Introduction - Telling Tales Out Of School
This study explores the constraints and successes encountered in attempting to implement a number of innovative teaching approaches in five middle school classrooms in an Australian city during 1996. These innovations included a constructivist epistemological perspective (Glasersfeld, 1993, 1989; Solomon, 1987; Tobin, 1990), portfolio assessment (Duschl & Gitomer, 1991) and ethical commitments to caring (Noddings, 1984), courage, fairness, honesty and practical wisdom (Sockett, 1993). The research explores questions about the effects of the roles and expectations of teachers and students in such an innovative context, and about teachers' beliefs and understandings of the nature of science and the impact of these beliefs on their teaching of science. It further explores the research methodology with which I have chosen to inquire into these issues, and reflects critically on the value and appropriateness of that methodology.
The style in which the preceding paragraph is written and the professional codes and conventions to which it adheres require some comment here. Throughout this thesis, a number of tensions are played out: between narrative and propositional modes of representation, between more 'objective' and 'subjective' ways of exploring my own and others' experience, between the demands of compelling fictional writing and persuasive research writing. I have tried to be as explicit as possible about why I value each pole of the various tensions (and I'm mindful that there are often more than two), and why I do not simply 'convert' to one pole or another.
One such tension is that between formal, academic writing styles - the use of citations to support arguments, and of 'scientific' (predominantly propositional-logical) language - and more casual, personal and connected genres. References and citations are used in the text in (at least) three ways: (1) to support the argument with apposite examples and ideas or point the reader to related research reports; (2) to acknowledge an intellectual debt, the source of an idea or inspiration; and (3) to ascribe intellectual property rights for material quoted or paraphrased. I have also chosen to use the names of individual theorists as sub-headings in Chapters Three and Four: the ideas of these writers and thinkers have had a profound influence on my own 'places to stand and ways to look', and I believe it is important to acknowledge that debt, and to point readers to some of these sources which I value.
This representational tension, however, remains difficult to fully resolve: I wish to engage readers in a narrative of experience, while encouraging them to maintain some critical distance from that over-arching narrative. I wish also to connect the experiences and reflections I recount here with my professional field of science education, in order that the account may be valuable for science educators.
For these reasons, I have chosen to use at least a quasi-academic literary style for Sections One and Three of this thesis (although, as you will have noticed by now, I am writing in the first person), while Section Two adopts a more novelistic style. In other words, the entire thesis is a narrative of experience, but that 'tale' contains within it various pieces, held in a sometimes-awkward tension, that can be described as dominantly narrative or dominantly propositional in their mode of rationality and representation. Chronologically, Sections One and Three are set in a post-classroom 'present' that corresponds to the writing of this thesis in late 1997 (and are, therefore, summatively reflective and post-hoc with respect to the teaching), while Section Two is set in the 'present' of the research year in the school, 1996.
Drawing on the work of Geertz (1983), Denzin and Lincoln (1994, p. 9) speak of the 'third moment' in the history of qualitative research as being characterised by 'blurred genres', and the present work can be seen as one way in which this moment continues to be played out in contemporary qualitative research. Similarly, Denzin and Lincoln's (1994, pp. 2-3) images of qualitative research as a work of bricolage and of the researcher as bricoleur were strongly influential on the way that this research project was conducted. This image has much in common with Polkinghorne's (1992) 'postmodern epistemology of practice'. Since this thesis is both a representation of and part of an on-going research activity (see Chapter Six), it has taken on the character of a bricolage: in the same sense that the research activity may be described as "a pieced-together, close-knit set of practices that provide solutions to a problem in a concrete situation" (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p.2), this thesis is a pieced-together, close-knit textual product intended to represent certain research experiences, understandings and problem-approaches.
The product of the bricoleur's labour is a bricolage, a complex, dense, reflexive, collage-like creation that represents the researcher's images, understandings, and interpretations of the world or phenomenon under analysis. This bricolage will...connect the parts to the whole, stressing the meaningful relationships that operate in the situations and social worlds studied.
(Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p.3)
The complex arguments surrounding issues of representation, legitimation and my constructivist/postmodernist epistemological and ontological perspective are addressed in much more detail in Chapters Three and Four. This introduction is intended to signal my intentions to readers: to challenge the tendency to read the text as a realist-positivist account of a research project. Instead, it should be read as a bricolage, or, to appropriate the image from R.D. Laing that I have chosen as an epigraph for this section, appreciated as a melody, where the intervals say as much as the notes.
The remainder of this chapter outlines the professional, personal and school contexts of the research, explores the three research questions, and outlines the structure of the thesis.
Professional Context
The research grew out of my earlier study (Geelan, 1994, 1996) on my attempts to support students in becoming 'active learners'. I found that the innovations I attempted were largely unsuccessful, and that students became frustrated by challenges to their existing roles and expectations. The pressures placed on students by expectations - their own and their parents' - placed a low value on greater quality of understandings and the development of transferable learning skills, and a high value on good grades. Their attitude was that, by attempting to change their learning roles from passive to active, and my own teaching role from one as a dispenser of information to a facilitator of learning, I was abdicating from my key responsibility of helping them to memorise the information they would need for success in their examinations.
I continue to value active learning and students' development of skills and attitudes to learning that will better fit them for a world in which they will need to continue to learn at a rapid rate in order to survive. If such changes to the expectations of students are to occur, however, it will not be because teachers have unilaterally chosen to change their own roles, it will be through a process of negotiation (Corbett & Wilson, 1995) and role redefinition that includes all stakeholders, including parents. The results of my earlier research (Geelan, 1994, 1996) had convinced me that this was the case, and the commitments, approaches and perspectives of those who planned Arcadia High School(1) suggested that such an approach would be attempted at the school.
Personal Context
The data and descriptions that form this research did not simply gather themselves, nor where they gathered by an affectless robot. I wish to make explicit the fact that it was I, David Geelan, who went into the school, taught and learned and researched, and constructed and carried away these stories. Denzin and Lincoln (1994, p. 11) speak of the "gendered, multiculturally situated researcher [who] approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework (theory, ontology) that specifies a set of questions (epistemology) that are then examined (methodology, analysis) in specific ways". It is impossible for me to be 'objective' and eschew my own values and biases - from a constructivist perspective, it is my own 'construct system' (Kelly, 1955) that I use to construe the world and the construction processes of those around me. This being the case, I make no pretence to objectivity. Instead, I embrace my personal perspective and viewpoint and ideas and, yes, even my biases.
In the face of such an approach, however, how can I argue that the results of my research are of value to anyone but myself? Surely they are so flawed and biased and personal that they are useful only to me? If that were so, it would be difficult to defend the time, energy and money that were expended in the research. I do not believe that is the case: the requirements for legitimation and justification of a constructivist approach to inquiry are very different from those of a positivist paradigm, but no less demanding. These requirements are discussed in some detail in Chapter Four. In brief, however, what I must do to make this research valuable and useful for you is to do my very best to identify and describe my biases up front, so that you can discount them, or better, read this representation in light of them. This assumes, of course, that I know myself well enough to explicate my biases: I will make that assumption, while remaining conscious that I no doubt have many unexamined assumptions and reified notions.
As well as attitudes and beliefs, there were events and circumstances that arose in my life outside the school but that impacted strongly on the ideas, emotions and reserves of energy and enthusiasm that I brought to my teaching and research. In attempting to describe myself, I must begin with my wife and daughters, since they are the key to my values and form of life. Their love and support for me, and my love and concern for them, are what motivate everything I do, and their needs constrain everything I do. During 1996, my wife Sue was working on her last year of secondary schooling, having returned to education as a mature age student after a fifteen-year break. She needed care, nurture, support and coaching, and I also needed to take a significant role in child care. Sue was also working night shift in a nursing home many weekends, further increasing the demands on my time. My eldest daughter, Cassandra, had begun Year One in primary school - I went to her school each Thursday morning to hear the children read. Cassie needed time and attention from her Dad, and to go to the park on weekends, and to have stories read to her. My younger daughter, Alexandra, was in day care three days each week. Sue stayed home with her one week day, and I stayed home another. I tried to do some work at home, but this can be impossible with a demanding two-year old in the house, and she needed fun and attention and hugs too. I don't regret or resent these family demands in the slightest - family life is what makes the research meaningful for me.
