Hello, all. I'm looking forward to class this week and talking about all your wonderful posts from last week. Thanks for your active participation! I'm also looking forward to discussing the readings for this week as listed on your syllabus. Remember that I sent the three articles to you as PDF files last week; if you need them again, please let me know. In this post I've included some prompts to help us begin discussion of these readings, including the Cochran-Smith chapters.
Below are (hopefully) provocative quotes from the two chapters and three articles for Week Four. Respond to the quotes openly--what are your thoughts about the statement? Do you agree/disagree? What other texts or theories or theorists might it remind you of? Does the quote make you think of any similar experiences/thoughts you have had? Etc. If none of these quotes appeal to you, please select your own, copy it, and respond.
"As might be expected, teachers enter the taking stock process displaying a variety of attitudes and concerns. Teacher directed action research is designed to be empowering and most teachers responded positively. While participation was voluntary and teachers have "bought into" the process, some can interpret their participation as an indirect requirement for maintaining good standing with the principal and colleagues in the school. Still others may enter the action research activity with the hidden agenda of documenting the accuracy of long held or strongly held beliefs and assumptions." (McCarthy & Riner, p. 225)
"How do we interrogate assumptions and practices when they are embedded in the very language we speak? How do we understand how shifts at broader levels of the system penetrate discourses and practices at local levels? Social practices like teaching are viewed by Foucault as discursive practices. Discourses shape practices and practices produce discourses, and some authors use the term discourse-practice to denote this circular dynamic." (Herr & Anderson, p. 389)
"Without a clear focus on the politics of schooling and the need for community organizing to build and sustain meaningful reform, little has been accomplished even in urban districts where people of color occupy educational and civic leadership positions" (Glass, p. 15)
"The considerable range and variation of practitioner research have contributed to its richness and vitality but, at the same time, perhaps undermined its coherence as an intellectual and social movement with a palpable impact on emerging policies." (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, Inquiry as Stance, p. 35)
One of the themes this week seemed to be the way teacher researchers work within or in spite of “the system” and how these decisions can work to either challenge or reify cultural or social norms. I want to focus on the role discourse plays in this specifically in response to the quote Janet posted about discourses shaping practice and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteCochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) made me think about the title teacher research and what even that name implies or assumes. For example, Cochran-Smith and Lytle, in discussing “language marks” of practitioner inquiry, explain how the term teacher research “suggests that research is not part of what is generally considered the normal work of teaching and calls attention to the fact that research about teaching is an activity usually carried out by someone other than a teacher” (p. 45) and how the scholarship of teaching “carries with it the point that teaching has not traditionally been considered scholarly activity in the sense of rigorous or systematic knowledge work” (p. 46). Applying Herr and Anderson’s question, “How do we interrogate assumptions and practices when they are embedded in the very language we speak” literally to the language of “teacher research” I wonder in what ways our language affects our practice or maybe more appropriately how our practice affects our own discourse in what we call teacher research. Even when I first looked at the Cochran-Smith and Lytle title I wonder why they chose “inquiry,” “stance,” and “practitioner research” and what message they were hoping to send with these choices. Why “practitioner research” as opposed to the use of “teacher research” in their first book Inside/Outside?
In thinking about how we “understand how shifts at broader levels of the system penetrate discourses and practices at local levels,” I can’t help but think about bell hooks chapter in Teaching to Transgress where she declares that Standard English is the “oppressors’ language” but she needs it “to talk to you.” She discusses how even as a well known, well respected scholar and educator she is expected to follow certain “rules” of Standard English to publish. Like hooks, I believe we have to work within the system to work against it. We may hate the connotations and implied messages within “No Child Left Behind” (of course, who would ever argue that we should leave a child behind?!), “best practices,” or “standards’ based assessments,” but we have to interact with this language to deconstruct and transcend it. I think one of Glass’s statements fits well here where, in talking about Freire’s philosophy, he says that “the oppressed much read and know the world and themselves in a critical way that reveals the processes of historical formation in order to write their future, transcending the present limits and expressing their primordial power of humanization” (p. 19). I think the word “oppressed” is appropriate here for teachers and likewise teacher research because they are not instrumental (not by their choice) in creating the dominant discourse in education. That said, I do not think this should result in several of the examples of Cochran-Smith and Lytle mention of learning communities where they often “retain many of the existing structures of power and privilege and may reify rather than challenge dominant epistemologies and values about the purposes of schooling, the relationships of researchers and the objects of research, and the educational questions that are most worth asking” (p. 59).
