Introduction - The Learning Journey
The conclusions of this research fall naturally into two areas. One is that represented by the first four conjectures presented in Chapter Six. This may be summarised by saying that the path to school reform is far more complex and difficult than it may at first appear. Perhaps this does not qualify as new knowledge - the last three decades of much-hyped and rapidly discarded curricular and social reforms in schools provide plenty of evidence of the difficulty of innovation. I would suggest, however, that the original contribution of this research is in offering a richer, less abstract and theoretical, more 'teacherly' appreciation of the particular kinds and areas of complexity and resistance, as a first step toward addressing them in reforms.
Issues relating to the nature of the challenges facing non-specialist teachers who are required to teach science were also addressed, and I have suggested that, if such teachers are to be asked to teach science, it is important that they be supported in developing a fund of 'pedagogical content knowledge' (Shulman, 1987) and more powerful understandings of the nature of science and school science.
The research also points to the necessity for innovations to be introduced through ongoing collaboration and negotiation between all stakeholders - teachers, administrators, parents and particularly students. Such negotiation must explicitly focus on the nexus between the social forces of school culture and the roles - the sets of interrelated expectations - that each individual brings to the school situation.
The second area of interest, represented by the fifth conjecture, is the methodology employed. I believe that much of the justification for the appropriateness of a research approach must be in terms of the usefulness of the research outcomes for the purposes for which the research was originally conducted (Donmoyer, 1997, March). My dual purpose in conducting this research was to expand my own understanding of teaching/learning/research, including exploring ways to more fully embody my own educational values in my practice, and to be able to communicate my new understandings to other teachers in ways that would be meaningful for them and would enable them to reflect on their own educational values and practices.
I believe that I have been enabled, through teaching in these classrooms, talking to these teachers, and writing and sharing these tales, to strengthen and deepen and elaborate my own understandings of the processes and antecedents of school education in ways that no other research methodology would have supported. I also believe, based on experience at local conferences and on discussions with teachers, that these stories allow me to communicate my newly developed understandings to other teachers in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Much research into science teaching is written in language and couched in ideas that make it either inaccessible or irrelevant to classroom teachers. I believe the narratives of experience that form one 'product' of this research project have the potential to empower teachers to enact positive changes in their own teaching practice and their own educative communities.
In Chapter One and throughout this discussion, however, I have indicated that my enthusiastic, rhetorical affirmation of the value of what narratives of experience can show to teachers and researchers must be tempered by a critical awareness of what they hide. As Bauersfeld notes: "Concentrated and systematic pursuit of one perspective forces other perspectives into blindness" (1988, p. 41). In the next part of this final chapter, I wish to 'question the answers' I have provided in the course of the thesis - to try, through adopting other perspectives, to see into some of the blind spots of the methods and approaches I have chosen for this inquiry. In the remainder of the chapter I will consider the implications of the research for my own future teaching/learning/research activities and those of others.
Critical Reflection - Vices and Virtues
I value the research approach I have adopted for this inquiry into my practice and that of my colleagues. That almost goes without saying - why else would I have chosen an approach that is somewhat different from the norm, with all the risk that such a choice entails? But my valuing of this approach must not be blind or uncritical. There are a number of potential problems and dangers that must be considered in conducting narrative research.
One of these is the problem of my intentions. If I bear any malice (or indeed, an infatuation) toward one or other of the teachers with whom I work, and about whom I write (or toward students or parents), or if I wish to present a particular case, irrespective of my experiences in the school, then my testimony is not to be trusted. What standards can be applied? What standards are appropriate for judging both the representation of the research - this book - and the research project as a whole? How can readers of these tales know that I have tried to capture my lived experience as honestly as I am able, rather than writing a pure polemic to attack an enemy or proselytise a perspective?
I can really offer no guarantees, except my assertion that I have tried to write an honest account. There is some evidence by which to test that assertion - the transcripts of the teacher interviews. These go at least some way to demonstrate whether my portrait of each character rings true, to the extent that the fictionalised characters are derived from the real teachers.
