All posts by Vickie

College teaching, research methodology

Teaching research methodology

This is a blog post I made after class, which started out as an email to a student who had to be absent. Like most successful students, she views the purpose of class as imparting information and asked me what information she had missed. Part of my role as an instructor is to pry students’ fingers off this notion. Of course there is information that happens. We have just started reading Writing the New Ethnography by H.L. Goodall.

As for what we did in class tonight in terms of information, hmm, well, I talked about the "crisis of representation" and modern social science. I talked a little about positivism, positivistic science, the death of positivistic science with the development of quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity, and how this coincided with the collapse of "civilized" Europe in WWI, the ensuing worldwide depression, the Russian Revolution, WWII and then the atom bomb. The foundational assumptions of the European intellectual tradition were challenged by both science and historical catastrophe. This led to people in the social sciences questioning the enterprise of scientifically describing the experiences of others, and to the question of how it is possible to represent the experience of others. What gives anyone the right to make pronouncements about others? And besides that, how can anyone claim that any amount of data collection can give a complete picture of an experience? And furthermore, how can words in a journal article or a book accurately convey the reality of the people it describes? This is the "crisis of representation." How do we represent the world? It is not possible. We just do the best we can, acknowledging the limitations.

I would add, which I did not in class, that the research rings truest when the limitations are discussed as specifically as possible. There are always of course unknown limitations, but the researcher does the best she can with identifying them, beginning with her own biases. Another way researchers make clear what limitations might exist is by being very forthright about how the data was collected, what she was doing during the data collection, how she reacted emotionally and intellectually to the data. When observing, recording these reactions is crucial.

A researcher is her or himself the ultimate instrument of data collection. It is through his brain and the connections he makes in his mind that the data acquires meaning. The self of the researcher interacts with the selves in the research setting. Therefore it is important to acknowledge the role of the self in doing research, and to be open and self-reflective about it. This is discussed a little in Goodall Ch. 1. He’s going to talk more about it in further chapters. We talked about good writing being transformative.

In discussing students’ responses to the Goodall book, we got off onto the topic of nothing ever being good enough in academia, it is always open to critique. There is a sense that we should have done more. While this is true of society to some extent, it is a major practice in academia. Critique is the lifeblood of the academy.

We spent most of the class time reviewing each other’s research questions through a gallery walk and comments made on sticky notes. I don’t know that this is something we could tell you about. You had to be there. I deliberately design in-person class using a Vygotskian scaffolding model, as discussed in the Walqui and vanLier chapters I sent you. This means me and other students responding to each other in ways which allow for "authoring" of knowledge rather than its consumption. ("Authoring" is a term from literary criticism, originated by Mikhail Bakhtin.) My goal is that a ZPD arises spontaneously based on my intuition about what might be a productive direction for generating new knowledge. I know I miss things, and let drop threads of conversation which might be valuable, but on the whole I’m satisfied that this provides an environment for deep learning.

So we considered research questions at length, and worked together to think about how to help each other with our questions.

social justice, Standards and accountability

what’s up with this?

How am I going to write about this topic which makes me so very angry? What is it we think we’re doing as educators? This is for real, it affects children’s lives. If teachers don’t do the best for kids, they are harmed, and if a ghetto child gets poor teaching 3 years in a row, well, you know. It’s practically set in stone.

My friend Konny asked me if I would be willing to diagnose reading difficulties of her bookkeeper’s daughter. This isn’t my field of expertise, although I learned some things about literacy in grad school. Plus I taught first grade. So I said I would see if there was anything I could do. I suggested the child bring two books with her, one that was easy for her to read, and one that was difficult.

The girl I will call Jamila arrived at my door, with her mother,  quiet and downcast. I had been expecting an 8 year old, but Jamila is 10. Konny remembered her as a lively, creative, happy child with a wonderful spark.

Well, it quickly became apparent that Jamila could decode but wasn’t comprehending. I did a short reciprocal teaching session and discussed with her mom that Jamila was perfectly smart, she just didn’t know that reading is thinking. The kinds of problems she was having, not reading longer words correctly, was due to her not knowing that the words were supposed to make sense in the sentence, or even that sentences are supposed to make sense. If you don’t know that, then any long word is as good as another. Somehow, her reading instruction in school had missed this point.

Konny saw Jamila shortly thereafter, and the child proudly told her, “I’m not stupid!”

Wow, how many other kids in Jamila’s public school think they’re stupid not because they are, but because their teachers don’t know what they’re doing? These are schools where kids are tested every week, do benchmark tests every 9 weeks. But nobody is teaching.

So that’s what I mean, I’m really really angry about this. We have known about reading as thinking for at least 25 years—this research was done in the 1980’s. What kind of education leads an intelligent 10 year old girl to think she is stupid?

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Vygotsky and On-Line Learning

I’m in the midst of commenting on grad students’ lit reviews submitted electronically. This is our online class for the week. Many students profusely thank me for “helping” them. I reply that what I’m doing is teaching.

