Stephen Bamford. Research Methods in Education MA Unit – First Draft

The creation of quality experience – how do I research this in my classroom?

This paper is partly the 'story so far' of my thinking in explaining how and why I am continuing to ask the question, "How do I improve what I am doing here?" and partly an attempt to mediate between this process and the given curriculum required to achieve recognition of my theories of practice within the academy in the form of an accredited qualification. I also view this writing as an opportunity to communicate with other educators the changes (ontological, epistemological and methodological) that are taking place in my own learning as a result of my engagement with research methods in education, in the hope of contributing the knowledge-base in education.

I continue to identify with Jack Whitehead's "Three Original Ideas" from The Growth of Educational Knowledge, Whitehead (1993). I continue to experience tension from existing as a living contradiction in my social context. I hold certain values very dear whilst at the same time I experience their denial. I hold the belief that my values could be lived more fully in my practice and that this will improve what I am doing. I believe that this description and explanation of my learning and continuing attempts to live my values more fully in practice is a tentatively emerging living educational theory. Whilst this remains unchanged and continues to form the basis of my enquiry, a fundamental shift has taken place in my thinking around the processes of practitioner research.

Whitehead, J (1993) The Growth of Educational Knowledge – Creating Your Own Living Educational Theories, Bournemouth, Hyde Publications

At first I was content to pursue what I perceived as a 'straightforward' question such as, "How will the development of a creative curriculum impact on the learning of the children I teach?" Although I framed my thinking within the zone of action research and living educational theory, providing an account of my own practice, observing, describing and explaining what I was doing and why, it was easy to see how I could also comfortably utilise conventions of practice within social science research to bring what I was noticing and hypothesising about into the public domain. I could generate knowledge about what my pupils were doing and describe and explain their actions. Using test results, work sampling, interview and questionnaires, etc, would provide suitable evidence to back up any claims to knowledge. This was a comfortable existence of sorts – pleasing, I felt, to the academy and to myself. It appeared to tick all the right boxes. However, I sensed it did not adhere to the original principles laid out in the form of the "Three Original Ideas" – where did this truly link with my values as I perceived them? The greatest measure of truth I could find as I laid out my original values was in a statement that I wished to help within my context to provide learners with the capacity to take delight in and to some degree feel uplifted by their own learning, as well as promoting an understanding that learning embraces in some way all the different theories surrounding it. Reading this, I became concerned that I was becoming too detached from the potentially rich experience of my own practice in the process of researching it to create evidence. If I was not truly attuned to the uplifting (and otherwise!) experiences of my own learning, how could this realistically influence my practice and therefore my pupils? My reading of Eisner (1988) helps me to clarify this further.

Getting too close to practice hampers perspective. There is, surely, a grain of truth here. But just as surely the test of theory is how well it enables us to deal with our practical tasks. Theory is a tool, not simply an end within the professional sphere, and tools untested or misunderstood are hardly useful. (p19)

Eisner, E.W. (1988) The Primacy of Experience and the Politics of Method Educational Researcher, Vol.17, No.5, pp15-20

So what has changed? It is in reading around research methods in education that I started to clarify my thinking on precisely what I have begun to do to improve what I am doing as a practitioner-researcher and this formed a concern about methodology from which I could continue to develop my understanding of the influences of my thinking in my own learning, in the learning of others and the learning of those in the social formations in which I teach (Whitehead & McNiff, 2006). I believe that what I am doing has moved beyond the necessity to ask about one particular element of teaching and learning, such as creativity, pupil voice, or a curriculum-based component. It is helpful for me at this point to again identify with Elliot Eisner, in his presidential address to the American Educational Research Association, Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research, Eisner (1993)

I came to believe that humans do not simply have experience; they have a hand in its creation, and the quality of their creation depends upon the ways they employ their minds.

A second idea that has guided my journey is the belief that the use of mind is the most potent means of its development. What we think about matters. What we try to do with what we think about matters. And so it follows, what schools allow children to think about shapes, in ways perhaps more significant than we realize, the kinds of minds they come to own. As the English sociologist Basil Bernstein suggests, the curriculum is a mind altering device (1971). We might extend his observation and say, "Education itself is a mind-making process."(p. 5)

Eisner, E.W. (1993) Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research. Educational Researcher, Vol.22, No. 7, pp5-11

It is the ideas of created quality experience and the use of mind that have become so interesting to me. I believe they point the way forward to a focus on values embedded within ontology, epistemology and therefore methodology and, for the purposes of this paper, research methods themselves. In a written response to a student's question, Jack Whitehead drew attention to what Marion Dadds and Susan Hart refer to as

methodological inventiveness (Whitehead 2006).

Perhaps the most important new insight for both of us has been awareness that, for some

practitioner researchers, creating their own unique way through their research may be as important as their self-chosen research focus. We had understood for many years that substantive choice was fundamental to the motivation and effectiveness of practitioner research (Dadds 1995); that what practitioners chose to research was important to their sense of engagement and purpose. But we had understood far less well that how practitioners chose to research, and their sense of control over this, could be equally important to their motivation, their sense of identity within the research and their research outcomes." (Dadds & Hart, p. 166, 2001)

Dadds, M. & Hart, S. (2001) Doing Practitioner Research Differently, p. 166. London;

RoutledgeFalmer.