Part II:
ReplyDeleteAs the article by Herr and Anderson points out, our reality is tangled up in our language and vice versa, and decisions teachers make about how to use (or not use) language communicates to students messages about the world and the way it does or does not work. I guess what I’m saying is that as teachers, the best way to “interrogate assumptions and practices when they are embedded in the very language we speak” is to not only consciously be aware of what we communicate in our own discourse but also ask students to approach it critically, question it, debate it, dissect it. I loved the idea in the reading about having students complete inquiry projects where we “research” the community and world with students to ask epistemological questions about what knowledge is, who is given access to knowledge, how this affects how we understand and function in the world, and what can/should be done as a result.
I don’t know if I addressed what we were supposed to….I always start writing and then start rambling (: I have also never formally studied discourse analysis, so please feel free to disagree with or correct me!
Looking forward to seeing everyone Thursday!!
As I read for this week, one thing that interested me was the interplay of power and language. On this note, I like the question Janet posted from the Herr and Anderson piece – “How do we interrogate assumptions and practices when they are embedded in the very language we speak?” I think this is a great question – one that is clearly linked to language and power. But before I address this question in particular, I want to discuss another quote I found of interest from the same article. Here it is:
ReplyDelete“Distributed cognition theory illuminates a certain potential for building greater organizational and professional capacity and ultimately school improvement, but does little to illuminate issues of power and conflict. And yet, it is the lack of attention to power that leaves such approaches to collaborative action research impotent in the face of school reform based on high-stakes testing that narrow the very notion of learning itself” (Herr & Anderson, p. 383).
What drew me to the quote was the idea that our lack of attention to power leaves us, well powerless. I think that a discussion of power is very important not only in the context of teacher research (and as the article discusses collaboration), but in all education, and indeed life. In terms of power and education, I think that one of the major problems educators face is a lack of power at the research and policy level, and there is a great need for “pushing back against the top-down mandates” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, p. 33-34). I think about how, as Cochran-Smith and Lytle write, “local contexts, local knowledge, and the role of teachers as decision makers and change agents” gets lost in the mix (p.6). So, how do we gain some (or become part of the body that holds power) power in terms of teacher research and in terms of “bringing teachers’ voices into the political arena” (p.28)? My answer to this would be linked to collaboration with teachers, administrators, and political leaders.
However, I think teachers and practitioner researchers need to be careful in attempts for power in educational contexts. I say this because of the fears presented in Cochran-Smith’s and Lytle’s work that “practitioner research…could become both trivialized and marginalized, or co-opted into educational change initiatives antithetical to its purpose” (p.26). If this becomes the case, does practitioner researcher lose its “power”?
If I go back to the question concerning interrogating practices and assumptions when they are embedded in the language we speak, I think one thing we need to consider is interrogating the language itself. For example, in chapter two of Inquiry as Stance, Cochran-Smith and Lytle discuss the problems with language and how the naming of things (teacher, teacher research, and action research) itself is problematic. They write that the divide between practitioner inquiry and “traditional forms” of educational research lies in the language (p.45). Specifically, they state, “by virtue of the marker teacher, for example, the term teacher researcher suggests that research is not part of what is generally considered the normal work of teaching and calls attention to the fact that research about teaching is an activity usually carried out by someone who is not a teacher. Similarly, the prefix action in the phrase action research seems to suggest that ‘regular’ research resides in the realm of theory or abstraction and is separated from the world of action” (p.45-46). Is the way we use language to define these different kinds of research creating or contributing to the “hierarchical connections between teaching and research” (p.26)? I would say that to some degree, the answer must be yes.