Of course this is a different paradigm of teaching, one made possible by e-learning. Specifically what I do is use comments to engage the students in conversation with a more knowledgeable other, by which I mean me the professor, MKO in the jargon.

I’m still digesting Walqui & van Lier’s chapters on Vygotsky.

Walqui, A., & Van Lier, L. (2010). Scaffolding the academic success of adolescent English language learners. San Francisco, CA: WestEd.

E-learning has enormous potential if used in this way.

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Common Core State Standards

  • Victoria Deneroff

  • I’ve just started researching the history of CCSS and standards in general because I’ll be teaching a special topics class about them. In the pre-standards days, textbooks determined curriculum. I started teaching  high school in the 80’s, and when I asked the department chair what the curriculum for earth science was, he said, "Well you have the textbook, don’t you?"

  • This mindset, or perhaps you could call it a paradigm, of curriculum being presented to rather than developed by teachers, carried over into the standards era. People expect that they will be told what to teach, even when we have standards that expect teachers to develop their own curriculum.

  • In this vein, ten years ago when I was teaching a masters-level class in elementary mathematics pedagogy in Los Angeles, I assigned the students to develop a mathematics unit to teach their students about the meaning of the equal sign. The class kind of stared at me. Finally somebody said something very close to: We don’t know how to design lessons any more. All of their lessons were derived from the central office and were completely scripted.
    I don’t think state DOE’s and other people in charge of curriculum understand the re-education it will take to use CCSS the way they were intended.

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    Educational research in the service of children and youth

    I’ve had a bit of an epiphany in the last few days.

    It started when I attended an NSTA regional conference for science teachers. All anyone could talk about was standards, especially Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). I attended a forum on NGSS and diversity. I left skeptical. The only ones who are likely to benefit are people in the education biz, including professors of education, textbook publishers, and the testing business.

    What makes anyone think promulgating new standards is going to fix education?  There was a frenzy of discussion of 21st Century skills, globalization, competition, etc. The degree to which education needs fixing is not clear to me, at this point. I don’t think it’s skills. What needs to happen is we need to stop using the educational system to harm kids.

    By harm I mean that most people, say 75%, leave high school feeling that they are stupid. Harping on competition and skills is not going to change this. In the 1950’s Talcott Parsons, structuralist sociologist, predicted that increasing requirements in schools would have the unintended consequence of increasing students’ alienation. I believe we are seeing that. Teachers I talk with are tearing their hair out over “unmotivated” students.

    Besides, there seems to be a repeat of previous magical thinking: Promulgating standards does not mean anyone is going to change the way they teach.

    I am in the education biz to serve children. It’s not to further my career, keep my job, etc. The conference brought me up sharply. What am I doing here?

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    Social practice theories

    My intellectual commitments derive from Jean Lave, Courtney Cazden, Fred Erickson, Kris Gutierrez–social practice theory. Linguists such as James Crashen come to the same conclusion from a different angle.  Teachers who  actually use an alternate definition of learning in their classrooms see students thrive as learners. That makes the scholarly work worthwhile.

    How then do we move teachers away from assumptions about learning that create inequality toward an inclusive education for all? I think Rosebery & Warren’s research is a key. They work with small groups of teachers over years to facilitate their understanding of what students are actually doing when they talk about science.

    Through the social practice theory lens, teaching is a social practice based on common assumptions of what learning is. My experience is that people don’t like to examine their cultural assumptions, and that the work requires patience and persistence. I’m working on how teachers construct identities, that is, their ideas of what it means to be a teacher, and what sorts of activities support identity change.

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    Equity and learning

  • The issue of tracking-streaming-leveling, whatever you call it, is a knotty one. One thing we know for pretty much certain is that tracking hurts kids on the bottom. Once a child is placed in the bottom level, it’s almost impossible for them leave it, because opportunity to learn is decreased for the low-track students. I would argue it also hurts high track kids because they get an inflated view of their abilities, reinforcing their sense of privilege. Moreover, it is antidemocratic to provide opportunity to only some (who almost always are upper SES). On the other hand, a multi-leveled classroom requires an entirely different way of teaching, one that provides entry points for students of all prior achievement levels. The vast majority of teachers don’t know how to pull this off, and the result is harmful to high, medium and low students, as well as the teacher. My opinion, based on a lot of observation, is that traditional teacher-centered instruction well done is vastly superior to student-centered teaching of mediocre quality, a situation in which nobody seems to learn much of anything. In other words, I think reform pedagogies are more sensitive to the skill of the teacher. I seem in my posts to come back time and again for the need to transform teaching.