I wish to identify with this concept of 'methodological inventiveness,' in as much as whilst I wish to focus my enquiry on the creation of quality experience, my greater purpose is to examine critically the how of the practitioner-research process. I see this as a means of generating a living theory that in of itself is transforming and improving what I am doing and is in turn a transforming influence on those with whom I share the leaning space.

I am developing my awareness of the pitfalls that present themselves as I choose to focus on communicating this. I am made aware of the need to define and articulate the standards of judgement I will use to evaluate my own work and make these available to the wider educational research community. In this I am influenced by the work of Jack Whitehead and Jean McNiff in "Action Research/Living Theory…" (Whitehead & McNiff, 2006) and like them I wish to consistently produce a contribution that stands the test of the Research Assessment Exercise (2008) standards of originality, significance and rigour. This critical examination process, then, carries with it a greater weight of expectation. It needs to respond appropriately to more than one set of standards – not only my own. Dadds and Heart go on to draw attention to this. Although they advocate the gift of controlled judgement for some practitioner-researchers to create their own methodological path through their research, they are careful to mention standards of validity and integrity in those choices:

If our aim is to create conditions that facilitate methodological inventiveness, we need to ensure as far as possible that our pedagogical approaches match the message that we seek to communicate. More important than adhering to any specific methodological approach, be it that of traditional social science or traditional action research. may be the willingness and courage of practitioners – and those who support them – to create enquiry approaches that enable new, valid understandings to develop; understandings that empower practitioners to improve their work for the beneficiaries in their care. Practitioner research methodologies are with us to serve professional practices. So what genuinely matters are the purposes of practice which the research seeks to serve, and the integrity with which the practitioner researcher makes methodological choices about ways of achieving those purposes. No methodology is, or should, cast in stone, if we accept that professional intention should be informing research processes, not pre-set ideas about methods of techniques. (Dadds & Hart, p. 169, 2001)

Dadds, M. & Hart, S. (2001) Doing Practitioner Research Differently, p. 169. London;

RoutledgeFalmer.

It is not difficult to understand the need to respond with validity and integrity to critical standards of judgement in communicating with the wider educational community if I wish my work to, for example, influence debates about the future of educational policy and be considered as sound theory rather than simply examples of good practice. The framework of social science research is once again tempting because it is an accepted form of generating theory. Eisner (1988) provides strong argument for sticking with the language of science when articulating theory and research:

In our schools and in research communities in education, the language of science and propositional forms of discourse have been dominant. Knowledge is defined within these forms…

There are very good reasons for the hegemony of propositional discourse in educational theory and research. Propositional language is the vehicle, par excellence, for precise communication. When terms are made conventional and the rules of syntax codified, the possibility of sharing meanings is increased. (p. 16)

Furthermore, sharing ones own practice with others and using purposeful investigation to gather data and generate evidence to test emerging theories should be very familiar to any teacher who has extended their studies beyond the initial requirements for qualified status. However, I think I have already touched upon reasons why I am drawn away from this approach.

I wish to generate theory about what I am doing to influence others. For this reason practitioner research seems a strong direction to take, despite the situation that there are continuing debates surrounding the forms of representation for action-research-based evidence such as narrative or audio-visual materials. As Eisner states: "We worry about claims that cannot be tested and we believe that unless assertions are made in propositional terms, we have no good way to test their truth…We seem to believe that what we cannot say, we cannot know…" (Eisner, 1988 p. 16) This however, is revealed as a means to communicate a challenge when later in the article he clearly advocates the pursuit of 'methods and languages that do justice to what we have seen...' In the hope that 'our politics will become a liberating force for both understanding and enhancing the educational process' (p. 20) This is echoed in the idea of 'multi-layered and multi-dimensional' proof of quality for this area of research that Furlong and Oancea view as 'socially robust':

Applied and practice-based research are not methodologically depleted forms of research; rather they can be innovatory modes of research that cater for a different set of needs and define quality in terms of wider social robustness.

We have also noted that applied and practice- based research stand at the intersection of many interest groups and thus of many interpretations of quality; any assessment of quality therefore needs to be multi-layered, and multi-dimensional in approach. (p 9)

Furlong, J & Oancea, A (2005) Assessing Quality in Applied and Practice-based Educational Research. A Framework for Discussion. Retrieved from www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/Images/assessing_quality_shortreport 8/8/06

I certainly wish to investigate alternative forms of representation like those stated above in providing evidence to support my theoretical ideas, as these researchers have simply whet my appetite for this seemingly risky business, by asserting that the rewards for such behaviour may, if undertaken somehow with rigour, have greater validity and impact from the context of the practitioner. Who could resist?

There is another concern here in my case, however. The very action of recording my own research, even as a narrative or on film, creates within me a detached, social scientist that is looking in from the outside at someone else's practice. How can I avoid this? There is another helpful step upon my journey to be found at this point. If I am settled on the role of research-practitioner, in turning the lens upon myself, I can further rise to the appropriate critical standards of judgement by drawing on the idea of living theory in action research. As I have mentioned, I am influenced by the work of Jack Whitehead and Jean McNiff in this and understand my practice as a form of real-life theorizing. An important aspect of this approach is related to the standards of judgement I will use to evaluate my own work. A living theory approach asserts that I should use living standards to make critical judgements about the quality of my practice and that these should be based on my values. By doing this I hope to avoid the detachment I may experience through producing an appropriate narrative of the process of my practice, whilst still producing an accessible account through which my claims to knowledge may be tested for validity through the critical feedback of others.