Category Archives: self-study

Writing: A method of inquiry – Richardson

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Yesterday I reread Laurel Richardson’s chapter in the Handbook of Qualitative Research and it imbued me with a burning desire to finalise my thesis direction and get going. I have several options open and I really need to decide. The chapter helped me realise (yet again!) that until I begin writing I won’t know what I really know and won’t be able to grasp how able I am to do the job.

The reading I have done in the past two months have convinced me that narrative will be a central feature of my work (my narratives? teacher narratives?). Writing from an involved position seems natural to me now – I can’t believe that a year ago I was looking up the rules of “don’t dare to use the personal “I” in your academic writing”.

During the past weeks I have expressed my concerns about the validity of the work I will be doing and about my claim to authority (How will anyone ever take my work seriously? Who am I to produce an academic text?). Reading Kamler & Thomson (2006), Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision (thank goodness for ebooks) boosted my confidence as did Parr’s article (2007), “Writing and practitioner inquiry: Thinking relationally”.

Laurel Richardson’s discussion of the post modernist view of authoritative knowledge took me one step further.

“The postmodernist context of doubt, then, distrusts all methods equally. No method has a privileged status…a postmodernist position does allow us to know “something” without claiming to know everything. Having a partial, local, historical knowledge is still knowing” (p. 928). Richardson reassuringly reminds us that we don’t need to “write a single text in which we say everything at once to everyone” (p. 929).

I am grateful to Laurel Richardson for these encouraging words. Work like that I CAN DO! I do know something, I even know quite a bit! Yes, my knowledge is “partial” (but involves up to  20 years of teaching, school administration and teacher mentoring), it is “local” (I can relate to my own education in Melbourne, Australia and to my work experience in the north of Israel), and it is “historical” (My personal experiences as a pupil go back 30+ years and my professional experience spans several upheavals in the battle over teaching literacy). I do know, all teachers know. My task will be to critically examine that knowledge in order to personally grow from it and maybe also interest others on the way.

I am hoping to succeed in writing a readable and interesting report, one Richardson would call “vital” (p. 924), a text which would “make a difference” (p. 924). I aim to write for my colleagues, literacy teachers and teacher educators – real people in a real world, not necessarily for the university library.

I can’t see myself experimenting with fictional or poetic genres although I found the fictional story-diary I wrote in Graham Parr’s unit challenging and stimulating. Richardson explains the use of the metaphor in social-science writing and gives an exercise on it at the end of the chapter. I want to devote some time to this. What metaphor would I chose for the teaching of writing? What metaphors would upper primary school pupils choose to describe the task of composition?

What are my thesis options as I see them at this time?

  • Autoethnography – examining my personal experiences of learning and teaching writing in order to discover patterns and themes which may well be relevant to teaching done by others.
  • Narrative Inquiry – examining personal teaching experience through field texts gathered from other teachers (I’ll have to find Aussie teachers somehow) – email conversations or blog entries mainly I presume. I’ll have to decide whether I am researching from the sidelines or become personally involved in the process and the content. The involved stance interests me more.

Still more questions than answers…decision time is definitely here!

Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923-948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Writing in Practitioner Inquiry – Graham Parr

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 First thoughts after reading the article:

I was surprised to read how similar the description of the activities of the teachers’ group at Eastern Girls’ School was to the type of PD group that I have been dreaming of setting up here. Almost a year ago I spoke with my colleague who is responsible for literacy education in the north of the country and asked her to consider me running inquiry groups for teachers with emphasis on the teaching of writing in the upper primary grades. In Israel there is almost no culture of professional writing among teachers and most PD courses are built along the lines of the left side of the table, “managerial understandings of effective PD”. There are almost no frameworks for teachers to come together (by choice or by mandate) to discuss classroom practice and the personal experiences of teachers in action.   

In some of the schools I work in I have an hourly session with 2-3 teachers from the same grade level. My day is made up of these meetings and together we plan, build assessment criteria, discuss the curriculum, and create teaching and learning materials. Occasionally we collaboratively examine student drafts and written products. Hardly ever do we take the time to really reflect. The agenda is determined according to teacher needs and content which I suggest – we try to find a balance.  

