Practitioner Teacher Inquiry and Research

Carolyn A. Babione

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118588734
• eBook ISBN: 9781118603536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

Teacher inquiry helps improve educational outcomes

Practitioner Teacher Inquiry and Research explores the concept and importance of the teacher practitioner, and prepares students in teacher education courses and programs to conduct research in the classroom. Author Carolyn Babione has extensive experience in undergraduate- and graduate-level teacher training and teacher inquiry coursework. In the book, Babione guides students through the background, theory, and strategy required to successfully conduct classroom research. The first part of the book tackles the "how-to" and "why" of teacher inquiry, while the second part provides students with real-life practitioner inquiry research projects across a range of school settings, content areas, and teaching strategies. The book's discussion includes topics such as:

• Underlying cultural and historical perspectives surrounding the teaching profession
• Hidden stereotypes that limit teacher beliefs about power and voice
• Current curriculum innovation and reflections on modern developments

Practitioner Teacher Inquiry and Research successfully guides and encourages budding teachers to fully understand the importance of their involvement in studying and researching their classroom settings, giving a better understanding of how their beliefs and teaching practices impact classroom learning.

Part 1
Perspectives, Strategies, and Methodologies

Chapter 1
Developing A Concept of Practitioner Teacher Inquiry

---

Learning Objectives

• 
  Examine the beliefs and stereotypes surrounding the feminization of teaching.
• 
  Analyze how teacher identity as caring has impacted the inquiry stance.
• 
  Evaluate how teacher identity must change as society changes.
• 
  Distinguish interpretive science from positivism.

---

Juxtaposed against traditional forms of research, this chapter discusses what practitioner teacher inquiry is, arguing that the changing environment of schooling necessitates a change in teacher identity to include the concept of inquiry study. The chapter affords readers the opportunity to look closely at how practitioner teacher inquiry is influenced by teacher identities and by long-standing beliefs, including stereotypes. Teachers are asked to analyze how the history of resegregation of teaching to a female profession has forestalled the professional work of teachers in schools, contributing to silencing the voices of teachers. As teachers analyze beliefs and values present in today's cultures, including stereotypes of teacher identity that they themselves may have accepted as facts, teacher identity moves closer to professional empowerment over curriculum and instruction needed to educate the youth of our rapidly changing world.

How to Define Research

Contemporary society is creating a new form of culture, with a broad notion of learning, substituting the concept of ready-made knowledge with a more liberating possibility of creating knowledge. There are two streams in history, one a story of reactive responding and one of building and creating (Fritz, 1989).

Positivism and Interpretive Research

Research paradigms are sets of basic principles that provide frameworks for the research process (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Fundamental philosophical systems of science distinguish approaches to research paradigms. The field of science can be viewed through sociological processes that have occurred through history (Kuhn, 1970; Popper, 1968).

Originally established in the seventeenth-century philosophical Age of Reason, the research paradigm of traditional positivism brought certainty and a sense of understanding to a world that was viewed as rational; one could research and find the “truth” (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004). By the twentieth century, these traditional research models, designed for the natural sciences, were applied to large-scale school effectiveness research.

traditional positivism

a philosophy of science that involves a friendly-hostile cooperation of scientists in which certainty and verifiability are viewed as rational and providing empirical evidence

Advanced civilizations across the world, including institutions such as schools, are confronted by what many believe to be irreversible economic and social change. It is commonplace to hear that society, and life in general, is shifting and changing rapidly. High-speed information networks, a global media industry, and an economy that relies on the exchange of knowledge rather than manufactured products, call for building and creating but also produce tremendous uncertainty (Williamson & Morgan, 2009).

Schools cannot fall behind but must keep pace with the ever-faster rate of societal change. Even in the face of tightly controlled school policies, the nature of schooling is embedded in complexity, and variation, rather than uniformity, is the norm. Those closest to education argue that student development is affected by multiple factors within and beyond school, which relate to each other in complex ways, and that it is a mistake to impose mechanistic models of linear rationality on schools (Wrigley, 2003).

Today, there is a resurgence of confidence in the power of traditional positivism and statistical methodologies that will produce “empirical evidence” to support best practices in school settings (Cochran-Smith, 2004). However, Berliner (2002) cautioned that the language of “hard science” is for bridges and sending rockets to the moon and not designed for complex issues in school settings. Conducting randomized field trials to evaluate school programs does not capture the complexity that surrounds contemporary schools. These top-down models of research fail to capture the evolving sociocultural aspects of the school settings.

Unfortunately, much of the current thrust for education research is in reaction or response to societal changes rather than in building on these changes. Instructional innovations that are statistically effective in one school setting may not be successful in another context or school setting. Additionally, positivist research methods can be misleading and confusing to P–12 teachers, untrained to understand and work within these methodologies.

The world is in an age of transition and we can no longer accept quick-fix mechanistic solutions to problems facing work careers, such as education. Complexity theory involves the study of complex and chaotic systems in which small consequences can evoke significant changes in outcomes. Development and change are viewed as natural and associated with adaptation to one's environment based on experience.

complexity theory

the study of complex and chaotic systems in which small consequences produce changes

Interpretive science advanced on the premise that reality is no longer the same for everyone; there are multiple versions of truths or realities. In particular, social scientists reject the emphasis on linear causality and variable-centered models of research, arguing that social reality exists independent of perceptions about it (Hakim, 2000).

interpretive science

the premise that people create their own meanings as they interact with others, as opposed to an objective reality that can be discovered

Supporters of interpretive science believe that the nature of reality is so complex that isolating and examining specific elements of a phenomenon result in fragmented understandings. Interpreting, on the other hand, describes how people make sense of their own experiences and the experiences of others (Schnelker, 2006). Interpretive research requires more multidisciplinary and multimethod methodologies that could be used to effectively study “the erratic, runaway character of modernity” (Giddens, 1991, p. 30). Complexity theory has provided educators with a new logic to reframe complex questions. Qualitative and holistic studies are helpful tools for teachers as they seek to grasp change processes resulting from the exploration of these complex questions.

Practitioner Teacher Inquiry Study

The teacher inquiry movement is a response to the great complexity inherent in a teacher's job, to changes in society, and to the influences from social science fields studying in school settings. This relatively new branch of interpretive research necessitates that, as teaching practitioners, we alter many of our traditional ideas about the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired. This shift in research from a technical rationalistic industrial and scientific model to include the critical inclusion of teacher knowledge involves a shift from the positivistic “knowing that” to “knowing how.”

teacher inquiry

a response to the complexity in society and schools in which teachers master skills of inquiry to create and critique contextual influences of teaching and learning within the school and community settings

The rejection of an absolutist stance and the assertion of contextual influences found in the interpretive paradigm are fundamental to practitioner teacher inquiry. Teachers who conduct inquiry studies in their classrooms are no longer viewed as “consumers” of knowledge. Classroom teachers master skills to create and critique knowledge and use this understanding in the context of their own teaching.

The teacher as researcher movement is widely acknowledged and endorsed today (Auger & Wideman, 2000; Blackwell & Diez, 1999; Green & Brown, 2006; Zeichner & Gore, 1995). Practitioner teacher inquiry is associated with the development of skills in decision making and problem solving necessary for school reform initiatives (Ben-Peretz, 2011; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Slavin, 1997; Ulichny & Schoener, 1996) and in cognitive processing necessary to explore problems and dilemmas (Schön, 1983). Inqu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Tables, Figures, and Exhibits
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Author
• The Contributors
• Part 1: Perspectives, Strategies, and Methodologies
• Part 2: Teacher Inquiry into Practice
• Glossary
• Index
• Credits
• End User License Agreement