Introduction - The Real World?
The camera takes in a broad landscape of low, smoky-blue hills, with a perfectly clear, bright blue sky above. Here and there a window obliquely flashes back the sun, as the point-of-view zooms forward and down, into a new suburb of an Australian city. The houses here are all recent, as the swamps and fields are filled and turned into housing estates, and the camera sees that many of them still have no lawns and fences. Dogs and children play in the streets and yards. In a continuing long zoom - the viewer is made vertiginously conscious of the unnatural changes of perspective - the camera slides up a short street, to a limestone-brick house with green-framed windows and a shiny corrugated steel roof. One window is open, and the viewer is carried into an untidy study, dominated by a computer surrounded by stacks of CD-ROMs and floppy disks.
A copy of 'School Stories' is sitting on David Geelan's desk, open to the beginning. A breeze catches the pages and flips them rapidly until, somewhere near the middle of the book, they slow and stop. The new page is suddenly no longer flat in the centre, but has begun mounding up into a small hill. The process continues, accelerating, so that the shape is soon a print-covered paper ovoid on a stem, which quickly expands out into broad shoulders. Features form on the front of what looks increasingly like a head, and a blocky body rises from the page, followed by two sturdy legs. In a few moments, a creature that looks like David, but composed of paper and print and much smaller, stands on the pages of 'School Stories' and looks around.
After a moment, the David-creature looks down at the page on which he is standing, and extends a hand to it. A tiny, delicate hand of paper rises from the page. He grasps it, and pulls a paper Candace from the pages of the book. Like a chain of paper dolls, all holding hands, a Carolyn, an Alyx and an Andrea are pulled from the pages of 'School Stories', and into... the real world?
Digression - Pseudonyms
It is important to note, in moving from Chapter Five to Chapter Six, a very subtle change in what is meant when I use each of the pseudonyms I've chosen. In discussing the narratives of experience that together make up 'School Stories', the names used - 'Carolyn', 'Candace', 'Andrew', 'Shannon' - refer to the fictionalised characters who inhabit the 'novel'. This means, for example, that the 'Carolyn' who appears in 'School Stories' is very strongly based in my experiences of a particular teacher in the school where I taught. But 'Carolyn' is not, and is not intended to be, a realist portrait of that teacher. Rather, 'Carolyn' is a character with specific narrative and rhetorical purposes relating to making explicit for the reader my developing understandings about the importance of trust and relationship, and about the dangers inherent in conflicting expectations. Similarly, the 'I' who appears in those tales must to some extent be a fictionalised character, strongly based in the (not unproblematic) experiential reality of the David Geelan who is writing this thesis, yet not identical in all aspects. I have had to construct an 'I' as part of the net-weaving, melody-playing, tale-telling process. Like all of this thesis, this chapter is characterised by 'blurred genres' (Geertz, 1983), and by the approach to representation of a bricoleur, piecing together a story from 'found objects'.
In this chapter, I want to marshal some of the other evidence that was generated in the course of my research in the school, and use it to enrich and embellish my representation of the textual characters. This material consists of the transcripts of audio-taped interviews with each of four teachers (Appendix Three) and the results of two survey instruments, the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES) and the Beliefs about Science and School Science Questionnaire (BASSSQ) (Appendix Two). In reporting this evidence, the pseudonyms chosen take on a slightly different significance, in that they become direct substitutions for the names of actual teachers. Rather than being the words of fictionalised, composite characters like those represented in 'School Stories', the words recorded in the interviews, and the views reported in the surveys, are those of the individual teachers.
I contemplated using different pseudonyms for the teachers, in order to emphasise this shading of meaning and identity, however I felt that (a) this would be much more confusing for readers and (b) this material offers some of the warrants that I need to present for my representation of these characters. While I am suggesting that not every characteristic and every word of the fictionalised 'Alyx' in 'School Stories' comes directly from the real 'Alyx' with whom I taught and whom I interviewed, the character is based in the person, and the survey and interview data offers some evidence of the relationship between the two. Be aware, then, that for this chapter, the names used have a slightly different meaning than that they carried in Chapter Five.
I don't wish to claim, though, that the empirical materials gathered - the survey results and interviews - constitute a 'real(ist)' portrait of these teachers either. These materials were not intended for that use, and were not gathered in that way. If my strategies for establishing verisimilitude (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, pp. 579-580) were those of the quantitative positivist, it would have been necessary to validate the surveys used, to attend to random sampling and sample size, to use more sophisticated statistical calculations. Those moves might have established the verisimilitude of my account within that particular community, however that is not a community with which I wish to identify myself, or whose perspectives I value. Similarly, if I wished to suggest that the interview results were a true and fair representation of these teachers, it would have been necessary to conduct 'member checks', and meet other of Guba and Lincoln's (1989) post-positivist 'parallel criteria'.