Despite the fact that time is scarce and teachers are certainly always overloaded, I am aware that almost all of the teachers who take part in these sessions are grateful for the time to sit together, receive help in solving problems and extend their learning on literacy related issues. In each of these schools the principal has definitely “carved out” these hours and organized the timetable accordingly – not an easy task.

 I was surprised to read that reflective writing is expected of teachers in certain areas in Australia. In in-service PD seminars, if I ask language teachers to write for 10-15 minutes on a certain topic they look at me in horror. I also meet many teachers who feel extremely threatened when they have to write or respond in a virtual campus connected to a seminar or course.

 I know that there is a centre for PD in Jerusalem called “Ovnayim” –  http://www.ovnayim.org/site/?lang=english – they work with teacher narratives and I have already made contact with them. I believe that if I mentioned practitioner inquiry most of the teachers in this country would have no idea of what I’m talking about. 

An important point I have taken from the article is the distinction between “public texts” and “other texts”. I think the division is useful for teacher researchers involved in professional writing as it takes the pressure out of writing for a public platform, the option of gradually developing narratives, journal/blog entries or email correspondence into an article or other “public text” may be easier.

Parr, G. (2007). Writing and practitioner inquiry: Thinking relationally. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 6(3), 22-47. Retrieved from http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/2007v6n3art2.pdf   

Potential problems for teacher researchers

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Gordon Griffiths wrote about the problems facing teachers who wish to research their immediate work environment. Difficulties mentioned are:

  • It is not easy for teachers to look at their everyday surroundings and see them as unfamiliar.
  • Recording the enormous amount of activity happening in a school hour/lesson/day.
  • Finding the time to rewrite the large volume of field notes.
  • The tiring research process which is in addition to the exhausting duties of the teacher.
  • Knowing who the research plans and processes should be negotiated with and at which stage.
  • One or more of the researcher’s regular school positions may hinder the process of data collection. This in turn may prevent the researcher from following certain research trails.
  •  Collegues may feel threatened by the research, even if the teacher is researching his/her own classroom.
  • There is danger of the teacher researcher exploiting the information gathered for purposes other than research goals.
  • The teacher researcher is often jeopardizing something – position, social contacts, respect…in the exposing research process.

 An important point raised is that even if a teacher is researching his/her own classroom practice, the context must be presented, involving the whole school environment. 

   

Griffiths, G. (1985).  Doubts, dilemmas and diary-keeping: Some reflections on teacher-based research. In R. G. Burgess (Ed.), Issues in educational research: Qualitative methods (pp. 197-215). London, UK: The Falmer Press.

More about validity in self-study

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Allan Feldman (2003) responded to the article by Bullough and Pinnegar (2001) that I wrote about yesterday…or the day before…

Feldman agrees with the guidelines presented by the authors but contends that they have evaded the question of validity. He contends that it is not enought to show that self-studies are high in quality, he calls for evidence of the validity of self-studies.

Feldman summarises that in traditional research “validity usually refers to the degree to which a study accurately reflects or assesses the specific topic that the research is attempting to measure” (p. 26).

Early qualitative researchers such as Eisner (1981, 1991) and Lincoln and Guba (1985) discussed criteria like “believability, credibility, consensus, and coherence, to replace accuracy as a warrant for validity” (p. 26).

Feldman calls researchers to provide readers with reasons for them to believe that the research is true. He stresses that in order for self-study  to be seen as knowledge suitable for use by others,  the question of validity must be addressed.

Feldman explains that self-study in education and in teacher education is a political issue (the researcher wants to stimulate change in his/her own work and as a  result influence policy-makers) and a moral issue ( the researcher aims to study his/her own practice in order to improve it and in turn improve the work of others). “we need to know that it is well grounded, just and can provide the results we desire” (p. 27).