The other standard that applies must be literary: not 'is the account true?' - it was never intended as a realist portrait - but 'does it seem true?' Does it have an internal consistency that gives it verisimilitude (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, pp 579-580), and does it resonate with your own classroom experience? And is it a good story - engaging, thought-provoking, challenging? But finally, I can offer no guarantees as to my motives - is this a fatal flaw of the method?
Another potential problem - and one to which I believe I may have succumbed - is excessive reliance on one method of gathering evidence. I value an eclectic approach to research in education (Geelan, under review), and have used the surveys and interviews to complement the impressionist tales I wrote. Had I been concentrating less on the tales as the core of the research, however, I might have seen the intriguing patterns in the students' survey results, and have taken the time to interview some students to tease out the reasons for their beliefs and perspectives. It would have been fascinating to know how their rather objectivist views on the nature of science arose, and to explore what they meant when they indicated that they only wanted their science learning to be relevant to their lives 'sometimes'. That opportunity has been lost - that cohort of students has been separated, has lived through another year, and can never be interviewed just as they were at the end of 1996.
Finally, there is the question of bias and prejudgement. I entered the school with a rich, eclectic and quite well-articulated conceptual framework and set of values - they're outlined in some detail in Section One. I have left the school with those values and perspectives enriched, and with related new understandings, but perhaps my values have not been fundamentally changed or challenged (one important exception is discussed below), and the 'novel' and conjectures that form the research results are almost completely consistent with those values and theories. I have been unabashed in owning my values, but do they make me an unreliable witness, someone who brings his own axe to grind, instead of finding the raw ore on the research site and smelting it there? I'm not sure. This is a judgement for the reader to make. I cannot eschew my values and ideas and become a tabula rasa recording instrument for a culture - if I were to try, the best I could do would be to fake it, as so many realist ethnographers have done. I believe it's better to tell you who I am, what I believe, what I think, then let you decide what value to put on my account. It's what you do every day in life, from sales personnel to bankers - evaluate the account by the information you have about the source.
Of course, I could be lying. This textual representation of 'David Geelan' is, as we noted at the very beginning, entirely my creation. Perhaps I'm not as brave as Cromwell, and will paint over all the warts in my self-portrait. Or, more subtly, perhaps I'll leave a little wart showing to convince you of my honesty, but paint out the huge blemish on the other side of my face, that I really don't want you to see. Maybe you need to talk to Peter, or Sue, or my friends, so that you can check the verisimilitude of my self-portrait. All I can offer in text is my word - I've painted the best I can, but I'm an impressionist, not a photorealist.
The one real surprise for me in the whole research project was the importance of love and relationship in teaching. I've discussed this further in the next section, but it was a genuinely novel understanding for me in the context of education. It's possible, though, that I saw it because I was ready, because I'd matured enough, because I was talking about agape love with friends. Perhaps all this sensitised me to the magic of what Candace and Alyx did in their classrooms, where someone else - or even me in another year of my life - might not have noticed, or might have used different language to describe what they saw. Does that matter? Is it a problem if my personal life shows me new things in my research site, or helps me write old things in a new way? The conventional wisdom has been "yes, this is contamination", but I wonder.
Implications for My Teaching/Learning/Research Practice
As I noted in the introduction of this chapter, I had two key purposes in mind for this research project. The first of these was to deepen and enrich my own 'connected knowledge' (Belenky et al., 1986) and understanding (Wolcott, 1990) of my teaching/learning/research practices and those of my teacher colleagues, in order to support changing my practices to more fully embody my values.
The four implications that I see for my practice - as a teacher-researcher who is continually learning from his students and colleagues - consist of two reminders of pedagogical verities, one surprise that shouldn't have been, and an approach to reflection and on-going professional and personal growth.
Reforms are difficult
Four of the five conjectures presented in Chapter Five point, in different ways, to the difficulty of changing what happens in schools. My own experience with attempts to change my teaching practices (Geelan, 1994, 1996) bears this out: when it comes to inertia, the QE II has nothing on schools! What does this mean for my own classroom practice and for my teacher education activities? Certainly not that we should just give up and stop trying: the reforms, innovations and changes we try to embody in our teaching practice are our values, and if our professional lives continue to be conducted in negation of our values, we are in great danger of moral and emotional burnout.