Instead, I have chosen to use these materials heuristically, as part of my phenomenological activity (van Manen, 1990) of attempting to be thoughtful (van Manen, 1991) about my own practices and those of my colleagues - about my lived experience in the school. For this reason I have chosen to represent the four teachers and myself as characters - the paper-and-print David, Candace, Carolyn, Alyx and Andrea(1) - in this chapter, acknowledging that I am not attempting truly to speak for the Other(2), but to richly represent my own lived experiences while working pedagogically with others.
Conjectures
The second representational form taken by the results of the research is the five 'conjectures' presented below. These are in a sense the second part of the 'findings' of the study, but that word is perhaps too strong. I regard the research as hypothesis generating rather than hypothesis testing in nature: the term 'conjectures' has been specifically chosen because it reflects the provisional and tentative nature of the understandings generated in the course of the research project.
'Conjectures' are less strongly held than the 'assertions' of grounded theory (Strauss, 1990) or interpretive research (Erickson, 1986), since much of the evidence is so personal, reflecting my largely phenomenological understandings (van Manen, 1990) and consisting of impressionist tales that reflect my own emotions and opinions and ideas. This mediates their applicability to other contexts and situations - readers are required to compare both the context of the research and the person of the researcher in understanding possible resonances of these conjectures for their own educational sites. The term 'conjectures' has been borrowed from Karl Popper's (1953) falsificationist scheme for the nature of science. Popper speaks of science as advancing by 'conjectures and refutations' - the advancement of tentative theories about the world for empirical testing and possible refutation or falsification. The relationship of my use of the term to Popper's perspective is, however, rhetorical and metaphorical rather than canonical: within the realm of 'human science' (van Manen, 1991) the falsificationist scheme seems to me to be untenable because of the complexity of human beings and their interactions. As noted in Chapter Three, my chosen referent from the philosophy of science is Feyerabend (1975) rather than Popper.
I have not chosen to pinpoint specific tales in 'School Stories' that support each conjecture as I did for the research questions in Chapter Five, because this is almost impossible: the conjectures are 'grounded' in impressions accumulated over the course of my teaching year at Arcadia High School, rather than in single 'critical incidents'. If I have been successful in writing my account of that year, similar impressions will have been generated or re-iterated in you as you read 'School Stories', and those impressions will be juxtaposed with the different representation of the research below, which draws on the interviews and surveys as well as the tales. This is a key issue: despite the epistemically different status of the tales, interviews and surveys, they have been brought together in a bricolage (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). This constitutes a practical example of Feyerabend's (1974, 1975) 'epistemological anarchy' - the holding in a dialectical tension of philosophically incommensurable perspectives in order to "contribute to the development of our consciousness" (1975, p. 30).
The conjectures are by no means 'proved' by the evidence generated: they are suggested by that evidence (including the impressionist tales, surveys and interviews), and supported - and sometimes challenged - by it. The conjectures are tentative new understandings that I have developed as a result of the research process, and they will continue to be explored in my own teaching practice and future research activities - indeed, this is one of their key purposes.
For each of the first four conjectures I have stated and briefly discussed the conjecture from my perspective, then 'discussed' it with one or more of the four 'teachers'. The words used by Candace, Carolyn, Alyx and Andrea in these discussions are taken directly from the interview transcripts(3) with the four teachers who bear those pseudonyms (and who, as noted above, are related but not identical to the four characters in 'School Stories' who bear those names). The survey data are similarly 'discussed' by the David character (since there was no direct discussion of the survey results in the interviews), in relation to the first and second conjectures.
Teachers and researchers often describe resistance to change as resulting from the pressures of external examinations and State prescriptions, and these are important sources of constraint, which need to be addressed. In the context of the present study, however, my own and others' key difficulty was in re-imagining what it meant to be a teacher within the new commitments that we were attempting to embody in our teaching, and in escaping from - or at least transforming into new meanings - the patterns imposed by our personal biographies, first as learners and then as teachers.
In saying this, my intention is definitely not to lay blame on the teachers: my own inertia was probably as great as or greater than that of my colleagues. Instead, I want to identify the power of critical reflection by teachers on their own assumptions and practices as a key influence for curricular change. Such reflection calls into question teachers' taken-for-granted assumptions about what is natural and necessary in education. It requires them to ask questions about the degree and source of constraint acting on their classroom practices, to determine whether it is really as great as they believe, and to find creative, educationally defensible ways of addressing the constraints placed on teaching and learning. It is ultimately empowering.
