Persisting In The Face Of Pressures: How Have We Contributed To The Generation Of Cultures Of Inquiry?
Jack Whitehead, University of Bath, Bath, UK
and
Jacqueline Delong, 235 Grand River Street North, Paris, Ont., Canada
A presentation at the International Conference of Teacher Research (ICTR) 2008 with the Theme: Combining Voices: Building a Teacher Research Community.
Bank Street College of Education
New York, New York
March 28 and 29
Introduction
As two practitioner researchers, one in the university (Whitehead, 2001) and one in a school system (Delong, 2002) we have responded with a critical mass of teacher research publications and degrees in response to Snow’s (2001) advocacy of making public the practical knowledge of teachers by systematizing the knowledge of practitioner researchers and by highlighting research undertaken to improve teaching and learning.
Our intention is to share educational insights from our learning together over some 12 years of sustained mutual support in helping each other to enhance our educational influences in our work in education. We are both aware of the dialogic nature of our learning. Hence the dialogical form of this presentation. We are aware of the importance for each of us of the flow of life-affirming energy in our passion in our professional practices and of the importance of the recognition, acknowledgement and affirmation by others in our persistence in the face of pressures that could discourage and sap our creative energies. Hence our use of multi-media representations of the flows of energy with our values in our explanations of educational influence in the generation of cultures of inquiry.
We have found that multi-media representations of what we are doing can help to communicate the meanings of the flows of energy with our values in our educational relationships. We are also aware of the importance of the ideas we use from others in helping us to understand the pressures that we find discouraging and that sap our creative energies. Through these understandings of the power relations that sustain the imposition of inappropriate systemic and cultural pressures we have been able to combine our voices in contributing to the generation of cultures of educational enquiry. The interchangeable use of ‘inquiry’ and ‘enquiry’ in our paper reflects one of the cultural differences in our use of language from an English and Canadian perspective.
In relation to the contribution of our presentation to educational knowledge we draw on the three different ways of knowing that are influencing our learning together. We draw insights from traditional theories. We see such theories as offering generalized explanations in the form of relationships between propositional statements that explain something about the world as it is. The propositional logic of such explanations eliminates contradictions between the statements from correct thought. We also draw insights from dialectical theories in which contradictions form the nucleus of explanations of change and transformation. Dialecticians tend to reject the elimination of contradictions by propositional thinkers and claim that propositional thinking masks the dialectical nature of reality. We draw insights from both propositional and dialectical thinkers into our perspective of inclusionality.
We work with Rayner’s idea of inclusionality as a relationally dynamic awareness of space and boundaries in our explanations of our contributions to the generation of cultures of inquiry. We intend to show how multi-media representations can overcome limitations in both propositional and dialectical explanations in communicating meanings of flows of energy with values. We claim that they do this in inclusional explanations of educational influences in learning how to contribute to cultures of inquiry. The form of the paper shows the combining of our voices as we share ideas and respond to each other’s thinking.
Combining our Voices
We are combining Jacqueline Delong’s account of contributing to the building of a teacher research community by forming and sustaining a culture of inquiry for teacher-researchers as leaders of learning in a School District, with Jack Whitehead’s account of contributing a new form of educational knowledge, with living educational theories, to the generation of a culture of enquiry with teacher-researchers.
Jacqueline - For over 12 years, I have encouraged and supported pre-school, elementary and secondary teachers, graduate students, administrators and support staff to research their practice by asking the question, “How Can I Improve My Practice?” (Delong, 2002; Whitehead, 1989, 2005). The evidence of the systemic influence is embodied in seven volumes of Passion In Professional Practice: Action Research In Grand Erie (Delong, et al 2001-2007) and annual conferences, Ontario Educational Research Council and Act Reflect Revise, where researchers also shared their findings. The support model has been published in Action Research For Teaching Excellence (Delong, Black & Wideman, 2005).
Living educational theories are the explanations that individuals produce for their educational influences in their learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations in which they live and work.