Instead, reforms need to be seen as local, collaborative and contextual, rather than externally mandated, individual and context-independent. The approaches to innovation that are most powerful are neither those that provide 'teacher-proof' packages of hi-tech materials and resources, nor those where courageous individual teachers choose to change what they do. Rather, reforms that are conducted by collaborative, committed groups of professionals, working from common value perspectives, and with a focus on reflection and self-study, are the most likely to contribute to more durable change. Even so, the 'practical' and 'critical' (Habermas, 1971) complexity of school systems and societies, and the conceptual inertia of teachers, students and parents mean that no reforms will occur over night - they will require long periods of time, changes to expectations and education of all stakeholders.
In the school where I will be teaching in 1998, a like-minded community of Christian teachers will be attempting to develop an upper secondary school curriculum that is academically excellent, focussed on student learning, and reflects the moral and spiritual values of the teachers, students and parents in the school community. The implications of this research project for that next phase of my teaching/learning/research practice are that reforms are difficult, but not impossible, and that explicit attention to the expectations, beliefs and assumptions of teachers and students is essential.
Students are central
The second and third conjectures bring my attention to an issue of which I was already aware (Geelan, 1994, 1996): the central importance of addressing the roles and expectations of students in trying to change what happens in schools. I need this reminder, though, because again and again I fall into the trap of assuming that if I change myself and my teaching practices, that will be enough. It never is, of course, because while I am changing the expectations I have of myself and my students, they are keeping the same old sets of expectations, and are becoming frustrated as I fail (on their terms) to be reliable and predictable.
It is not enough, either, for me to tell the students about the new roles and expectations I'm imagining: they have all accumulated many years of experience of 'what schools are like', and what are appropriate roles and practices for teachers and students. From my constructivist perspective, I ought to understand that it will take more than a lesson, more even than a school year, to fundamentally reconstruct the way these students think about their own learning. The difficulty is compounded, of course, if I am making the changes more or less unilaterally in my own classroom, while my colleagues in other learning areas re-affirm the old approaches as hard as they can. Instead of telling - imposing - I need to negotiate the new roles and expectations with the students in good faith. There will be some things that are not negotiable, and I need to be up front about those things. I need to take the students' needs and concerns seriously, and not be cavalier about their ambitions and need to find a place in the hierarchy. These are both moral issues about the students' freedom and dignity, and pragmatic pedagogical issues: if the students choose not to change, I cannot force them - all I can do is derail their learning by trampling their expectations.
It's more difficult even than that, though, because I've accumulated a fair bit of schooling myself, and I have a huge mass of expectations that takes a long time to turn around. So I often give out mixed signals, or say one thing and do another. If I claim to value collaborative construction of knowledge, but then give students individual grades for work individually learned, can I blame them if they stick to what's safe, to what they know?
I am also constrained by external pressures over which I have no control. Is it fair for me to ask students to value new ways of learning and thinking when they'll be rewarded for the old ways? Do I do them a disservice by choosing not to help them play the selection game just as hard as they can?
If I intend to change and challenge 'the way things are done' in my teaching, then I need to be consistent, to take students' needs and ideas into account, and to be willing to genuinely negotiate new roles and expectations, rather than impose them.
Love is the answer
Or at least, a far more significant part of the answer than I had realised. I really shouldn't have been surprised by this: I have seen the power of love in my own life. But it's not something we talk about in the literature of education, and it's not something my research questions addressed.
It was Candace and Alyx's love for their students, though - their active caring and nurture and the strong, trusting relationships they built - that really made the difference in their classrooms. Their epistemological and pedagogical beliefs and approaches, as measured by the CLES and the BASSQ, were not, after all, so different from those of their colleagues, but their far greater success in implementing the constructivist-referenced reforms in their classrooms was built in relationship. They expected the best of their students, and most often received it from them. Their classroom management was negotiated, relationship based, accountable for everyone involved.