The five tiny paper people spread out over the desktop, looking at the strewn pages of text, graphs and tables. Prompted by their surroundings, David sits down with Andrea, and asks her whether she felt that there was a lack of structure for her to follow in her teaching at Arcadia - something she'd expressed in a conversation earlier in the year. Andrea responds, "I'm a structured person, so I appreciate structure, I appreciate being able to read up that this is what we're doing and if I have to do anything I know I have to have it lots of time in advance because I get anxious if I haven't got things ready."
"Is that one of the things you miss here generally?", David asks. "Not so much relying on textbooks, it's harder to refer someone to something if they miss something?"
"Absolutely," she responds. "Because usually you can say 'We covered this chapter, or these exercises in that book while you were away...'"
This is one example of a situation in which Andrea's own beliefs about teaching, and her preferred teaching practices, were in conflict with the more fluid, integrated curricular approach that was valued by the Arcadia system. Her perceived constraint arose from her assumptions about 'covering the work', and led her to act in ways that tended to constrain the way the constructivist-referenced innovations were implemented in her classroom. Andrea openly acknowledged the existence of this conflict in a number of conversations, and left the school at the end of 1996.
This desire to teach in ways with which she was familiar was by no means confined to Andrea. When David spoke with Carolyn a little later, they tried, rather warily, to address the question of the gap between the innovative approaches valued at Arcadia, and which David had tried to incorporate in his teaching, and the approaches with which Carolyn was most comfortable:
"There were certain things that I remember doing in science and actually enjoying," said Carolyn, "and I would have liked to see the kids do that as well. One of the things another team did - they did electricity, and I always remember really enjoying making the light bulb light up. That's a very practical thing that I thought 'if I enjoy it - a non-science person's enjoyed it - then it would have been good to do with the kids'. And in a way I was a bit jealous - I was thinking 'my kids are missing out on this, and maybe they won't get to do it in Year Nine.'"
"You were really rather disappointed with the type of help and support I was able to give you through the year, weren't you Carolyn?" David asks the question tentatively, and you really get the feeling he'd prefer to just leave the whole issue alone and avoid the potential for confrontation. But he's also driven by the imperatives of the research, and on this occasion they win. "Would you mind telling me a little bit about why?"
"Right at the beginning of the year," Carolyn begins, "when they said we were going to have this science specialist coming in, we presumed that this person with this amazing amount of resources would appear, you know, this bottomless pit that we could pick at and get all this stuff. But that didn't occur, so it was almost like getting your hopes up and then having them dashed on the rocks of not having this person who's going to come in and be a big whiz-bang science teacher."
Carolyn had been looking to David for 'resources' and 'packages' - pre-packaged sets of worksheets and activities for students to complete individually at their desks - while, from his critical constructivist (Taylor, 1996) perspective on learning, David thought he was trying to encourage and support students in the collaborative, social construction of knowledge. This is by no means to suggest that David's teaching approach is 'right' and Carolyn's is 'wrong', but that the lack of congruence between Carolyn's valued practices and those of the school acted to constrain the constructivist-referenced innovations in that classroom.
One source of such inertia is the conflict between the 'sacred stories' of a particular school and the 'secret stories' of its teachers - or to put it another way, conflict between the ethical and epistemological perspectives of the teachers and those underpinning the innovations. Some of the teachers' beliefs about and attitudes toward science were not particularly coherent with those espoused by the principal and by the school community as a corporate entity. The latter 'sacred stories' were explicitly constructivist, and valued a connected, inter-subjective and human approach to science over a positivist, impersonal perspective.
David reaches down, and strains to lift the front cover of 'School Stories' and close the book. Eventually he succeeds, and in the place where the cover had lain he finds a few pages of interesting graphs. He calls all four of the others over, and they perch on the spine of the book as they look over the graphs.
"As you know, guys, I've been doing some research while I've been teaching here this year," David begins. "You've been aware of that, but we haven't really talked too much about the research - we've been more concerned with the teaching. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like us to talk a little bit about some of the information I gathered from you and your students. You remember - this was one of the few times the research actually took centre stage in the classrooms - when I asked everyone to do those surveys. These graphs (Figures Two to Fifteen, Appendix Two) represent the survey results."
"What was your research actually on...?" asks Carolyn.