In this paper, I will share ways in which I have created, encouraged and supported communities of teacher researchers in a large school district in Ontario, Canada. The means to have accomplished these communities include slow, sustained and relational system implementation, integration into district initiatives, policy creation, district, community and international connections, university partnerships, support of new leaders, personal tenacity and influence. We will dialogue about these means one at a time.
Jack – what I would like to do is to contribute to understandings, of how we are persisting in the face of pressures in contributing to the generation of cultures of inquiry, by focusing on the epistemological significance of our work for educational knowledge. I am thinking particularly of our helping to systematize the knowledge of practitioner-researchers. I see this knowledge as an answer to Schön’s (1996) call to develop a new epistemology for the new scholarship of teaching. I believe that we are contributing to the creation of this new epistemology as we reveal the living standards of judgment that can be used to evaluate the validity of our explanations of our educational influences in learning.
I believe that each one of us can make an original contribution to educational knowledge by explaining our educational influence in our own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations in which we work. I think that such contributions are grounded in our dialogic engagement with the relational dynamic of systemic transformation in developing a culture of inquiry.
I like the way Lumley expresses such a relational dynamic in his fluid-dynamical worldview as:
“ ...an inspiring pooling-of-consciousness that seems to include and connect all within all in unifying dynamical communion.... The concreteness of 'local object being'... allows us to understand the dynamics of the common living-space in which we are all ineluctably included participants.” (Lumley, 2008, p.3)
Where I see Jacqueline expressing her embodied knowledge as an educational leader is in her sustained and relational systemic influences.
Jacqueline – I now want to talk about the means to have accomplished these teacher research communities:
1. slow, sustained and relational system implementation:
When I started in 1995 with 5 teachers and 2 school administrators (Delong, 200? in Hossack), It was a small group that I coached myself with the expertise of Jack Whitehead, Tom Russell and Lynn Hannay.
Each of the following years, there were increasing numbers of action researchers and action research groups, with new group leaders like Cheryl Black, Heather Knill-Griesser, Peggy Blair, Bill Valoppi, Dave Abbey and Sharon Laidlaw. I also engaged Diane Morgan, an educational consultant, to coach one group which became too many for me to support myself. With the support of Peter Moffatt, Director of Education, I had access to resources to support the teacher researcher communities until 2003 when he retired. From then until 2007 when I retired, the resources increasingly became more difficult to access. During the 2006-7 school year, having little access to budget, I facilitated a group myself with some release time but mostly with meetings after school. Out of that group, three enjoyed the action research community so much that they are now members of the Brock Masters Cohort program running in 2007-9.
The support model included release time, supported groups, conferences and publications, as described in Action Research For Teaching Excellence (Delong, Black & Wideman, 2005).
While the first years and the last were highly dependent on my relational way of being in the teacher-researcher communities, I provided sustained support for all the groups by attending as many of the community sessions as I could. My focus was to listen to their stories becoming explanations of their lives as professional educators as well as inspiring them to see the depth of their knowledge as practitioners, something they often could not see at first. I challenged them to speak with their own voices and not to let others speak for them.
Having spent a minimum of 5 days a year together and often many more, the community of teacher-researchers became intimate spaces where they felt safe and dependent on each other. The introspection and self-study that is required to conduct action research with “I” at the centre often makes a researcher feel vulnerable. A supportive community is essential not only for mutual support but also for honest and critical feedback on the strength of claims to know.
When we were having difficulty in finding ways of getting the voices out into the public domain, in 1998 Ron Wideman, Assistant Dean at Nipissing University and the Brant County Board of Education in partnership with the Ontario Public School Teachers’ Federation created The Ontario Action Researcher an electronic journal still operating on the Nipissing University website http://www.nipissingu.ca/oar .It is now in its 9th volume.
Articulating the nature of the relationships in teacher research communities is difficult to convey in words but the visual narrative can often capture this meaning. Responding to a request from the University of British Columbia for an interview on action research to be shown at the Investigating Our Practices Conference on May 5, 2007 provided another opportunity to reflect on my living systems thinking (Marshall, 2004) as well as the issue that Vasilyuk points out concerning the poor conceptualisations of energy and values, energy and meaning and energy and motivation.
