The Process of Inquiry

As I read through the academic texts on qualitative research and teacher education, I can’t help but question the methodology of my choice.  During my PGD, I became fully engaged in teacher inquiry.  I learned so much about myself, my teaching and student learning from the process.  I wonder if I would have ever gained as much insight from a strictly positivist study? Being a Public school teacher is all about the relationship between the learner and the teacher — that is the reality.  During the past few years, I have come to describe my entire reason for coming to work each day is to experience the “moment” with each child.  In my mind’s eye, I see I am sitting beside the child.  We are either listening, talking or just watching.  the moment of learning can not be quantified.  The presence can sometimes not be described in words, even. Yet, over the course of the year, you can see the qualitative and quantitative outcomes of such a practice.  As post positivism asserts, we, the researcher must be aware of our own stance and biases when we approach qualitative research.

Qualitative research is a holistic stance, as is described in the bricoleur paragraphs. It is the ability to see the forest for the trees. In a classroom environment, a teacher can not isolate one aspect of students’ learning. Learning continuously overlaps and weaves together with other facets of children’s development, history, curriculum and daily life.  A teacher researcher would find that by separating controls, the task of research would be skewed and fragmented.  The only other alternative thus far is the traditional empirical scientific research described at the beginning of the Denzin and Lincoln paper; and they have made clear the potential harm of separating the researcher and the Other.

However, I can not turn a blind eye to the criticisms of Inquiry Research.  Below is my list.

1.  Because the qualitative researcher is an active participant in her study environment, where does the truth lie?  Does she make the truth? Does she change the course of study? Does she make her own new but subjective knowledge?  How can truth (which is generalized) be formed if it is only according to the micro context of one classroom and one teacher?  How can a research study be followed through to an end?  As an active agent of change and of observation, how can the researcher see the alternatives? “Politicians and scientists sometimes call qualitative researchers journalists or soft scientists.”  (p. 8, Handbook of Qualitative Research; Denzin & Lincoln)
2. Qualitative Research is knowing how to balance the broad, interpretive and the narrow, critical  perspectives.  By understanding the dichotomies, the teacher researcher can continue to bear light on a subjective but empirically proven learning phenomena. Whatever the case, teachers need to be aware and resist the movement of “placing it (qualitative research) back inside the box of positivism.”
3. Methodology vs. Method:

• “ology” suffix means the “study of…”: this is the theory of the practice, the methodology of self-study, teacher inquiry theories.  Some relevant people: Stephen Brooks, Parker Palmer, Henri Giroux etc.
• method is the application or the things you do to collect your data.  These include focus groups, surveys, interviews, video, recordings, samples.

1. Tensions: for many years, there are many researchers who have debated the relevance and difference between knowledge and evidence.

• Refer to the 8 critiques in “Inquiry as Stance.”
• some academics can believe in qualitative research but don’t believe that researchers should research themselves. However, many also believe that this is relevant, it is important to know the self first before you can research your subjects.

In conclusion, I need to be much more mindful, diligent and purposeful in my next teacher inquiry and self-study.  I believe this methodology to be a very important step in creating meaningful, ethical working conditions for not just education but in many other disciplines. I wonder if the MBA degrees incorporated such a method, perhaps the onslaught of CEO corruption of the early 2000’s would have been avoided? Today, as I look around, there is still a great need for self-study among many professions other than teaching.

Class Notes:

Revolution via Technology:

• Robert Boyle: first father of experimentation (17th c.); he claimed 3 distinct techies to experimentation:
• Material Technology
• Literary Technology: experiments would be opened to everyone, everyone could come to the same conclusion and understanding.
• Social Technology: an idea is offered to be refuted.

• Thomas Hobbs: opposed to the idea of if there could be a vacuum in nature, then there could be a vacuum in society.

As the bricoleur and the montage:  maybe make the child represented as a quilt.

Collection and curation: this is like the common place book, how will you keep track of

Table 1.1 Follow these phases in my inquiry work.

Phase 1: Researcher as a Multicultural subject:  this is the self part, important to include who you are, your history.

Phase 2: Theoretical Paradigms and Perspectives: many teachers see ourselves as constructivists and connectionists.

• there are many multiple views, not just one objective view
• understanding is co-created
• research should be thought in terms of dependability and transferability rather than reliability and validity
• Social constructivism, Radical constructivism, etc. Which constructivist are you?

Phase 3: Research Strategies: 

Phase 4: Pragmatics: how are you going to do what you want to do?

Phase 5: The Art, Practices, and Politics of Interpretation and Evaluation: how will you interpret what I have written? What choices do we make when we write up the data? What do we leave out? What stays in? How will you respond to those who question you? How can you explain your work from those who look for quantitative results?