"There were a number of things I was looking at and trying to understand better," David responds. "I wanted, first of all, to look at my own teaching practices as I tried to be a better teacher - more constructivist, but also more involved in negotiation and integrated curriculum. Since I was team teaching with all of you, that meant I also had to be interested in your teaching practices, and in the ideas and theories behind them. That's what I want to talk about now."
"Candace, if we can start with you? I was a little surprised to see that, on the BASSSQ survey (Figure Four) your scores were mostly toward the middle of the range. For the four scales of that survey, a higher number corresponds to a more instrumentalist and constructivist, less certain view of the nature of science. Based on how you taught in the classroom, I would have thought you would be further toward the high end on these scales. Andrea, on the other hand - I would have expected that you'd have a much more objectivist view of science, but you've scored very highly on all of the scales, particularly the fourth. You two were quite surprising, but Carolyn, your results on the BASSSQ seem to me to fit fairly well with what you've expressed in our discussion so far - a fairly certain, objectivist view of the nature of science."
The four paper-and-print teachers stand mute under this examination. Their stories, as characters, have been told in 'School Stories', and David has chosen not to confront them by asking them to respond to this evidence which, in some cases, seems to contradict the way he has construed them. Because, after all, this is a problem for him, not for them.
David continues: "I was especially intrigued by the issue of 'Shared Control' in the CLES surveys (Figures Two, Three, Five, Six, Eight, Ten, Twelve and Fourteen). There were some quite large differences in the ways each of you responded on the 'perceived' version of this scale (Figure Two) - more so than any of the others. Andrea, you indicated that you share control of the classroom with your students'seldom', Alyx indicated that this happens 'sometimes' and Carolyn and Candace, you felt that you shared control 'often'. This compares interestingly with the 'preferred' form of this scale, which indicates what you aspire to in your teaching. Andrea only wished to share control 'sometimes', while the rest of you valued this occurring 'often'."
"Turning to a comparison of your responses with those of your students: Carolyn, your students indicated that you shared classroom control with them less than 'seldom', although you felt that you did this more than 'often' (Figure Eight). Andrea, you've indicated that you feel your classroom is strongly teacher-centred, with students only sharing some control 'seldom'. This perception lines up quite closely with what your students have expressed (Figure Ten), which suggests that you have a good understanding of what happens in your practice. You've also indicated that you really don't want the students to share classroom control to a great extent, although you would like this to increase from 'seldom' to 'sometimes'. This also lined up strongly with the preference expressed by your students. This is intriguing, because I think Andrew Montgomery and the school planners would have preferred more active student involvement and agency in the classroom than that result indicates."
The espoused, official values of the Arcadia school community - the school's sacred stories - are congruent with the higher ends of the scales on both the CLES and BASSSQ instruments: student-centred, constructivist-referenced learning with a strong humanist flavour is the intention of the curricular and structural reforms in the school. To the extent to which teachers' own values (reflected in the 'preferred' form of the CLES and in the BASSSQ) and, more importantly, their practices (in the 'perceived' form) do not reflect these values, they can be said to be constraining the constructivist-referenced reforms in the school. Clearly, the gap between the 'perceived' and 'preferred' forms of the CLES reflects the teachers' experience of themselves as 'living contradictions' (Whitehead, 1989) - of holding values and experiencing their negation in practice. This is the same tension that I have chosen to refer to as 'conceptual inertia' in this first conjecture, although the latter term is narrower, in that it deals only with the gaps caused by the teachers' own biographies and beliefs, not those attributable to external constraints.
In my own teaching life (Geelan, 1994, 1996), I have several times fallen into the trap of attempting to change what happens in my classroom by changing myself as a teacher. Such changes have consistently failed, simply because, while I had changed my expectations of myself and of the students, they continued in traditional expectations of me and of themselves. This led to significant frustration on the part of everyone involved.
Rather than simply changing teachers and expecting students to automatically change in response, a more powerful approach is to explicitly negotiate with students, in an authentic, non-coercive way, the new constellation of expectations required by the proposed innovation. Corbett and Wilson (1995) have suggested that teachers and reformers 'make a difference with, not for, students' - the research project reported here has led me to believe that such an approach is crucial.
This need not and should not mean walking into class on the first day of the year and saying 'Let's negotiate' - that can lead to chaos and inequity, since the students are very unlikely to have negotiation skills in the school context: many have been told what to do for their entire school lives. Instead, it involves a conscious, planned programme of activities and approaches intended to teach the skills of negotiation, followed by and complemented by an authentic willingness to allow students to participate in decisions affecting their own education (and also an awareness of which decisions can and cannot appropriately be made by students).