    Education in the US, and in the countries which use European-derived systems of schooling, are based on the assumption that knowledge is an acquisition of information by individuals. We believe it is "natural" that some students learn better than others. Our entire education system is based on this belief. We develop standardized tests and have a multi-billion dollar industry based on this premise. However, in almost all learning situations outside of school, people learn new ideas and new skills through participating in the milieu in which they find themselves. For example, Mayan girls sit beside their mothers as they weave, help as they can, and over time begin to make their own weavings. No one "teaches" them. They learn through participating in village life. (This is documented by theorist Barbara Rogoff. Her book, The Cultural Nature of Human Development, is well worth reading.) Studies of non-school learning repeatedly show that teaching is not required for learning. Rogoff defines learning as "transformation of participation." In fact, all children who are not neurologically compromised accomplish the incredibly complex task of learning their mother tongue through their participation in family and community life, and do so without explicit teaching. How then, can we design educational institutions in which students are engaged in tasks where they can increase their competence? What sort of STEM tasks can children do that allow them to participate at more and more complex levels?

  • As far as transforming teaching, we need first to acknowledge the harm that the current view of learning causes. We also need to recognize that our assumptions about learning, when we investigate them, are simply not valid. Teachers need tools to understand the cognitive skills which each student brings to a classroom. They need to understand that ALL children are attempting to make sense of the schooling they receive. In this vein, I recommend Warren & Rosebery’s work. If you don’t know it, their edited book, Teaching Science to English Language Learners, is the result of many years of working with teachers to overcome deficit views of some students.

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    Namaste

    All of what I write here will be bullshit. Still, I’m going to write it. It seems the Divine Shakti has inspired it. This is no claim to be special, since anything anyone does is through the inspiration of the Divine Shakti. In fact, I’m told by my teacher that anything anyone does is an illusion and that everything is the action of Shakti, that there are no persons in reality.

    The words of the scriptures, gurus and teachers tell me I’m not doing anything, and in fact that there is no me. The me often finds herself in a confused state, since she knows there is no me and yet doesn’t she know what else to do, if that is comprehensible at all. The problem  is the “doing.” There is no doer and nothing is done. Oh crap.

    Reasoning will not get anywhere, as the above paragraph shows. I understand there is no point in trying to figure it out. Only fear holds me back. I ignore it as I am able and strike out for the other shore. Gone, gone, gone beyond.

    I have always been here and now. Nisargadatta Maharaj says to investigate the I am.

    The me recently went through a period of intense spiritual practice, japa, contemplation, and for now that is over. I bow to all the gurus, teachers and realized beings who are the Self as I am the Self. Namaste.

    College teaching, science education reform, STEM Education

    Science Education for All. I Mean it: Each and All

    I’m reading Larry Cuban’s new book, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice, which has a chapter on the history of science education reform. (Note the subtitle, Change without Reform in American Education.) He quotes Jonathan Osborne, who points out that the goals of science education appear to be contradictory. Are we aiming to produce scientifically literate citizens or future scientists and engineers?

    I thought about it for few minutes, and came down on the side of scientific literacy. Well,  but certainly we do need future scientists and engineers. Why can’t we have both?

    If you read some of my blog posts, one of the issues I’ve been grappling with is college science teaching. Post-secondary instruction drives the whole show. Future K-12 science teachers quite naturally try to reproduce the curriculum they experience in college. Lectures, Q&A sessions, laboratory investigations, exams, quizzes, etc. A very strong body of evidence supports the notion that college science coursework is not much like what scientists actually do in their work. Science studies show real scientists engage in flights of imagination and visualization, personify inanimate entities such as electrons, and work out tough problems in dreams. College students become scientists when they join lab groups as apprentices, usually as graduate students, although undergraduate research is becoming more common.

    Beth Warren and Ann Rosebery show how young children really do think like scientists, using their imagination for example, wondering out loud what it feels like for a plant to grow, comparing plant growth to the experience of outgrowing your shoes. Well meaning teachers, enculturated into school science by 16 years of “science education,” typically squelch such flights of fancy in order to prepare students for the difficult and dry science they will encounter in the future.

    But the difficult and dry science of high school and college is not science! In fact, professors I know complain that students who come to them don’t know how to think, imagine, or solve novel problems. By and large, school science is not preparing anybody for knowing and doing real science. Youth who later become scientists have to unlearn habits of mind which are not productive of innovation and critical thinking.

    I have in front of me the latest edition of the Harvard Education Letter. In the cover article, “Changing the Face of Math,” Laura Pappano provides a good argument for reform mathematics focused on engaging youth in complex, open-ended problem solving connected with their lives. “What if our national problems with math…are more about fuzzy-sounding stuff like relationships, emotion, and identity than, well, actual math?” Students disengage from rote memorization and rote memorization of procedures does not prepare them for doing mathematics in the future.

    This brings me back to the dilemma raised by Jonathan Osborne, a leading voice in science education. What if we’re looking at it wrong? Is there some other way to think about science education that does not involve a competing and mutually exclusive goals for the population of US high school students?

    I believe we need a paradigm shift. What does challenging, emotionally accessible, interesting science education look like? We pretty much know, actually. It doesn’t happen because we are hesitant to abandon an admittedly flawed system which has in the past produced some pretty good results. However, continuing to exclude students of color and girls from the STEM workforce is not acceptable. Furthermore, continuing to exclude students of color and girls from the power of STEM knowledge is not acceptable.