So, I put it back to all of you (since I am not sure I adequately answer this question), how can practitioner inquiry address these issues of power and language?
I wanted to respond to the quotation from McCarthy and Riner because it was one that I noted in relation to my own experience of school improvement plans. They say, "As might be expected, teachers enter the taking stock process displaying a variety of attitudes and concerns. Teacher directed action research is designed to be empowering and most teachers responded positively. While participation was voluntary and teachers have "bought into" the process, some can interpret their participation as an indirect requirement for maintaining good standing with the principal and colleagues in the school. Still others may enter the action research activity with the hidden agenda of documenting the accuracy of long held or strongly held beliefs and assumptions" (McCarthy & Riner, p. 225). I felt this tension in my previous teaching situation because of the demographics of our staff. As a small Catholic school with a tightly-knit community, one portion of our staff (probably one-third to half) consisted of older teachers with deep roots within the community and decades of service. These teachers (mostly women) were either very committed to Catholic education or could afford to remain at the school as teachers because their spouses were the primary breadwinners – or both. The other portion of the staff consisted of groups of young men and women, usually first- or second-year teachers who had a consistently high turnover rate. Because the pay was not great, a lot of these young teachers had to leave for financial reasons. I believe part of the exodus of young blood, however, was due to attitudes such as those McCarthy and Riner mention amongst the more “established” portion of our teacher population. I believe these attitudes tie in with some of what Beth and Heather have already discussed regarding issues of power.
ReplyDeleteTBC. . .
Part II
ReplyDeleteOur administration never involved us in anything as formal as learning communities or schoolwide action research projects, but our new administrators did encourage inquiry learning and developed groups similar to the cadres of the accelerated schools inquiry process (p.226) for tackling various portions of our school improvement plan. Like the teachers McCarthy and Riner refer to, most of the teachers in our school responded positively to the idea of professional development opportunities that seemed to value teacher input. However, many of the “entrenched” teachers saw work in the various school improvement committees as onerous and pointless but necessary in order to be seen as a “team player.” It was hard for me, as a young teacher who was interested in learning from experienced teachers, to get excited about working with the entrenched teachers who wanted to spend a lot of time complaining about the work we were asked to do. And while Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) warn of the dangers of focusing to heavily on high-stakes testing data, it was very frustrating to work with teachers who wanted to look at test data and find ways to pin students' failures all right back on the students (and sometimes their parents). Some teachers were almost maliciously interested in using test data to prove to themselves that some students were just beyond help – usually the students they had already decided they didn't like because the student didn't fit in very well, had caused trouble in the past, etc. Those teachers were very interested in looking to the data to “document the accuracy of their long held or strongly held beliefs and assumptions” (McCarthy and Riner, p. 225), especially when they could use the data to justify not changing a thing about the way they worked. I hate being so hard on other teachers, but I spent a lot of time working alone because I was the only progressive voice in a very small department, and I was afraid to ask for advice for fear that someone would meddle in my attempts to improve my classroom. I didn't want to have an incident like Taylor's, and have someone tell me to cut the English professor BS :-)
Where this brings me is to issues of power and Cochran-Smith and Lytle's term “radically local” (p. 10). I love that term and could write volumes about it, but I worry about it, too. If my school remains “radically local,” I'm not really sure how much will ever change because the community is very closed (and maybe this is a non-issue because it's a private school). The push and pull of power amongst the various loci of control in education, ranging from the individual teacher and his or her students all the way up to the federal level, is something that I feel is very necessary. While I prefer to have control over what I do in my own classroom – to be treated like a professional capable of making informed decisions rather than a technician reading a script – I understand the need for some way to ensure equity on a national level so that students aren't doomed by locality. This is another area where I don't have a solution and would like to talk more about what a good balance of power would look like and how practitioner research affects/is affected by that balance.
