As an outcome of
my participation in CASTL , I am in the process of learning more about the
way other educational researchers have used the arts in general and drama
in particular as a means of data analysis and reporting. So much for issue
number 3.
For the purpose
of this paper, I will focus on the first two issues though I understand that
writing the study as drama may help me address those concerns. I will attempt
to share with you evidence to support my assertion that analytic induction
is not the best way for a teacher to represent her own practice.
I will also attempt to describe and explain a different structure for data
analysis and reporting that is more representative of the practitioner researcher’s
epistemological necessities and realities. ( I am not unaware of the fact that I
am using analytic induction to arrive at and argue the assertion I made in
the first line of this paper. This paper however is not about inquiry into
my teaching practice.)
Circle of Inquiry
Several years ago,
I was asked to do a workshop for teachers in the Philadelphia Writing Project
about teacher inquiry. Unlike
many of my other colleagues, I
had not written anything which would count as academic research, but I had
been taking an inquiry stance on my practice and learning from what Lytle
and Cochran Smith refer to as “systematic and intentional investigation.”
Inquiry had become the process by which I was able to learn more about my
students and grow as a teacher.
In trying to describe
this process to other teachers, I drew the following model that I subsequently
called the circle of inquiry.
dissonance
taking
action
raising questions
making
sense
looking closely
searching
broadly
I explained that
for me, the inquiry was often instigated by a disturbing or perplexing event
that then created discomfort or dissonance. This discomfort caused me to ask
questions, often difficult ones relating to issues like race, identity, language,
power, authority and equity. In attempting to find answers to the questions
prompted by the dissonance, I would both look closely at my own practice employing
some means of systematic and intentional investigation and I would search
broadly by reading extensively in the filed and trying to make connections
to my work. The looking and the searching would lead to a process of understanding
or making sense of my questions in light of the looking and search. The new
understandings would then prompt me to respond – to take some action
e.g. teach in a particular way, assign a particular text etc. The new action
would often create a new uncertainty, discomfort or dissonance, starting the
circle anew.
In creating this
model at the time, I had not read the work of Donald Schoen nor others writing
about reflective practice, though later I was edified to learn that my circle
of inquiry was very similar to models developed by others. I was not familiar
with their work at the time, and I was not applying their model to my work.
Rather, I was trying to understand my own knowledge-making process and share
it in terms comprehensible and useful to other teachers.
Mea Culpa
My discomfort with
analytic induction as a way of making sense of my own practice is best exemplified
by my difficulty in completing the narrative vignette assignment for a graduate
Data Analysis course I took in Spring 2001 at the Graduate School of Education,
University of Pennsylvania. I completed four drafts and with each successive
one (which did come closer to being “right,”) I felt as if my
mind were being bent further and further out of shape. Now this bending out
of shape could be construed as “learning.” After all, I was learning
how to do this kind of analysis. And perhaps I should have been happy with
this and be glad that I was coming closer to being able to write about my
teaching in a way which would accepted by the scholarly community. Accept
for that old dissonance thing. It continued to feel very wrong for me to write
about my work in that way.
In order to tell
the rest of the story honestly, I must first make a major confession.
When we were first given the narrative
vignette assignment, I did what all good graduate students do: I recycled
a paper I had written in another context. “Reading the Writing on the
Wall,” my paper about my students’ multiple readings of the graffiti
that appeared on the schools’ walls, was originally written as a paper
delivered at NCTE this fall as part of a panel on teacher research. It is
important to note that this NCTE presentation was my only audience for this
paper; I was not writing it for any particular publication nor for a graduate
education course.
What I handed in
for this class as “draft one” of the narrative vignette was not
the original draft. It was my attempt to reshape the telling of that incident
into a narrative vignette.
The painful moves I had to make as a writer in order to reshape my
paper into an acceptable vignette, convinced me that I needed to find some
other way to structure the telling of the graffiti story which would better
represent the way in which I experienced it. It was then that I had the brilliant
idea to reprint my original version of the paper – untainted by my attempts
to “correct” it. What I discovered in re-examining my original
paper was that the way I had chosen to structure the story was consistent
with the processes I had previously identified in my “circle of inquiry”
model. (Click on each section
title to jump to the corresponding section of this original paper).
The paper begins
in the present tense with an excerpt from my teacher journal, the day of the
inciting incident. The use of the present tense and the description of the
incident with no explanation, invites the reader (or listener in the case
of a presentation) to enter into my process of inquiry at my starting point
– the moment of dissonance.
From there, I step back and contextualize the incident and situate
myself in that context so that the reader knows where I am coming from. I describe a bit of my own history at
the school and share the questions the incident raised for me which connected
to questions I already had about my teaching. these questions related to race,
identity, social class, equity and the difficulty in encouraging dialogue
from multiple perspectives in a school which values debate and conformity.
The reflective conversation which constitutes the next part of the
paper, represents the “looking closely” phase of my circle of
inquiry. In this part of the paper, I share what
my students said about the graffiti.
The quotes which I share comprise some of the important information I received
by looking closely at my own practice to find the answers . I do not offer
my interpretations of their words at this point in the paper for two reasons:1)
I am uncomfortable speaking for them – I’d prefer to let their
words speak for themselves and 2) I want the reader the continue to be inside
my process of inquiry. I do not share the conclusions I later drew about the
students comments, because I had not drawn them at this particular time in
the process. However, I am offering
a different kind of analysis when I share only those comments which stood
out for me and by the way I highlight certain issues such as race and social
class.