David and Candace have wandered away from the rest of the group. Candace begins to talk about negotiation as a value that she has tried to embody in her classroom, but the negation of which she has experienced in her teaching practice (Whitehead, 1989).
"With these kids," says Candace thoughtfully, "my next project would be to take what we've learnt and then start introducing negotiation. That would be the next logical step: say 'Hey, we've got this to learn, these are the skills in science that you have to learn', and then bring them into the discussion and bring them into building ...."
"Yeah, negotiation's something I've been thinking about," David muses."Is that something you also have to build up to? You almost have to give them skills in negotiation, because we've spent seven years delivering..."
"Oh, I've learnt that to my cost," Candace interrupts. "I learnt that last year. I did it Bean and Brodhagen method, exactly what they said to do - and it didn't work. So I think there's a flaw in their reasoning: I think you have to skill-base kids before you can use the skill in order for them to skill themselves."
Alyx joins the group, and the discussion turns to issues of nurture and caring.
"I'm a nurturer," Alyx begins, "and I still think there's room for more nurturing throughout the whole school, and more care. I think curriculum's one thing, and going headlong into things and having these great evaluations is one thing, but I still think there's lots of room for care I don't see happening here."
"Why do you think that is?", David asks. "Because I think that would be something that the people who set the school up would have wanted to be happening. Why do you think it's not? Just too much stress on the curriculum stuff?"
"Yeah, I think so," Alyx replies. "I think the school's driven towards that. Those things can be evaluated in a tangible [way], and you can see it on paper, but nurturing stuff - you only see it in the eyes of people and their hair looking shabby, and the amount of sick days people take... but I think that's probably one of the most important things."
It appears that attention to the constructivist-referenced curricular innovations, even with the best of intentions, is not sufficient to ensure that the kinds of values espoused by the school (sacred stories) are actually embodied in the classroom practices within the school (secret stories). It also requires a commitment to caring, nurture and relationships on the part of individual teachers - and Alyx, at least, felt that this facet had not been given the explicit attention it needed at Arcadia.
The other four teachers have wandered away, and are variously kicking at the books and papers on the desk, reading or sitting on a stack of diskettes. David is sitting alone, poring over the graphs of the students' responses to the BASSSQ and both forms of the CLES. He mutters to himself, "Hmm, the perceptions of the students seem to be strikingly consistent across all four class groups, on all three instruments (Figures Five, Six and Seven). Most students see themselves (on the 'perceived' form of the CLES, Figure Five) as learning relevant science, learning about the uncertainty of scientific knowledge, having a voice in the operation of the classroom and negotiating with other students somewhere between 'sometimes' and 'often'. But they perceive that they share control of the activities of the classroom only 'seldom'."
"The 'preferred' form of the same instrument (Figure Six) indicates that they would like to do each of these things somewhere between 'sometimes' and 'often' - the one change they would prefer is a greater sense of agency and an authentic role in choosing their own learning experiences. It is intriguing, though, that they don't express an even stronger preference for these five 'constructivist values' - only one class expresses the desire to be involved in any of these ways more strongly than 'often'. It is possible to speculate that students' preference for only relatively minor change is the result of the successful 'schooling' (including in Illich's sense! (see School Stories, p. 189)) in traditional educational expectations that they have received - further interview research would provide a valuable supplement to these survey results in teasing out the expectations of students."
"The results for all four classes on the BASSSQ (Figure Seven) are even more consistent," David continues. "They indicate that students in general have quite objectivist views about the nature of science and school science."
This result is in spite of the fact that these students completed the surveys in November after spending the entire school year in a science education program that was quite explicitly intended to develop more constructivist perspectives on the nature of science. The results provide evidence to support the conjecture that students' expectations and beliefs must be explicitly addressed - and perhaps also suggest that even explicit attention will not cause these beliefs to change quickly or easily.
Although most educators would assent to this proposition, I wish to suggest that the richness of narrative accounts has the potential to give readers a stronger feeling for the complexity of school contexts - not only the numerous stakeholders and their complex interactions, but also the beliefs and assumptions which underlie such interactions - than can more traditional research approaches. To put it another way: most educators are aware of the 'technical' complexity of schools (to use Habermas' (1971) terms) - the timetable pressures, falling budgets, rising class sizes, competing demands from governments, parents and employer associations. I am concerned here much more with the 'practical' and 'critical' complexity of schools: the variety of competing assumptions and beliefs that can tend to constrain the development of rich communicative relationships in schools. It is this 'hidden complexity' that the tales can help to describe and make explicit. Oversimplifying the school context can lead to oversimplifying what must be addressed if curricular innovations are to succeed which, in turn, can lead to only partial implementation, or even failure, of such innovations.