This is my first full semester of teaching EDCI 285 – Multiculturalism and Education. Currently the class is reading School: the Story of American Public Education, and I am reading the text almost word-for-word. The ideas of William Wirt, a student of John Dewey, creator of the Gary Plan and superintendent of Gary, IN public schools, make me wonder what teacher research was conducted to develop his plan. I do not know much about William Wirt, but from School it sounds like he was the person who changed public schools so they are as we experience them today. In the Gary schools he encouraged art, music, printing, home economics, mechanics, agriculture, and many other alternative subjects to reading, writing, and arithmetic. Gary Public Schools even had its own zoo. Wirt also organized the buildings and the students so that the entire school was operational all day long. Instead of sitting in the same room and moving from subject to subject, students were divided into classes which moved from room to room. By no means is this rocket science to us now, but it was the most progressive form of education during the early 1900s. In light of our readings, I wonder what specific research conducted by Dewey at the University of Chicago Laboratory School influenced Wirt. I also wonder what research was conducted by Wirt and his teachers within Gary Public Schools. Did his teachers conduct research? Where is that research now? My thoughts may not be adding value to our class discussion of the assigned texts yet, but I did have the urge to share my initial thoughts as they wonder the halls of public schools in existence over a century ago. With hundreds of immigrant children entering Gary Public Schools, what would those teachers have thought and done had they known the phrase ‘Teacher Research?’
ReplyDeleteCourtney, I just read your post and can't help but respond briefly: yes, my experience was VERY must like that. To put it candidly, the seasoned teachers had no interest in professional development or research. They were jaded, to say the least; they were tired of the latest "trends" in education and just did the bare minimum of what we were required to do to get by. They would role their eyes and say things like, "oh this again, remember when we had to do X back in the 1980s and it was just like this curriculum mapping they're asking us to do now...sigh." I wish I could say I'm exaggerating, and during every one of these "professional developing days," which, in their defense, often were a joke like the lady I mentioned before from the state who came in and told us to have students make stuff up and write 5 paragraph themes, I would sit, like Courtney mentioned, feeling torn between wishing we really were doing something valuable and wishing that I was just teaching because I was so tired of hearing them complain about everything! I *really* wish I could have been in a district like Shay's - that's awesome that your school is so progressive (: That said, in response to your question about being "radical local," which I also LOVED, I still think it's essential. I was thinking about your comment in light of future teachers and how so much of the research says that new teachers teach the way they were taught and about how if we provide them with a radically new way to approach education that this will trickle down and positively affects our students' students. It's at least something, right?! (:
ReplyDeleteFROM SUDHA:
ReplyDeleteThe needs of the student must be at the core
of any type of teacher-initiated research. There
should be no other agenda: everyone should be
working for the greater good.
Whatever terminology is used, observation is
the key. The teacher needs to focus on
observing the behavior of the students;
this will reveal the best curriculum. The teacher
will then understand which students learn better
through lecturing or hands-on activities.
Interdisciplinary studies, such as growing a garden
would instruct the students on a variety of subjects:
conservation, botany, nutrition, as well as the
history of gardens, measuring the amount of
plant food needed, and so on.
In Inquiry As Stance, there was another
interdisciplinary study mentioned in regard to
literacy in which the students were involved in learning
radio, filmmaking, and writing. Another example from the
book was planting the seed in the minds of primary
school children with environmental learning activities.
The key to social change is education.
The current status quo philosophy needs to be
disbanded, with teachers teaching students how
to pass standardized tests in order to obtain funding
for the schools. Collaborative research with schools
facing similar difficulties could meet via the Internet
and problem solve: after the virtual classroom
meetings, each student could write an essay on how
he or she learns best, and possible solutions to
problems the schools are facing. This approach
could be particularly useful to schools with a
diverse student population.
Since education is ultimately about the students,
they should be consulted in shared problem solving,
students as researchers in an inquiry-oriented
curriculum. Why should the responsibility of
education be solely on teachers? Teachers should
be empowering their students to learn.
