Falk, Bulmenreich, and Jones Lay Out the Basics for Teacher Research

The first chapter of Falk and Blumenreich’s The Power of Questions: A Guide to Teacher and Student Research begins with a sentence that I agree full heartedly with.  “One of the great things about teaching is that it offers the possibility for a life of continual learning.” (Falk & Blumenreich, 2005, p.1) Teachers learn about their students, themselves, and their subject matter unceasingly.  Without dismissing the roles and motivations of experts, policy makers, and researchers from outside the classroom who have produced great quantities of data, curricula, and programs for teachers, it is important to remember that teachers and students aren’t strictly passive learners.  It seems evident that teachers are in primary positions (in the classrooms day to day) and therefore “capable of generating their own knowledge by engaging in investigations about issues related to their own interests, the curriculum, or their work.” (Bisset & Bullock, 1987, et al, as quoted in Falk & Blumenreich, p. 5) Once generated, this knowledge can be applied to the challenges of meeting the educational needs of diverse students in diverse circumstances.

 

The second chapter outlines the different paradigms, approaches, and methods that teachers can use to conduct research to generate knowledge that can be applied in their teaching. I can appreciate the authors emphasis on the naturalistic/hermeneutic research that “examines phenomena in their authentic network of relationship within their natural contexts” (Eisner, 1991a; quoted in Falk, p. 9) But I question how reliable or practical the conclusions can be when naturalistic research is mired in a complex web of factors and influences that are inter-woven in those natural contexts and where each situation is uniquely composed.   I hope that as the course progresses we will explore how to realistically use research that originates in the various and specific individual cases explored through case studies, personal narratives, action research and ethnography, and be able to apply the strategies resulting from them in our own unique environments and with our own unique students.  

In “Chapter 1: Assembling a Critical Pedagogy” from S. Jones’ Writing and Teaching to Change the World: Connecting with Our Most Vulnerable Students I found several significant ideas that got my attention. Jones wrote that within the teacher inquiry community (TIC) “participants recognized some of their habits of seeing students in particular ways and challenged themselves to see beyond those perceptions.” (Jones, 2014, p. 1) This resulted in being open to different pedagogical approaches and  being able to avoid “playing the blame game, getting mired in deficit discourses.” (Jones, p. 3) Jones wrote that “deficit thinking about children and families is unethical, indeed a practice that damages people.”  (Jones, p.3) I was fascinated and appreciated the distinction that Jones made between the philosophical ideas of morality and ethics. Jones linked morality with judgment and absolutism (Jones, pp.8-10) while acting and thinking ethically requires awareness of individualism and interconnectedness and questions not the behaviors but the conditions that make the behaviors possible.  I didn’t expect to find these definitions in a book about teaching but found their application as appropriate to teaching as to other areas in my life.  Jones argues for “the conditions of critical pedagogy necessarily requiring an ethical stance for questioning and acting and making sense rather than a moralistic stance that knows right and wrong.” (Jones, p.10)

This author used the metaphor of giants (Jones, pp.5-6) to describe the obstacles and challenges of BOTH school experiences AND life beyond school.  Having been a successful student and a young person who enjoyed going to school, it took me by surprise to have school life described with such a threatening image.  So, I think I may be out of touch with the experiences and feelings of students who are disenfranchised, vulnerable, or not successfully meeting the educational challenges.  I have not taught children, nor have I been fully employed in teaching adults, yet I have heard of and experienced the challenges experienced by teachers from their perspectives more than I have heard of the experiences from the perspectives of struggling students.  This surprising metaphor was a wake up call for me about the limits and boundaries of my understanding of the educational experience from the perspective of the learner.  I think my own classroom research will need to focus greatly on the student perspective.  I am inclined at this point to consider a case study or narrative approach in my upcoming research for this class in order to pinpoint that focus on learners' perspectives.