I am wondering if this clip might demonstrate those conceptualizations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5J7Yr_LjFs
I think you will hear me talk about my values as standards of judgment. The values as standards of judgment that I articulated are valuing the other, building and sustaining a culture of inquiry, creating the evidential knowledge-base of practitioner research to give voice to teachers’ knowledge, sustaining collaborative learning communities for improving student learning and improving the social order. What I don’t talk about in the clip is the cycles of support and non-support, ‘victory narratives’ and ‘stories of ruin’ (MacLure 1996), that I have experienced in those 12 years of building a system culture of inquiry. I plan to do that in this paper.
Jack – What I feel as I watch this clip and the one below of you responding to a question on support for teacher researchers at the 1999 International Conference of Teacher Research, is the flow of life-affirming energy with your values. You distinguish, valuing the other, building and sustaining a culture of inquiry, creating the evidential knowledge-base of practitioner research to give voice to teachers’ knowledge, sustaining collaborative learning communities for improving student learning and improving the social order. I would like to dwell on the significance for educational knowledge of your embodied expression and representation of your energy-flowing values and your relationally dynamic systemic awareness, as we look at their integration into district initiatives.
Jacqueline –
2. integration into district initiatives:
I think that I naturally live systemic thinking as a focus for inquiry:
I set out to learn more about, and develop, how systemic thinking informs my behaviour
and approaches to inquiry. Thinking systemically, to me, includes:
Often holding in mind ideas of connectedness, systemic properties and dynamics,
persistence of patterns, and resilience;
Respecting emergence and unfolding process;
Believing that often “parts” cannot change unless there is some kind of shift in
systemic pattern, but/and that sometimes “parts” can change and influence change
in the wider “system”;
Typically experiencing myself as involved in any systemic relationships I am
seeking to understand, not apart. (Marshall, 2004)
While I was fortunate to be in a senior leadership position with access to resources, the practical resources required to support teachers to create living educational theories, such as release time, technological and print resources, opportunities to share and publish, become a mission of the entire research community. There is no denying the fact that my access to budgets for the purpose of conducting teacher research was significant in building the communities, but that access was, shall we say, creative. For the years 1995-7, the source of funding was a grant from the provincial government to conduct research on the implementation of a new curriculum. From 1997 to 2003, an actual research budget came into existence. This small budget (about $60,000) provided a base for funding release time, meeting and publication costs, conferences and materials for the research communities.
Each year, as well, I attached a research project cost to system initiatives for which I was responsible, such as, Autism, Role of the Resource Teacher, Student Assessment and Literacy and Numeracy. As an example, when I was responsible for Program, the Program Team (the coordinators and consultants and me) decided that with the increasing numbers of children with Autism, we needed a system focus on Autism. A part of the budget was then allocated to research on the effectiveness of our teaching of children with Autism. This research is published in Passion in Professional Practice, Volume III (Delong et al, 2003) and available at http://www.actionresearch.ca .
This may appear to fly in the face of teacher researchers choosing their area of passion, but only those who voluntarily expressed an interest in focusing their question ‘How can I improve my practice?’ on improving instruction to children with Autism were involved in the research community. Now I am well aware that the leader of this community, Peggy Blair, Special Education Co-ordinator, contacted teachers whom she thought might be interested in the project but they had full control over becoming involved.
Connecting teacher research to leadership initiatives was a natural so in 1997 when I had that portfolio, supports for those “Leaders of the Future” included sessions on planning, program and legal issues as well as supports for conducting action research. Those supports included the regular supports such as release time but also local area groups modeled on the Bath Action Research Group but called BARN – Brant Action Research Network and sessions with Jack Whitehead and Jean McNiff. After the amalgamation of three boards into a larger district, Grand Erie District School Board, in 1998, I added two more groups for after school sessions. Each of the three former board communities had facilitators like Cheryl Black, Heather Knill-Griesser, Cheryl Stewart, Liana Thompson, Dave and Lynn Abbey.