What do I mean, in this context, by 'love'? The term is so frequently used, and in such a wide variety of contexts, that it can become almost meaningless. There are a number of Greek terms for love, which allow some clearer distinctions to be made. Eros is described as 'the energy of desire', and is most often used of romantic and erotic love. This is the love I share with Sue, which provides power and energy and security to support my teaching, but does not have a place in the school. Philos is 'friendship' or 'fellow-feeling' - beyond acquaintance to an actual affection and liking. Unless I feel this toward my students, they will sense my dislike or indifference, and it will be impossible to inspire them to succeed, to learn and to care. It is possible to teach without philos, but not to teach well. Agape can be described as 'spiritual love' - an unselfish, even self-sacrificing love for others. Such a love for my students is difficult, taxing, in that it holds others more important than myself, and takes their greatest good as the goal. This does not mean their wishes or desires: they may not know what is in their best long-term interests. Like Van Manen (1991), I am willing to claim that I know what is good for my students, but very aware of the necessity for constant critical reflection to ensure that I'm not indoctrinating or coercing them.
The biblical description of love in I Corinthians 13 (this version is from 'The Message' paraphrase) describes agape beautifully:
...no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love. Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have. Love doesn't strut, doesn't have a swelled head, doesn't force itself on others, isn't always "me first", doesn't fly off the handle, doesn't keep score of the sins of others, doesn't revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end.
This is a significant challenge for me in my own teaching, because I tend to be shy, and to fear becoming too close to those I teach. And of course, like everyone, I tend to be self-centred and to consider my own needs and wishes before those of others. How can I find ways to demonstrate love, caring and trust in my teaching? Van Manen's (1991) 'pedagogical thoughtfulness' seems to me to be a (much longer!) term for 'applied love', and he offers many brilliant suggestions and meditations on how to make thoughtfulness a practical part of teaching. As I return to the classroom, I will have a whole new teaching approach to try to put into practice: I've been working on constructivism for eight years, now here comes love...
Stories are powerful
I have no choice but to go on living the narrative of my teaching life - whether I attend to it consciously or not, that tale will wind on until I stop teaching (probably about the time I stop breathing.) The power lies in choosing to tell tales about my lived tale. By writing stories I make them explicit for myself, make them available for reflection, weave a net of narrative to capture my experiences so that I can examine them. My writing is itself an activity of teaching and learning, as I am enabled to tease out the influences, ideas and assumptions that are changing my lived story each day. Through creating stories, I experience myself again as a living contradiction (Whitehead, 1989), and both affirm and challenge the values I try to embody in my teaching practice.
But my told tales are not only for me. They are powerful for others too, and the sharing of tales is both a means of reflection on another's experience, and an act of trust. An image that has great power for me comes from a tale I heard: in the former Soviet Union, deep friendships were cemented and enriched when one told one's friend of some thought or action that, if reported to the authorities, would result in prosecution. Such a truth was a gift of trust: it said "I know you, and trust you, with my life and freedom". The stakes are perhaps not as great, but for teachers to take their 'secret stories' (Clandinin and Connelly, 1995, 1996), which may admit that they are not as confident, professional and on top of things as they'd like to be, out of the classroom and share them with one another is a way of developing a professional community of practice in which it is possible to be supported by others we can trust to know our weakness.
The implication for my practice, then, is that I need to keep writing and sharing the narratives of my experience, as part of my professional development and personal growth.
Invitation - Who Will Join Me?
The second purpose I chose for this research was to represent the new understandings and knowledge resulting from the research in ways that were accessible and valuable to teachers. The written account was intended to serve as an occasion for teachers to reflect on their own narratives of classroom experience in light of mine, in order to enable them to begin the process of reflective inquiry that constitutes the development of 'living educational theory' (Whitehead, 1989).
This intention grows out of the fourth implication discussed in the preceding section of this chapter. If I find that 'stories are powerful' as an approach to critical reflection on my own practice, perhaps others will find my stories powerful too and, more importantly, be encouraged to begin to write their own stories. Stories are both told and lived. It is through abstracting written narratives from the on-going narratives of our (teaching) lives that we begin a process of reflection and disciplined inquiry into our values and their intersection with our practice; we begin to experience ourselves as 'living contradictions' (Whitehead, 1989) in ways that may not have occurred to us had we continued simply living our narratives of experience.