As sometimes happened during the year, David, Candace and Alyx have formed an intently talking cluster. Their attention has turned to issues of the complexity of school contexts, and how these can change the meanings of curricular materials and approaches. They're talking about the 'Voyage to Centauri' materials (Appendix One) that David and Candace developed for Term Four.
"I think our project this final semester has been really productive...maybe I should have been starting to do that earlier," David says. "One reason I wasn't was because I was hoping to get teachers to take more of a leading role. But maybe I should have been providing more structure?"
"No, I don't think you can say that," Candace contradicts him. "I think the thing is we evolved to that together, and when we actually got that rather good idea, it was a bounce of ideas from the two of us. I don't think you could say that you could have done that for us at the beginning, same as I couldn't have done..."
David interrupts: "If I'd come in with a package as finished as that at the beginning, it would have been another prescriptive package...Whereas people have actually sparked off it towards the end this time."
"Yeah," Candace agrees, "I think it's somewhere that you have to go to, from somewhere, and it can't be..."
"Delivered from the Mount", David offers.
"...because that is a personal package," Candace continues. "People may pick that up and say 'that's garbage' because they haven't seen the stuff that goes behind it."
Candace suggests that it was not the written materials at all that constituted the innovative curriculum in our science classes during the final term of 1996, but the complex interpersonal interactions, the skills and relationships we had built up in the course of the year and the congruence of our educational values that really changed our classroom practices. As she notes, in another context people might identify the materials as "garbage" - and they'd be right, because they would be inappropriate for that context. One implication of this perspective is that any form of centralised curricular development and control (something returning to popularity in Australia) faces enormous (insurmountable?) challenges because by its acontextual nature it cannot take into account the 'practical' (Habermas, 1971) complexity of school life.
Alyx has already indicated that she believes the school has not managed to 'keep all the balls in the air': in trying to attend to a number of curricular innovations at once, it has failed to adequately attend to the needs of students for care and nurture. David suggests that this is a consequence of the complexity of school contexts - it is exceptionally difficult to attend to, and balance, all of the competing exigencies of the operation of the school, including (and perhaps especially) those related to expectations and attitudes rather than to paper and policy. David asks about the demands of teaching at Arcadia.
"This is the hardest school I've taught at," Alyx begins, "the demands here are huge, and that's why I'm going part time next year. I don't think I could cope full time plus study. I think that I'm getting better at it, I think the second year will be much better, but it's just a really hard school, lots of things to do - your mind is totally cluttered all the time, weekends, everything, with work from this school, after school..."
"Do you think that'll change?", David asks. "Is it like going back to your first year of teaching again?"
"Absolutely, yep. I think it will change, but I think the individual has to change it too. I think if people stay here long enough, and don't live, breathe and eat this school, and are not married to the school, work out that you have to have some personal social life..."
"So how are you feeling about teaching science next year?"
"Much more confident," says Alyx. "I thought I knew it all from my science background but I don't. It's all very well having the knowledge but not knowing how to teach it... I was just shell-shocked in this school. What I probably should have done at the start of the year was just to stick with Primary Investigations and done some simple stuff. But, 'cos there are so many tantalising offers here and you think 'Oh yeah, I'll try that...', I did a lot of things in a mediocre way rather than a few things well. Science is one of them I felt I didn't do a good job. I felt for the first six months I didn't do a good job here at all, in anything - it took me that long to really work out that I do my best and I can only do my best, until you come to terms with it all."
From my perspective, Alyx did a great job with science and everything else, but she clearly felt overwhelmed by the complexity of the situation, the changes being demanded of her and the students, but also the tantalising opportunities to teach in new and creative ways. Other teachers concurred - they valued what was happening in the school, but were developing a fuller appreciation of the complexity of school contexts when some of the taken-for-granted, seen-as-natural beliefs and practices are challenged.
As I have argued elsewhere (Geelan, 1996, Nov), this is not so much through lack of pedagogical knowledge, or even content knowledge, but through the lack of a rich, powerful and constructivist view of the nature of science. Teachers who have not studied science tend strongly toward an uncritical, positivist scientism, and this is not easily addressed - certainly not through inservice activities aimed at increasing their knowledge of science content or at instructing them in particular activities and strategies. The question of whether it is possible to develop more intensive, and differently focussed, teacher education activities to address teachers' epistemologies and views on the nature of science is an interesting one for further research.