I also had to fly across the country to Brisbane one weekend during the year to attend a major (and very emotional) conference of Sue's extended family, and to Sydney for another week for my sister Kathy's wedding. Some of the frustration felt by my colleagues in the school, and the perception on the part of one teacher that I had been lazy and negligent, no doubt arose from this sense of priorities that I brought to my activities; although I attempted to be reliable and professional in all situations, if there was any conflict the family always won.
Secondly, I am a Christian, and am actively involved in my home church. I preach every two months, and am involved in a number of other roles within the church. Every Saturday (I am Seventh-day Adventist by denomination) throughout the year was pretty much taken up with church-related activities. Further, between August and December of 1996, there was a major conflict between the church pastor and one of the senior elders (yes, it happens to Christians too!), which almost divided the church, and led to much hurt, and many extra meetings in the search for reconciliation. My involvement in this process no doubt contributed - along with events in the school - to the general feeling of burnout and depression that I carried for much of the latter part of the year. The influence of my Christianity is not only in added busy-ness and draining pressure of course - it also pervades my ethical and spiritual beliefs and values. My personal faith and devotional life also provide extra reservoirs of strength and emotional energy, on which I draw in times of crisis.
One further extra-school event had a significant effect on the way the year unfolded. In mid-February, only a couple of weeks into the school year, I broke my left leg while roller-blading in the park. A spiral fracture of the tibia and a crack in the fibular, complicated by the fact that I had already broken both bones ten years earlier in a motorcycle accident and still had a plate and screws in one, meant that I spent a week in hospital, followed by three months on crutches and a further two months walking in a cast. My consulting orthopedic surgeon held his clinic only on Wednesday mornings, a day when I would otherwise have been in the classroom of an Arcadia teacher. This event and its consequences led to a number of strains and challenges in the course of the year that would not otherwise have been present.
School Context
Arcadia High School opened in 1995 with 600 students in Years Seven and Eight (about ages 13 and 14). The school is in the rapidly growing western corridor of an Australian state capital, and was needed because a rapidly expanding population meant that the two local secondary (high) schools and five primary (elementary) schools were all overflowing. A visionary team of educators, led by the foundation principal Andrew Montgomery, chose to make this school something fairly new for Australia - a middle school. In the state where Arcadia was developed, Year Seven is the final year of primary school, and Year Eight the first year of secondary school. The change in culture and approach between the two levels of schooling is quite dramatic: in primary school, students spend their day largely with one teacher, in one classroom, while in secondary school they may have up to six different teachers and move to a new room for each subject. Primary schools are generally smaller, around three hundred students, while suburban secondary schools can have up to two thousand students.
It was decided that Arcadia would be a middle school, relieving stresses on the local primary and secondary schools, but what is more important, easing the transition for students. The program developed was similar to that in Australian primary schools - students had a home room and a home room teacher, who taught them all learning areas (subjects) except arts, technology, sport and Languages Other Than English (LOTE). It was felt that such a structure had significant potential to support students in developing transferable learning skills as well as a high level of literacy. Other innovations introduced to support this approach included portfolio assessment (Duschl & Gitomer, 1991), intended to de-emphasise grades as a motivator and to value work the students did outside exam conditions, and teacher collaborative planning, intended to support teachers in providing a genuinely integrated curriculum.
My role within the school during its inaugural year, 1995, was as a teacher educator, involved in professional development courses with some teachers in the school. Because there were several teachers who were interested, the university course was run on the school site, rather than at a university campus. This gave me a strong feeling for both the exhilarating successes and the frustrating challenges of attempting to bring together a mixed community of primary and secondary teachers (since there were no middle schools in the area, there were no trained and experienced middle school teachers), and to blend and balance the two cultures in ways that would best support students' learning and personal growth. At one point the internal conflicts became so severe that it appeared the school community might just fly apart from the centrifugal force of conflicting expectations, but by the end of 1995 a synthesis had been reached that had many teachers raving over the new freedom they felt to teach in innovative and creative ways.
In 1996, the school added Year Nine (that is, the previous year's Year Eight students moved into the new grade), which meant that the student population increased by a third, to more than nine hundred students. This meant that the teaching staff also increased by a third, from thirty-five to almost fifty. I chose to conduct my doctoral research in the school because I felt that what was happening there was exciting, and that it related strongly to my own educational commitments and values. I saw the research as an opportunity to put into practice the new understandings gained from the earlier research (see 'Professional Context' above).