Critical Friendship/Collaboration in Action

– Shawn vs. Michael: an interpretative discussion — Teaching and Anthropology

• Michael’s body language is very inviting. He is very positive, saying thank you for saying that.
• they are persuing their own teacher inquiry project.
• how can critical friends help each other to grow? They chose to choose a book and discuss once a month.

– Participative observation similar to teacher inquiry: About 20 years ago, anthropology, 2 anthropologist came back from the same field with two different stories. But we realize that we all bring different perspectives. This is relevant.

– “I am an anthropologist within my own village.” Teachers are doing the same work within their classrooms.

• What is knowledge, what is truth? If my truth is my own, and yours is your own truth. How does that impact your teaching?  Answer: When you teach, you are teaching to your own informed knowledge anyways. We do need to be aware of what is my truth, what are my values, what are my views. We need to understand ourselves so that we can be objective to others’ views. — The key is to be mindful of our biases.

– Knowledge within our own context is not as deep/objective as knowledge from outside our context.

– Recursive element of teacher inquiry helps us to go deeper and deeper in the same context. It is so easy to take things for granted, we need to re-awake ourselves so we can grow.

– Alfie Kohn: there is a difference between doing to children and working with children.

• “You want this, but you do that — what are you doing to help children learn?”
• read his work, “Getting hit on the head lessons.”
• but how is our system supporting this? We don’t have the continuity as the grades get higher, the intrinsic motivation falls…
• perhaps look at other settings and histories to see our systems

– Reflexivity: in making an observation that affects the outcome of the situation. We are just not simply doing a,b,c and so on.  Any move we make will affect what we do next.

• this is hard work, very emotionally charged; it is easier to push the issues aside
• s —–> o
• s —–> o
•   <—- to reflect back to self.
• Our settings are constantly changing, our students are always changing.

– Pedagogy is the relationship between teacher and student.

– How do you reconcile between their philosophies and the system? How do we build an environment where these things are possible? Continuity is the opportunity to build the vulnerabilities of children so that they can grow.

What is knowledge?

Teachers have two kinds of knowledge: (Shulman 1986)

• Content + Pedagogical Knowledge = Pedagogical Content knowledge

Craft Knowledge: teachers learn on the job as an apprentice

Personal Practical Knowledge

Reflection-in-action –> Knowing in action (Schon 1983, 1987)

Propositional and Experiential (Munby, Russell & Martin)

Ignorance: thoroughly conscious ignorance

Knowledge is a big subject but ignorance is a bigger one. Knowledge serves more ignorance.  There are low quality ignorance and high quality ignorance. Schools can’t sell facts for a living anymore. “You always get what you screen for.” Schools test will screen for what society wants. What does society want?”

The Care Ethics Debate

It is the second week of school and I feel guilty that we have not touched on the academic curriculum, hardly.  I am still trying to let go of old habits, habits that taunt me to push for beautiful children’s products and quantifiable learning outcomes.  It was all in vane anyhow, as I pushed for math lessons and writing lessons, the children just pushed back with their behaviour.  I am an experienced teacher, how did I let this happen? Of course no learning will happen if I didn’t take the time to bond, to build a community first.

Community is big with me; every year, it becomes the cornerstone of my thematic units.  So I take another look at what it means to be a caring teacher.  On Friday night, I end my exhausting week reading Nel Noddings and her article, The Caring Relation in Teaching.  The reading was a wonderful affirmation to the work I see daily in my school.  Staff members, parents and students constantly greet each other with smiles, offers to help or just a friendly chat.  Our school is often complimented by TOCs and visitors as an energetic, fun place to work. Instinctively, we all believe that care is synonymous with effective teaching but Noddings takes us deeper into the subject.  She introduces the act of caring as an ethic that teachers must be held accountable for.

Before the ethics of care, I think many teachers believe it is their job requirement to just deliver the academic content.  Everything beyond that is gravy and not required.  Personally, I hold academic skill and content very high on my list of requirements.  I would not be comfortable with taking a majority of teaching time building relationships.  After my graduate diploma program, I would say that I like to balance the two, 50% relationship, 50% intellectual academics.  However, at Friday’s Pro-D, my friend and colleague, Jennifer Barker, clarified the situation beautifully.  She said, “…it can’t be describe in percentages; rather, relationship is the foundation of good teaching and learning.”  I love this statement, without a trusting, authentic relationship, there will be no learning.  I would like to share a wonderful Tedtalk about the ethic of caring for teachers: http://video.pbs.org/video/2365006547/

Rita Pearson reminds me that teaching is not just a job, it is a calling.  Not everyone can like everyone, let alone love.  Yet that is the very thing that teachers are called to do, especially with kids that may not fit the mold.  Our job is not only to seek to like our students genuinely but to show them how they are worthy of being liked, even though there may be no evidence of it…yet. The Ethic of care remind us to respect and honour our students even when we are frustrated, tired and challenged beyond our abilities.  