Guidelines for maximizing the validity of self-study (p. 28):

  1. Provide clear and detailed description of how we collect data and make explicit what counts as data. Provide details of research methods used.
  2. Provide clear and detailed description of how we constructed the representation from our data. (Information about how the researcher transformed data into an artistic representation).
  3. Extend triangulation beyond multiple sources of data to include explorations of multiple ways to represent the same self-study. (Show why a certain form of representation was chosen).
  4. Provide evidence of the value of the changes in our ways of being teacher educators

According to Feldman we can increase the validty of our work “By making our inquiry methods transparent and subjecting our representations to our own critique, as well as that of others” (p. 28).

Feldman, A. (2003). Validity and quality in self-study. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 26-28. Retrieved from http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/pqdweb?index=0&did=334094231&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=6&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1199347819&clientId=16397

When does self-study become research?

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This morning I began looking into the area of self-study research. The article by Bullough and Pinnegar clarified for me what the role of the researcher is in this kind of work and explained what the reader is expecting while reading an autobiographical educational study.

The article gives 14 useful guidelines for ensuring that research of this kind is of a high quality. Personally I am quite daunted by the requirements and am not sure that I will ever be capable of  meeting them.  

 The article explains four historical developments which encouraged the onset of self-study research forms in education.

“When biography and history are joined, when the issue confronted by the self is shown to have relationship to and bearing on the context and ethos of a time, then self-study moves to research” (p. 15). There must be a balance made between the individual and public issues and interests. The writing must not be too self interested but at the same time not fall back to the distance of traditional research forms. This balance must be evident both in the data gathered and in its analysis.

Questions of authority:

“Self-study is a mongrel: The study is always of practice, but at the intersection of self and other, and its methods are borrowed. Thus in order to assert authority the study must do so from the frame or frames of the borrowed methodology, the standards of scholarship of the embraced tradition still must be met”. (Pinnegar, 1998 as cited on p. 15). 

Where is the difficulty?

“researchers face the difficulty of representing, presenting, legitimating, analyzing, and reporting one’s own experience as data – and of doing so in honest, not self-serving ways…” (p. 15).

“each researcher must prove herself as a methodologist and a writer” (p. 15).

Guidelines for autobiography (p. 16-19):

  1. Autobiographical self-studies should ring true and enable connection.
  2. Self-studies should promote insight and interpretation.
  3. Autobiographical self-study research must engage history forthrightly and the author must take an honest stand.
  4.  Biographical and autobiographical self-studies in teacher education are about the problems and issues that make someone an educator.
  5.  Authentic voice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the scholarly standing of a biographical self-study.
  6.  The autobiographical self-study  researcher has an ineluctable obligation to seek to improve the learning situation not only for the self but for the other.
  7. Powerful autobiographical self-studies portray character development and include dramatic action: Something genuine is at stake in the story. (Standards of good fiction apply)
  8. Quality autobiographical self-studies attend carefully to persons in context or setting.
  9. Quality autobiographical self-studies offer fresh perspectives on established truths.

Guidelines for correspondence, E-mail, and recorded correspondence (p. 19-20):

  10. Self-studies that rely on correspondence should provide the reader with an inside look at participants’ thinking and feeling.

11. To be scholarship, edited conversation or correspondence must not only have coherence and structure, but that coherence and structure should provide argumentation and convincing evidence.

12. Self-studies that rely on correspondence bring with them the necessity to select, frame, arrange, and footnote the correspondence in ways that demonstrate wholeness.

13. Interpretations made of self-study data should not only reveal but also interrogate the relationships, ccontradictions, and limits of the views presented.

14. Effective correspondence self-studies contain complication or tension.

“A self-study is a good read, attends to the ‘nodal moments’ of teaching and being a teacher educator and thereby enables reader insight or understanding into self, reveals a lively conscience and balanced sense of self-importance, tells a recognizable teacher or teacher educator story, portrays character development in the face of serious issues within a complex setting, gives place to the dynamic struggle of living life whole, and offers new perspective” (p. 19).

                                                       This really says it all!

I will definately need to return to these important points if in the end I decide to do a thesis which involves self-study. 

Bullough, R. V., & Pinnegar, S. (2001). Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study research. Educational Researcher,30(3), 13-21. Retrieved from http://edr.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/cgi/reprint/30/3/13