I also felt that it was important that I give to the school at least as much as I took - ethically, it would not be fair for me to gain many benefits from conducting research in the school, to take the teachers' and students' time and energies and stories and offer nothing in return. I also wanted to take advantage of the fact that I had a Ph.D. scholarship to conduct some long-term, close-up, intensive study of teaching and learning in classrooms. I knew that in the full life of an academic I may never have such an opportunity again.
For this reason, I volunteered to team teach at Arcadia for two and a half days each week throughout the 1996 school year. The teachers had trained and worked as either primary or secondary teachers, and most of the secondary teachers had specialised in areas such as English and Social Science. For this reason, many of the teachers felt very uneasy about teaching science. As an experienced science educator, I offered to help out in this area. While teaching, I would observe my own teaching practices and those of my colleagues, and the reactions and interactions of the students. I would attempt to record the happenings, emotions and implications of the classrooms through the writing of 'impressionist tales' (Van Maanen, 1988) and would check the plausibility of these tales through interviews, surveys and other forms of evidence.
I taught in five different classrooms, with five very different teachers, and also participated in the collaborative planning functions of the team. Only one of the five teachers had been at the school in 1995, so in their various ways, each had to experience for himself or herself a dramatic change of educational culture and expectations.
The current study focuses on my own experience in working as a team teacher, supporting nonspecialists (elementary teachers and secondary teachers from other learning areas) attempting to teach science for the first time. My own teaching practice was intended to embody a critical constructivist perspective (Taylor, 1996; Taylor & Campbell-Williams, 1993, March), and to introduce new teaching strategies and epistemological perspectives through negotiation (Corbett & Wilson, 1995).
Research Questions
It should be noted that the three research questions are dissimilar in type and focus: the first two questions are empirical in nature, asked of the school context itself during the research process. The chosen research methodology was intended to be appropriate for asking - and finding useful and powerful answers to - these questions. The third question is a reflective query about the research methodology - essentially about its appropriateness and power for addressing the first two questions. In this sense it may be seen as a meta-question: the answer to the third question, which is about the quality and appropriateness of the research methodology, reflects directly on the degree to which it is possible to rely upon the answers proposed for the first two research questions.
In the framing of this question, constructivism is seen as a referent (Tobin & Tippins, 1993) for ideas about teaching and learning, rather than a teaching methodology. In the context of the school, however, constructivist perspectives were embodied by - and often confused with - a wide variety of teaching innovations and approaches, including portfolio assessment, collaborative planning, integrated curriculum and a concern for addressing middle school students' increasingly negative attitudes toward school in general and science in particular. I argue in Chapter Three that these approaches are all connected with and derived from a constructivist epistemology, both logically and from the perspective of what is valued about education. My own perspective on constructivism as it pertained to my teaching and research activities and to the teaching of my colleagues is also discussed in some detail in Chapter Three.
It should also be noted that there are other webs of expectations - those of parents are especially important, but there are also the expectations of government, administrators and industry - which are beyond the scope of this particular research project, but which no doubt have an important role in supporting and constraining curriculum change. Some of these expectations appear indirectly in the study through the expectations of students and teachers - for example, parents' resistance to portfolio assessment manifested itself through student resistance and teacher frustration.
This question immediately suggests the related question "what counts as 'effectiveness'?", which needs to be explicitly addressed in terms of both the approaches and the outcomes that would be expected of teachers who were effectively using constructivism as a referent in their science teaching. This further requires a very clear and explicit definition of what is meant by the term 'constructivism' - something I have attempted elsewhere (Geelan, 1997a). These issues are explored in some detail in Chapter Three.
As noted above, this question is in one sense not a(n empirical) research question at all, in that it requires critical reflection rather than data collection and analysis. The warrants on which an answer must be based are theoretical, and relate to coherence and appropriateness for pre-specified purposes, rather than empirical and based in 'experience in/of the world'. In another sense, this is a research question - it is a question about research, rather than a question for research. I have discussed these issues in parallel with the discussion about the (re)presentation of the research in Chapter Four.