“So teachers become great actors even when we don’t want to come to work…and we teach anyway because that is what we do…every child deserves a champion… we are educators, we were born to do this…we were born to make a difference.”  — Rita Pearson

So let’s go back to Nel Noddings.  Noddings distinguishes the difference between a virtue carer and a relational carer.  Though I have many wonderful things to say about my staff and my school, I realize many of our practices fall under the heading of virtue carer.  We, as teachers, feel the pressure to our Ministry, our school goal and our own biases towards what learning is. We need to carefully reflect our own biases so that we realize when we have stopped listening to the cared-for in the quest for “getting things done.” I love how she talks about listening to the students’ expressed needs.  This seems so significant to me, I would like to say that I try to listen deeply and respond appropriately to my students.  However, I often have an agenda for them, I think I know what  they want or what they need.

Today, I had a test in the role of relational carer.  Our blossoming tween son had a difficult week. He kept forgetting his chores, waking up late, having trouble juggling his social life with his athletic and academic schedule.  So it is no surprise that my husband and I were ready to have “the talk” about responsibility and accountability.  However, we had hardly begun when we realized we something was different. I stopped the conversation and inserted Simone Weil’s, “What are you going through?” After quite a considerate amount of wait time, he managed to tell us his real issue.  It turns out he was experiencing a change or a loss of friendship in his long time “best friend.”  He reacted by becoming involved in all kinds of social groups, leaving him little time for his responsibilities. By opening up the space for our son to speak, we had to withhold the other “curriculum of life.” It turned out to be a very good morning and we eventually were able to talk about his chores and responsibilities.  In the classroom, teachers don’t have the time or space to give this kind of attention to all her students.  Or do they? Each student comes to school with different needs and the need to express them in different ways, at different times.  Observing carefully, listening deeply is the way to bring the care ethic into our classrooms.

A Critical Friend

I finally get to sit at my breakfast nook, sip on a hot cup of java. It is quiet, it is time to reflect. The past week has been a whirlwind of activities and intellectual moments.

Our class reading last week was about being a critical friend. What does it mean to be a critical friend? How critical is a critical friend?  At first, it is easy to answer these questions superficially. Of course a critical friend is important, of course, everyone needs a critical friend and of course, you can be a critical friend to your spouse, best friend and so on, as long as there is trust and love. But let’s look deeper into the idea of critical learning and what makes a friend.  

Critical learning involves putting ourselves in a vulnerable place, admitting that we don’t know or that we are inadequate in our knowledge, skills and even capacities somehow.  This hurdle alone is difficult as a first step.  As teachers, will we be able to invite a friend, a colleague to help us overcome this hurdle? Critical learning is a cycle of investigating into the unknown, to be uncomfortable, to be without a clear outcome.  Our past education and our society has taught us to be productive, goal oriented citizens. Yet critical learning requires us to shed that which limits us in our own learning.  What kind of person is capable of helping us along this ambiguous and tedious journey?  Will they also have had made these journeys themselves? What kind of expertise matters?  Will it be the skills and knowledge of the learning that we will be doing?  Or are knowledge and skills transferable from other disciplines and life experiences?  Another aspect of critical learning is the ability to deeply reflect.  Each reflection upon action drives us deeper into the understandings. Yet, reflection reminds us to go to that place of vulnerability and unveil truths that make us all uncomfortable.  Reflection is an emotional and intense activity, often done privately.  

Let’s look at the word “friend.”  What does it mean to be a friend? Instinctively, I visualize my friends, my husband, those closest to me.  In my work place, I am fortunate to have wonderful friends as well.  We talk reflect on our days, our lessons. We plan and organize activities together.  Can these people be the critical friend that Costa and Kallick spoke of?  I think not. It is possible that anyone of these can BECOME a critical friend, but without the understanding of the process of learning and living, not anyone can be a critical friend.  There are fewer challenging roles in life to be than a critical friend.  In a short list I will try to capture what characteristics a critical friend requires:

• wisdom
• courage
• skills (communication, deep listening, problem solving etc.)
• flexibility
• grace and compassion
• hopeful

The above list is not exhaustive.  When I envision the critical friend, I struggle with the word “friend.”  I am better able to call this person my teacher, my supervisor, my mentor.  Coming to this relationship, I am calling this person to be more to me than I can be to myself.  This person is not my peer (in terms of capacity to grow and learn).  I am requiring this person to bring new, difficult perspectives to my learning.  I think, instinctively, we will always choose friends who like-minded to us.  As a critical friend, it would be more beneficial to seek someone who is outside our circle of comfort. 

Finally, to enter a relationship of critical friendship, we need to first open ourselves to be vulnerable.  We need to enter the relationship with respect, open hearts and open minds.  We must be the one who invites our friend.  Critical learning requires a critical friend, are we up to the challenge of critically learning about ourselves, our practice?  Are we up to challenge of being the critical friend to each other?