David calls Andrea and Carolyn over to rejoin the discussion. Candace begins to talk about the question of her own knowledge of science and science teaching, and the tendency to default to didactic teaching and cookbook experiments.
"I always accepted that you had the scientific knowledge, David, but we didn't know our parameters. What's happened, though, is that it's sort of integrated itself and fallen over itself as far as I'm concerned. You've come out of science and gone into the integrated approach, and I've gone the other way, I've gone into science, so I think it's been sort of like a cross-fertilization of ideas."
"OK," says David, "one of the aims of this year was to make you feel more confident teaching science next year. Do you feel as though it's done that?
"Absolutely! But I still think that I'm going to need expert advice. At least now I know where to go, where to look it up, how to form it, how to use a lab, how to get the information to do the experiments, but I really think that I need expertise in bouncing off ideas to actually integrate them, because I really do fear that, because it is my weaker subject, that I will go to the safety net of 'Here's the experiment, do it'".
Carolyn interrupts. "But I'd like to have seen more of that. We have had a whole year of science and the kids haven't done a proper scientific report. Maybe my science experience was different, but we were given a task to do and we'd go and we'd set up the equipment. Maybe this is a bit advanced for Year Eights but they have all the skills of doing the equipment. To me, to make them independent we needed to be saying: 'OK this is what you've got to prove, here's a suggestion how to prove it, go and do it and then write up the reports.'"
"OK, that brings up questions about the nature of science - what science actually is...," David begins.
"Oh, I've always felt confident with the nature of science,"Candace interrupts, "I think that's because of my technology background, but I can now see more connections. For me, it was two things - where to go to get the information, how to actually formulate it so that makes sense to the kids, and is at their level... But I think the other important thing is to make it interesting, and I knew what I wanted to do, I had ideas, but I needed someone to say: 'Yeah but you've gotta do it this way.' It's the science base.'Cos I haven't got it. Without scaffolding, people who aren't science based are all going to have difficulties."
Theoretical as ever, David says:"There's an idea that Lee Shulman (1986) uses. He talks about pedagogical knowledge - generic knowledge about how to teach, and obviously you've got heaps of that. Content knowledge about science - not so much, but you know where to find it. But then he talks about pedagogical content knowledge - knowing how to teach science specifically and that's probably where you feel that..."
"Yes, I do. It's just actually to get a particular scientific concept over to the kids in the right way, right shape and right form. I don't have that knowledge, and I haven't got three years or four years to spend going back and researching that."
"So, is that maybe a weakness of the Arcadia middle school model?", asks David. "That all the teachers have that problem?"
"Yes, I think it is. I can tell you that science in Year Eight has not been done particularly well in certain blocks, because they don't have that base."
Andrea expresses her concerns in a slightly different way, congruent with her more content-based view of schooling in general.
"I think the kids are a lot more accepting of my lack of science knowledge than I would be in a similar situation, or even more so as a parent, that the teacher wasn't expert in the field they were teaching in. And that's because I come from a pretty traditional high school background where you expect the maths teacher to know the maths."
"When I spoke to you earlier in the year," David says, "you felt as though maybe this school wouldn't prepare them very well for Year 11 and 12 - do you still feel that way?"
"Yeah, I do. I have strong reservations about having people like me design and run a science program for Year Eight. Because I've put three, or two children through high school, another one's in Year Nine currently, and I see what sorts of work they come home with and the sorts of things they're doing, and I'm not competent to do that in science. It was lucky that I was confident to do it in the other three core areas, but... I would actually feel quite uncomfortable thinking that maybe my kid was being taught science by a mug like me, and I think that your contribution was invaluable from that point of view because I could say to them 'I am a mug, but here's Mr Geelan, he knows what we're doing'. I felt that gave the kids much better preparation."
"I guess the argument is that there are other things that balance out for the lack of content knowledge," David suggests.
"Yeah, but what do you do when you get to Year Ten," asks Andrea, "and you've had - say you'd had me two years for science and you get to Year Ten and you get a real science teacher who expects you to know things? The other thing is the assessment program. If Candace and you hadn't been here to guide what sorts of testing program we had, I wouldn't have had a clue. I probably would have picked up a textbook and religiously gone through chapter by chapter and hopefully made up questions that were relevant and could actually reflect what they'd learned."
Carolyn wants to talk about some of the ways that team teaching with David both supported and constrained her in teaching science.
"I think it was good to go over to the lab," she says, "'cos I would never have done that without you there. I mean my big lab expression was melting wax to see solid to a liquid and back, that was about it."