Introduction to the Research Methodology
A narrative methodology (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988, 1996), incorporating impressionist tales of the field (Van Maanen, 1988), was chosen for the empirical part of the study, because I felt that it was most able to capture the richness, complexity and human quality of school life. Theories, however complex, must simplify life by abstracting some facets and ignoring others. Stories, too, highlight some facets and hide others - a process of selection is involved. I believe, however, that stories, through allusion and shading and other fictional techniques, can capture facets, faces and voices in classrooms that are missed by theories and the practices of theory-building. In Chapter Six I argue that stories and impressionist tales are valuable as planks of a research methodology for what they show us, but that their use must be accompanied by a critical consciousness of what they hide.
Outline of the Structure of this Thesis
Section One: Chapters One to Four
Chapter Two - Expectations and Constraints: Backgrounding the First Research Question - discusses some recent research into teacher and student expectations, and their impact on teaching innovations in the science classroom (Tobin, Tippins & Hook, 1994; Tobin & LaMaster, 1995; McRobbie & Tobin, 1995, Tobin & McRobbie, 1996; Tobin, McRobbie & Anderson, 1997; Geelan, 1994, 1996; Brickhouse, 1990, 1993; Brickhouse & Bodner, 1992). It also considers the sociological constructs of 'roles' and 'expectations', drawing on the work of Berger (1963), as an explanatory framework for some of the interactions reported in the research literature and in my own classroom experiences. This chapter is intended to provide background for the discussion of the first research question, and to carry forward the narrative of my own on-going teaching/learning/research inquiry into my classroom practices and those of my colleagues.
Chapter Three is entitled "Constructivism and the Nature of Science: Teaching, Research and the Second Research Question". This chapter addresses the philosophical underpinnings of the research, and the thesis that represents it. Constructivism, in its many forms (Geelan, 1997a), is influential in three main ways in this research project. First, the innovations and approaches that were valued by the developers of the program at Arcadia school, that the teachers were attempting to implement, and that were a key focus of my research interest, were based in a constructivist epistemological perspective on learning. Second, my own teaching, more so than that of my colleagues due to earlier experiences, was based in a constructivist/relativist epistemology and a social constructionist perspective on learning. The dissonances between my own constructivist commitments and those of my colleagues became important in the course of the research. Third, the epistemological and ontological perspectives that underpin the research activity itself were explicitly constructivist in nature. Indeed, it could not be otherwise: as Steier (1995) has pointed out, a research approach which seeks to 'objectively' study the construction processes of others is 'naive' - it ignores the researcher's own construction processes. This chapter attempts to clarify the relationships between these three constructivist influences on the research, but it is also intended to outline my own perspective on constructivism as a referent (Tobin & Tippins, 1993) for teaching and learning in science. I have structured the first part of the chapter as a discussion of the work of four key theorists/researchers: Paul Feyerabend, Jack Whitehead, Peter Taylor and Frederick Steier. This approach is intended to acknowledge the intellectual debt I owe to each of these authors, and to point readers back to the sources from which my current understandings were derived. The second section of the chapter attempts to tease out my own perspective, which I have described as 'value-driven eclecticism', and to explore its interaction with the three areas of influence discussed above. As part of this section, I discuss my use of logic, rhetoric and dialectic as approaches to persuasion.
Chapter Four - Places to Stand, Ways to Look: Approaches and Methods and the Third Research Question - is in a sense the heart of the thesis. Both because the third research question is explicitly concerned with methodological issues, and because the methodology is the most novel (no pun intended) part of the research project, the explication of the methodological approach I have chosen/constructed, and the value judgements that informed that selection/development, is crucial to the argument. The research methodology draws on the ethnographic work of John van Maanen (1988, 1995), Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly's 'narratives of experience' (1988, 1995, 1996) and the hermeneutic phenomenological approach to human science inquiry described by Max van Manen (1990, 1991). It also explicitly values van Manen's (1991) 'tact of teaching' or 'pedagogical thoughtfulness'. Robert Donmoyer (1997, March) asserts that the argument about research methodologies, loosely referred to as the qualitative/quantitative debate, can be more productively considered as being about the purposes for which research is conducted than about methodologies. In accordance with that approach, Chapter Four outlines the purposes for which the research was conducted, and discusses the appropriateness of the methodological approach to these purposes. This chapter also addresses issues relating to Denzin and Lincoln's (1994) 'crises of representation and legitimation', and explores the tensions within which the narrative nets that comprise this thesis are woven.
