers or for research purposes. Carter (1993) cited Gudmundsdottir (1991) who encourages studying the stories told by teachers in everyday circumstances.

• Blogging would probably be a good example of this.

The focus on teacher narratives is a focus on voices previously unheard – teachers, rather than academics or administrators, women, rather than men, speaking out on the issues which really concern them. (Carter, 1993).

• Maybe again here, “somebody”  should be encouraging teachers to write these texts and in turn transform some of them to public texts (Parr, 2007).

Smith (19881, as cited in Carter, 1993) proposes that every story is created by a particular person in a distinctive context for a unique reason.

• It follows that stories are different if they  are produced for reseacrh or other purposes. \

Carter asks

• Do we tell our stories to support our theories or our research?
• Do we tell our stories in ways that are suitable in a particular context?

Carter raises the problem of making generalizations from individual teacher stories. What we can do, she explains, is to search for patterns emerging from teacher stories and try to reach professional understandings from them.

Although teacher stories are always created in a particular context, highlighting the practice of a particular educator, they always have the capacity to spark new reflection and the creation of new stories.

Carter – If we believe in story analysis as a means of creating a knowledge base for educators, significant efforts must be made to present ourselves as valid researchers in order to be accepted by academia and policy makers.

Carter, K. (1993). The place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education.  Educational Researcher, 22(1), 5-12. Retrieved from http://links.jstor.org/