Thank you
Sudha
--
Sudha Pillai
Graduate Student
College of Education
Curriculum and Instruction
Purdue University
This is very interesting. As I read for this week, I came to many of the same conclusions the class did. I noticed the undertone of teachers working together to create change and an environment where inquiry and research is possible and recognized. The readings made it abundantly clear that practitioner research has found its niche, and is going nowhere!
ReplyDeleteHowever, as the quote from Cochran-Smith and Lytle points out, the increasing growth of practitioner research has created a considerable range of research that is full of stamina but might just undercut “its coherence as an intellectual and social movement with a palpable impact on emerging policies” (p. 35). Emerging policies…this is where anger starts to bubble at the back of my throat. I do not know how to explain the hatred I feel for reasons why teachers are not taken seriously enough to create, reconstruct, and/or influence emerging policies. And now Cochran-Smith and Lytle say that the wide range of teacher research might be the reason why policy makes ignore the entire lot! AHHHHHHHHHH!
I know that I am being extreme. I understand that it is important to create “lateral citations” in practitioner research; that it is necessary to “connect the work of different individuals, communities, networks, and institutions” (p. 35). I also understand that what is done by practitioner research is not focused on professional development or policy makeovers, but instead to generate “local and public knowledge to inform wider social change and educational equity” (p.35). With all that said, it is still true that practitioner research continues to be ignored by “the higher-ups”, not because of its validity but because of its disparity.
Okay, let me have this side note. When I was an undergraduate, I was fortunate enough to perform an action research project. My naivety towards this project is laughable. First, I had no idea that there was this practitioner research movement that had been alive and well for twenty plus years, supporting and advocating for research done in the classroom. I remember thinking, “Duh, of course I am doing research in a classroom…where else would I do it?” I remember thinking that action research was a requirement among all teaching departments. I remember thinking that I would be expected to do this later in my life, once I am a practicing teacher, and that I might as well gain all the knowledge I could through this practice run, i.e. the course assignment. But then I became a practicing teacher and I joined a teaching department, and no one asked me for my required action research project; many did not even know what action research was…and just like Beth’s experience, many mocked me by saying that “action researcher” existed as this other hot topic from the 80s and it never worked!
Maybe these disparities would not exist if it were some sort of teacher requirement…and I am not taking about professional development (oh, the disgust I feel for professional development—please, someone, teach me the latest trend in education, as I listen to the snickering from the “experienced” teachers), but instead a requirement from each school corporation, not from the state, but the teacher’s local community. What would that create?
After thinking about the first quote by McCarthy and Riner, I have to say that I do think that teacher research has become an indirect requirement for maintaining good standing with administration. It seems to have become a sign of being a "good" teacher. In saying this, I recognize that my opinion on the matter might be influenced by the fact that teacher research can be a tool in which the teachers in my school district are evaluated as teachers. Within our building, if you have 3-5 years of teaching experience in our district, you are strongly encouraged to take the research option versus the formal in class observations. I believe the encouragement to take this route is twofold. First, it is less work for the administrators to do since the teachers are doing all of the work. Second, and more importantly, it is a way to show what a great building we are because we have so many teachers conducting their own research within their classrooms.
ReplyDeleteAs I continued to think about this quote, another came to mind. Within Chapter One of Inquiry as a Stance, Cocbran-Smith and Lytle state, "The accountability movement assumes there is a consensus across society about what it means to be educated, whose knowledge and values are of most worth, and what counts as effective" (10). Although I think that they are primarily referencing the rise in standardized testing, I do think that the accountability movement that they are referring to has much to do with this trend towards teacher research. As indicated in the McCarthy and Riner quote, teacher research has become a way to formally document assumptions and/or strongly held beliefs.
Heather, I wanted to respond to you here, but I just realized it will probably be easier to talk to you tonight! :-) I really want to talk about your questions in conjunction with what Beth and Sudha have said.
ReplyDelete