Section Two: 'School Stories'
The second section of the thesis consists of a 'novel' of approximately 30,000 words. The 'scare quotes' around the term 'novel' are intentional - they signal that, although the form and structure of this piece of writing are literary, its intention is somewhat different from that of an 'un-scare quoted' novel. A novel is a fictional text that is intended to entertain, to inform, to challenge and to teach (although the term 'didactic' is usually applied pejoratively to novels). Novels say something about the world - even science fiction novels - and can often, through the use of fictional characters and situations, tell us deep truths.
The 'novel' I have presented here, while it has all of the purposes of a novel - to entertain, inform, challenge and teach - also has two further intentions that tend to constrain it, and it is to signal these that I have insisted on retaining the scare quotes. Firstly, it is intended as part of my doctoral thesis - as a demonstration that I have sufficient breadth and depth of educational knowledge and insight to be admitted to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Science Education) of Curtin University of Technology. This applies constraints of content, approach and intention that would not be applicable to a purely literary novel. Secondly, it is intended to communicate, if not completely original understandings, certainly some newly articulated or represented knowledge about school science education, and specifically, about my personal experiences as a science educator in 'Arcadia High School'. Unlike Helen Demidenko/Darville's novel 'The Hand That Signed the Paper' (1995), it does matter whether the writing I present here does, in some sense, 'really' represent my experiences in the school. If this were not the case, then I could write a pure polemic, or a theoretical article, or a creed - what would be reflected in the text would be my own beliefs, ideas and values. These will feature strongly, of course, but I must also demonstrate the connection between what I have written and the reality of the school context and experience.
One way in which this connection is achieved is by providing what Guba and Lincoln (1989) describe as an 'audit trail', linking the representational text to the various artefacts (survey results, interviews and impressionist tales) that I have retrieved - in the best ethnographic tradition - from the field. I have attempted to do this through the second and third appendices, discussed below. Another way is what I have described as the 'uh huh' factor - the grunts and noises of affirmation and recognition that I hear from classroom teachers as they read the text. Since my intention is to render clearly some of the actualities of classroom life, if what I write is recognised as having verisimilitude by those who actually live and work in classrooms, I view that as an important measure of the extent to which this 'recognition' criterion has been met. Van Manen (1990) puts this criterion in more academic language:
The essence or nature of an experience has been adequately described in language if the description reawakens or shows us the lived quality and significance of the experience in a fuller or deeper manner. (p. 11)
The third way that the connectedness between my classroom experiences and the written text can be demonstrated is through the new understandings that are demonstrated in the writing of this thesis: had my perspectives and beliefs not been challenged and changed - and also in some cases affirmed and supported - by these experiences, it would have been impossible for me to write as I have.
I make another explicit distinction similar to that between my 'novel' and a literary novel - the distinction between 'fictional' and 'fictionalised' characters and situations. Fictional characters arise in the mind of the author (although they are no doubt frequently based on real people known to the author), and are shaped exclusively by literary demands - those of plot, characterisation and style. There are some purely fictional characters in the 'novel' that comprises the second section of this thesis: as one example, I never met 'Shannon', the sexually abused girl. I have, however, talked at great length with a number of survivors of childhood incest, some of them very close to me. Further, if we consider the statistics on child sexual abuse, in a school of nine hundred students there were probably up to one hundred 'Shannons' - they simply were not identified to me.
Through the construction of Shannon's fictional character, it was possible for me to address important questions about the tendency of myself and teachers with whom I worked to attribute all classroom events to themselves and their teaching innovations, rather than to extra-school factors, and about the effects of child sexual abuse on school behaviour and performance. Fictionalised characters and events, on the other hand, as I have chosen to use the term, are drawn quite directly from real people and events that I observed during my time in the school. That is to say, they are perhaps more journalistic than fictional - my attempt to portray actual situations and persons. In what sense, then, are they fictionalised? And for what purposes? There are two main reasons for fictionalising these characters:
Section Three: Chapters Five to Seven
Chapter Five - Tales of Different Kinds: Representing My Understandings - considers the issue of how the tales in 'School Stories' (Section Two) correspond to and address the first two research questions. That chapter is intended, not so much as an interpretation of 'School Stories', but as an explication: a making explicit of some of the pedagogical concerns and understandings that are more or less implicit in the text.