The next part of
the paper corresponds to the “searching broadly” phase of the
circle of inquiry. In it, I connect what I saw in my classroom ( the students
responses to our collaborative inquiry into the meaning of the graffiti) and
the additional questions it raised for me to the work of others, in this case
Adrienne Rich, James Joyce, Carolyn Hesford and W.E.B. DuBois. Again, this
reveals the way in which I look outside of my
own classroom experience and make
connections to the work of others.
The sense that I made from this looking and searching is represented
in the following line on page 4:
While this incident represents on
isolated event, the reading of one
particular text – some of
the differences and the significance of those
differences revealed through this
event can offer important insights for
whenever students and teacher read any text together
in the classroom.
This comes closest to being an assertion;
however, unlike the narrative vignette where the assertion begins the telling,
this assertion is conveyed near the end of the telling at the point where
it is occurring in the inquiry process.
The one part of
the paper that I eliminated completely in my attempt to hand in a acceptable
assignment immediately follows the assertion and again parallels my self-identified
process of inquiry. It is the
step in the process that I call “taking action.” It is where I
describe and explain the pedagogical moves I made in my teaching in response
to what I had learned from my inquiry into the graffiti. I began to develop
more expertise in employing teaching methodologies which promoted multiple
perspectives:
Reflective conversation and Quaker
style meetings replaced debates.
Group journals which students read
and responded to each other’s
reactions to books stories and plays
replaced individual literature
journals. Collaborative dramatic
re-enactments of texts replaced
individual oral presentations. p. 4
Thus, another teacher reading or
listening to this paper is not only able to see the changes I made in my practice
in response to my inquiry, she is able to experience the process I used in
constructing the knowledge.
The Circle Continues
I was pleasantly
surprised to find the way I had ended my original paper. In a section I call
“Coda,” I recount another incident, relating to the one described
in the first paragraph, only occurring months later. The incident is about
the way in which the graffiti resurfaced long after it had been sandblasted
off the walls. In their literary magazine, the student drew a picture of the
school building on the cover, the added the graffiti to illustration. And
at the top of the drawing were printed the letters R.O.P.E.: Results of Public
Education. In concluding the
paper, I brought it back to the incident which had sparked the inquiry, leaving
just enough ambiguity and uncertainty to evoke a new sense of dissonance.
The inquiry, it is implied, continues.
While the writing
this (original NCTE) paper and the telling of this story in this matter was
not planned nor conscious on my part, this analysis of my self-generated structure
and my subsequent discovery of its consistency with my own epistemological
processes has given me a direction for future work. It is one that feels like
an honest representation of my work. I believe that in examining the structure
of my own paper, I have uncovered for myself a way in which to tell the story
and present the data which I have gathered about my own teaching.
Conclusions and Other Uncertainties
One of the reasons I took this course was to help me complete my “Carnegie
Project.” As one of the 20 K-12
Fellows of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning (CASTL) I have the opportunity to play a key role in helping to define
the scholarship of teaching in a way which is most useful to and representative
of the work of practicing classroom teachers. I do not believe that the work
of teacher scholars must imitate the work of academic researchers. Classroom
teachers make and use knowledge differently from academic researchers.
Lee Shulman, President
of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has asserted that
all scholarship share these three characteristics: it is 1) public, 2) built
on the work of others and 3) open to critique from peers in the field. While
I do not contest what Shulman calls the “holy trinity” of scholarship,
I do have many concerns about these characteristics as they relate to the
work of classroom teachers. For instance, who constitutes the “public?”
Does public only mean publish? Would sharing one’s work at a department
meeting or NCTE convention be making the work public? Who gets to/ must critique
it? Are there unique ways in which teachers critique each other’s work?
Is it different from the ways academics critique theirs? How should academics
read teacher research? Should they critique it, or read it as insider knowledge
crucial to their own understandings of schools and classrooms? Who builds
upon it? In what ways?
It is my experience
that practicing teachers listen or read each other’s research NOT to
find that which is generalizable to all settings but to make connections to
their own classrooms. In other words, another teacher’s research becomes
part of the listening or reading teacher’s circle of inquiry about her
own practice. The other teacher’s research becomes put to practical
use as it enables the listening teacher to raise questions, think deeply about
critical issues, and take a closer look at what is happening in her classroom. Teachers are less likely to say, “
I must do this in all my classes because it works for Sally. Rather they are
more apt to think, “Sally’s work on portfolio assessment really
makes me think differently about the ways I have looked at student growth
in writing over time in my classroom. I need to take a closer look at what
I am doing.” In this sense,
teacher research or the scholarship of ( K-12) teaching can be generative
and transformative for both the reader and the writer.
Practicing K-12
classroom teachers not only construct knowledge differently from professors
in graduate schools of education or researchers in the field, they have different
ways of sharing that knowledge with one another. The range and types of teacher writing that are included in
the final Carnegie publication will have an enormous influence on what counts
as “the scholarship of teaching.” And the ways in which the Carnegie
Foundation decides to go “public” with the work of the K-12 Fellows
will also have an impact on how that scholarship is used in the field.
I am proud to have my work included with the work of the other K-12
CASTL Scholars and I am encouraged by the complexity and diversity of the
final projects.