Dinner with Andre

Dinner with Andre is a fundamental movie.  In its delivery and content, it embodies authentic learning and living.  In a nutshell, the movie is two hours of two men talking.  They are neither attractive, animated or eventful.  Literally, you watch two men talk as they eat dinner.  It is certainly not one for the main stream box office.  The idea of the movie had me vaguely intrigued, but after twenty minutes, I wanted to leave.  If I ever met a guy like Andre at a party, I would probably run out of the party as fast as I can in search of a cliff to jump off!  However, after 6o minutes of tedious listening and watching, I began like the script and after two hours, I loved the movie.

The purposeful delivery of the movie reminds me of the process of inquiry itself.  Inquiry learning is tedious, un-animated, repetitive.  The ambiguous and difficult nature of the cycle leaves the learner feeling that it is an unreasonable process.  Many will want to abort their learning in pursuit of something more concrete, more goal-oriented, more instantly gratifying.  However, if one just sticks through with it long enough, one will see that there are valuable intangibles that can not be learnt any other way.  The movie, too, gave me so many intangibles that I can not pin point just one.   I am glad that I am reflecting on the movie one week after I watched it.  As I was watching it, I made so many notes that it filled up a quarter of my journal.  However, l would like to share some of my big AHA moments of the movie.

The first significant learning is that once we accept that we are living according to others’ expectations, we are not living.  We can easily be distracted by the mechanical act of living (such as taking out the garbage, making dinner, reaching our quotas at work, and etc.)  As we fill up our days with these comfortable, predictable and instantly gratifying activities, we feel as we have accomplished something.  However, what have we really accomplished?  Were these our own goals? Are they our own reasons for existence?  Andre invites Wally to “break the habit of living. You really have to learn how…you have to be conscious of what you do.”  Who in our world is preventing us to do this? Our economic paradigms, our governments, our own families and peers?  Have we agreed to become the mechanical robots that mindlessly follows with our society’s mandate?  As a citizen of a democratic society, we have the power to transform our society, yet we have traded in that power for daily conveniences and comforts.  The cost is our identities, our intelligence, our capacities to live in a community and, ultimately, our souls.  But firstly, before we can be democratic citizens, we must first understand how to be mindful of ourselves and of the meaning of our individual lives.

Wally talks about how the theatre is trivialized, people just come to watch the theatre because it’s what “people do.” They don’t necessarily understand it, like it or even want to go.  Teaching and schools, I find, is often trivialized by the general public or even by stakeholders.  Not understanding deep learning, people will argue for or against it because they believe it is something of importance to do.  Schools are summed up as bureaucratic institutions that no longer work.  Teachers are seen as whiners who are helpless in “fixing” or creating good students.  Often, there is the view that teachers are the reasons for problems of our youth.  Just as in the theatre industry, deep understanding takes time; it requires a hard look at realities.  Sometimes this reality points back at our own inadequacies and the problems may be too big for us to handle.  It is easier to say we care and put the blame on something else than to realize we have become disenfranchised.  Education is a shared social responsibility.  Good education will pay off to its society tenfold in generations to come.  Is it possible to empower citizens to act mindfully for education?  What will it take to make this possible?

Andre later speaks of New Yorkers building their own prisons.  I think teachers can, too, do this to themselves.  Without realizing it, teachers can exhaustively behave in ways that they think are beneficial to them but in actual fact, contribute to their hurting.  For example, many teachers believe that to be good teachers, they must work hard.  However, what does working hard mean?  Are our actions representative of our authentic selves?  Is “working hard” truly going to make us better teachers, is it going to make our students better learners?  Or are we trying to make ourselves feel good by working hard?  Whose standard are we up holding; our own, our supervisors, our governments’, the general public’s?  Teachers need to be aware of the hegemony that defines the institution of education if we have hope to be free of it, individually and collectively.  Andre is right when he says that people fervently wake up every day to build their own cells that make up their very own prisons.  Then they become the jail guards themselves.  It saddens me to see we teachers are our own worst critics.  We would never show our uncaring side to children, yet we can be so critical to point out when one of us doesn’t “fit the mold.”  I feel very privileged to be in a province that allows me autonomy in my work.  I need to be mindful that autonomy requires trust and respect.  I am a professional who needs to advocate and earn that autonomy.

Finally, I realize that the issues that Andre and Wally speak of are not limited to the theatre or to education.  I believe living is learning.  Living and learning involves all disciplines of life.  The script, I suspect, will probably resonate with anyone who wants to explore their work and life through a critical, reflective lens.  I think I will make a nice dinner, pour some good wine and watch this movie with my husband.  He may never want another movie date with me again or maybe, he will get something out of it as I did.