Through the device of a discussion between fictionalised characters, Chapter Six presents five conjectures, grounded in my experiences within the school and in some of the empirical materials generated during the research. These conjectures also suggest some tentative answers to the three research questions posed. This chapter is particularly devoted to issues of verisimilitude (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, pp. 579-580) - the processes and strategies by which I aim to convince readers that the results - in all representational forms - represent something real and educationally significant about the school and my experiences within it.
Chapter Seven is entitled 'Conclusions, Implications and New Questions'. It provides a retrospective overview of the entire thesis, and moves forward to explore the implications of the research results and the developed methodology for my own future teaching and research practices and for those of others. Further, given that I have identified the project overall as 'hypothesis generating' rather than 'hypothesis testing' research, I have attempted to outline some of the research studies that might be conducted in the future, by myself or others, in order to test, or at least explore, the conjectures developed in the course of the present study.
Appendices
The four appendices present some of the 'empirical materials' (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) generated during the course of the research, along with some more explicit discussion of the genesis and evolution of the approaches to both research and representation that I have chosen. The student booklet used in Cowan Team to structure science activities during Term Four - 'Voyage to Centauri' - forms Appendix One. This represents an attempt to use a narrative structure as part of the teaching and learning activities of the team, and to increase the relevance and connectedness of scientific knowledge for the students. It is also intended to be strongly integrated with other learning areas, and several of the teachers developed quite sophisticated activities in language and social science and mathematics to complement the science activities.
Appendix Two presents the instruments used in the collection of the quantitative data that were intended to complement my classroom observations, along with the data generated. The Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES) (Taylor, Fraser & Fisher, 1997) was administered to both teachers and students, and in both a 'perceived' ("what happens in my classroom now") and a 'preferred' ("what I would like to happen in my classroom") form. The Beliefs About Science and School Science Questionnaire (BASSSQ) (Taylor & Aldridge, 1997) was administered to both students and teachers.
Interviews with four of the teachers with whom I worked in Cowan Team form Appendix Three. (The teachers appear here under their pseudonyms for reasons of confidentiality, but see the discussion in Chapter Five.) These were recorded at the conclusion of the research project, and exemplify several of the themes I have attempted to capture in this thesis. In particular: Candace gives her own perspectives on issues of trust and behaviour, and on some of the 'naughty boys' who appear in the story; Alyx identifies the degree of complexity and challenge experienced by teachers at the school; Andrea describes her discomfort and disorientation, and their consequences for those around her; and Carolyn describes, from her own perspective, the disappointments and mismatches of expectations that led to our conflict.
Appendix Four consists of an edited (for clarity and to reduce redundancy and repetition) collection of the e-mail messages that passed between my doctoral supervisor, Peter Taylor, and me over the course of my candidacy. These trace the development of the project, from my initial reluctance to try to do anything innovative with my thesis (stemming from a difficult experience with my M.Ed. thesis) to a growing excitement. They also demonstrate the development over time of the representational model that I finally adopted, and the discussions that led to this development. I further hope that these messages show the quality of the rapport we developed and of the supervisory relationship, and communicate something of the debt I owe to Peter for his intellectual challenges and constant encouragement.
Summary
This research is intended to speak richly to other teachers and educational researchers - possibly engaged in the introduction or evaluation of similar constructivist-referenced innovations in science education - of the struggles, critical reflections and triumphs involved in attempting to improve the equity, relevance and power of science education for our students. Rather than choose a single voice in which to speak of these things, I have chosen to present a bricolage - a collection of resonant, connected, chosen elements from my experience, the relationships of which are rich and complex. I cannot transparently represent my experience - this thesis attempts to make of my experience something that will stimulate readers toward their own educationally and personally significant experience.
The names of all teachers, students and administrators, and that used for the school, are pseudonyms.
Back to your place in the text.