"You sometimes seemed a bit reluctant to take the lead in teaching science in the classroom, though?" David asks. "Why was that, do you think?"
"It was, 'I've got this science expert at the back of my class, watching a non science expert'. A lot of the time I felt I wasn't not doing this properly and that's what you were thinking - sitting there thinking, 'she's not talking about this, she's not talking about that'. That was one of the issues but I think a lot of it was that I expected more structure and support. But then I got to the stage where I couldn't trust that that was going to happen so I would be running around first thing in the morning, going: 'Fred have you got a chemistry book that I can get some lesson out of?', because I still felt compelled that I should do science on a Wednesday even if you weren't there."
"First term I felt fine with science," Carolyn continues, "because it was environmental biological science. I haven't got any science learning but I found that interesting, I could teach that with the resources that people shared around. But when it got to the chemistry, I was thinking: 'this is way past me', but I think I probably could have bumbled along quite nicely by collaborating with Annalise, Steve and Cassandra. With that environmental stuff, I found that - I think because I had a certain amount of content knowledge - I could see the structure of where we were heading, so I could do more. One day when you weren't here I thought 'OK, we'll do the carbon cycle'. And I could link it to what else we'd been doing so that was OK. But once we got to chemistry... I don't know why a kettle boils, so that was my extent."
As Carolyn's final sentence above indicates, the lack of 'content knowledge' on the part of non-specialists teaching science is a significant problem. A teacher who has virtually no formal science background will have extreme difficulty in providing students with scientifically satisfactory explanations and schemes.
From my perspective, though, the key problem that occurred at Arcadia when non-specialist teachers are asked to teach science was that such teachers have no basis for comparison beyond their own school experiences, and no clearly articulated pedagogical and theoretical perspective from within which to reflect on their teaching practice. They tend to uncritically reproduce the science education practices and approaches of their own childhood and adolescence, rather than reflecting more constructivist/instrumentalist referents in their classroom practice.
It is difficult to provide evidence for this conjecture in the form of a written text, in that it asserts something about my own understandings. Even if I am able to set out those understandings in a clear and accessible way (which is by no means certain), how do I prove that they are, in some sense, the result of this research project? Even a quasi-experimental approach is impossible: we do not have available an alternative David Geelan, identical in every other respect, who neither taught at Arcadia nor conducted research on his teaching practices, with which to compare understandings. It is even difficult to compare my understandings at the beginning of 1996 with those I have now, in late 1997, as I write up the research.
The evidence for my new understandings must be located in my teaching practice - not in the ideas to which I can give verbal or textual assent, but in the way I teach, learn and research in classrooms. Have my practices changed as a result of this research project, so that I take more seriously the expectations and established roles and practices of the teachers and students with whom I work? Am I more aware of what it means to be a science teacher, and of the types of teacher knowledge that are important to that practice, and is that awareness reflected both in my own science teaching and my work with other teachers? I believe that I am more aware of all these things, and that - increasingly, but by no means fully - my practices reflect that awareness.
With a muffled bang, 'School Stories' springs open again on the desk, nearly knocking Alyx over. The open page begins to glow a faint blue, which begins to pulse steadily and increase. A tiny whirlwind begins to develop above the pages, and the paper teachers start to flap and move. Inexorably they are pulled closer, whirling, and picked up by the miniscule blue tornado. They spiral down into the page, and as David disappears, the whirlwind subsides, the blue glow dissipates, and all that is left is an open book on a desk. The camera pulls back, accelerating away past the dogs and the kids and the unfenced sandy yards, back past the flashing and sparkling windows, to a stationary view of the blue-grey hills and the bright blue sky.
Conclusion
Given the five tentative conjectures outlined in this chapter, and the experiences and understandings represented in 'School Stories', what questions remain to be asked and answered? What are the next steps in my own teaching/research journey, and how might others react and begin to conduct similar inquiries into their own understandings? These questions are addressed in Chapter Seven. In that chapter I also cast a critically reflective eye back over both the research project and this written representation/enactment of it. What was done well, what could have been done better? In what ways were my representations of others - and of myself - fair and unfair?
1. Although they remain characters, rather than realist representations of people, I have chosen to refer to these characters without 'scare quotes' throughout this chapter, simply because their constant use is awkward.Back to your place in the text.
2. See the discussion of the 'crises of representation and legitimation' (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) in Chapter Four.
Back to your place in the text.
3. The material from the interview transcripts used in this chapter has to some degree been edited for clarity and readability, without changing the intent of the original interview responses. The original, unedited transcripts form Appendix Three.
Back to your place in the text.