Once that process is begun, we experience dissatisfaction with this contradiction, and begin - in negotiation with our students, colleagues and other stakeholders - to work to change our practice. In my opinion, this is the most powerful (and perhaps the only truly effective) means of school change. Rather than curricular initiatives being sent - in Clandinin and Connelly's (1995) apt phrase - 'down the pipe' to classrooms from external bodies, teachers who are actively working, with a sense of agency and professionalism, to transform their practices will be much more likely to genuinely change what happens in classrooms. By making their 'secret stories' even a little public - first by writing them down rather than just living them in the classroom, and then by sharing the written tales with others - teachers can be empowered to challenge the 'sacred stories' that constrain their practice.
One important activity that is implied by this purpose of the research is the dissemination of the tales as broadly as possible among teachers and teacher-researchers. (This feels a little like hubris - because I value them, who's to say that others will? The test will, of course, be the teachers' reception of the tales.) One paper reporting the research and incorporating three tales from 'School Stories' has already been accepted for publication by the journal Research In Science Teaching (RISE) (Geelan, in press), and others will shortly be submitted to teachers' journals like the Australian Science Teachers Journal (ASTJ) and School Science and Mathematics (SSM). The research has been reported at a number of Western Australian and international conferences including the 1997 conferences of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and will be presented at the 1998 conference of the Australian Science Teachers Association (CONASTA) and the Australasian Science Education Research Association (ASERA).
The hypertext form of this thesis is itself an intriguing product. The text is identical to this paper form, but the very existence of hypertext links that break down the linearity of the reading activity makes it a different mode of experience for the reader. As Denzin and Lincoln have suggested:
This will challenge the traditional relationship between the reader and the writer. In the electronic spaces of hypertext, readers become writers, bricoleurs, who construct the text out of the bits and pieces and chunks of materials left for them by the writer. (1994, p. 583)
All of these avenues are intended to invite my fellow science educators and classroom teachers to begin using the power of narratives of experience (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988) in the process of critical reflection and disciplined inquiry with the aim of improving their teaching/learning/research practices. This corresponds with the notion of 'catalytic validity' (Lather, 1986) - "the degree to which a given research project empowers and emancipates a research community" (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 579).
Conclusion - Places to Begin
In bringing to an end the written phase of this research project, I have a sense of closure in that the text is complete, the arguments are made. The words and ideas move from my mind to my computer's screen, stir the magnetic particles on the hard drive into new patterns. Those patterns in turn will be translated and transformed, both into a heavy three hundred and fifty page paper book that will impress my daughters, and into a series of connected HTML files that will together constitute a hypertext narrative.
In another sense, though, nothing is finished, closed or complete. As I write this page, it is nearly the end of 1997, the year after I taught at Arcadia. In a few short weeks I will begin to teach again, returning to the secondary school science classroom in a small Christian school near my home. I hold many of the same values - both personal and educational - that I held at the beginning of 1996, and the story of the coming year will again be part of the narrative of my experiences as I seek to more fully live those values in my teaching practice. I will be teaching chemistry and calculus to students who will very soon face their own Tertiary Entrance Rank examinations, and it will be a genuine challenge to find ways to teach for understanding in the face of that massively distorting pressure.
In that sense, the 'results' and 'findings' of this research project are places to begin, not just in research but in my teaching life. If I value constructivist-referenced changes in my teaching, and if my research has, more than anything, demonstrated the great difficulty of enacting such changes in the classroom, that only makes me more eager to attempt the challenge.
In the end, it's all about what Nel Noddings (1984) calls 'caring'. I want to be a little braver than that, though, and say it's about love. If I can find the strength and the courage to look on all of my students with a love
which I have to borrow from God, who knows I can't do it alone
that cares for their needs, both educational and human, and that disposes me to thoughtfulness and tact (Van Manen, 1991), then perhaps from these starting places I can continue to more and more fully live my values. The tales of that attempt and that commitment will form the next instalment in my on-going learning tale, and I will write it as I have written this fragment of my life.