Development of the two worlds metaphor

As I sought further ways to illuminate the meaning of the teachers’ stories, I was constantly reminded of the story, often recounted in musical circles, of the great Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff. Following the performance of one of his own piano concertos, Rachmaninoff left the stage profoundly dissatisfied. Despite the brilliance of his playing, the careful shaping of each phrase, the building of tension within each section of the music, and the warm reception of the audience, Rachmaninoff’s own experience was that his performance had ‘missed the point’. The ‘point’ rested with his understanding of the ultimate meaning of the music, which lay, not within individual phrases or sections, but in the integration of all of the parts into one coherent and meaningful whole.

This story repeatedly took me back to my intuition that there was a ‘whole’ that sat beneath the teachers’ day-to-day experiences, and that this ‘whole’ was indeed greater than the sum of the parts. But although I had found ways of interpreting aspects of the teachers’ stories, I did not yet have the means of connecting up their experiences into one meaningful whole; the ‘gestalt’ was missing35. In seeking to illuminate the whole, I returned to Clandinin and Connelly’s (1995) metaphor of the teachers’ professional

35_{The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Brown, 1993) defines ‘gestalt’ as “an integrated}

knowledge landscape, which throughout the course of the inquiry had consistently attracted me as a way of making sense of teachers’ experiences.

In common with the teachers in Clandinin and Connelly’s (1995) studies, the music teachers occupied in-classroom and out-of-classroom places, in which there were typically different expectations and ways of looking at things. The out-of-classroom place bore strong resemblances to the out-of-class place on Clandinin and Connelly’s landscape. It was a largely objective, cognitive world, dominated by the language and values of rational thinking and typified by systems, policies and structures. For example, the lives of all of the individuals within the study were governed by timetables, which divided the day into discrete ‘blocks’ of time, and by clocks and bells which ensured that at the end of the allocated time, students and teachers moved on to their next ‘block’.

The out-of-class place of the teachers was also influenced by policies, ideas and documents funnelled through the conduit from outside. External policies created an objective, outcomes-driven climate. The ANZC established outcomes for learning, and external credentialing requirements, such as NCEA, dictated outcomes for assessment. Furthermore, as the data chapters had demonstrated, the teachers in my study were all, to some extent or other, ‘disturbed on the landscape’. These ‘disturbances’, in fact, pointed to the tensions of practice encountered by the teachers.

However, despite these obvious correlations with Clandinin and Connelly’s (1995) metaphor, there were still issues. The metaphor, as it was, did not account for several important aspects of the teachers’ stories and so did not provide an adequate lens through which to explore, and understand, the music teachers’ tensions. In musical parlance it did not completely ‘ring true’ in relation to my study. Acting as an interpretive bricoleur, and working with the ‘habit of changing habits’, I re-examined the metaphor. I returned to the sketches of the landscape – the bricoles – that I had drawn when I first encountered Clandinin and Connelly’s work, and re-imagined them in the light of the music teachers’ stories, exploring the places where the two did not connect.

One issue was that the metaphor did not adequately account for the teachers’ work in the extra-curricular arena. Although strictly speaking, extra-curricular music groups operate outside of timetabled classroom time and so might be considered to belong to the out-of-classroom place, the teachers spoke of their experience with these groups in a manner that had much more in common with the in-classroom place than the out-of-

classroom place. I returned to the image I had drawn of the landscape, and tentatively split the in-classroom place into two parts, to accommodate the extra-curricular music groups. However, this was not convincing. Although the image could now accommodate the extra-curricular groups in the in-classroom place, it did not take account of the fact that the in-classroom place – with good reason – was often a source of major tension for the teachers.

A second issue pertained to the nature, or quality of the landscape that the music teachers occupied. Clandinin and Connelly’s (1995) landscape is embedded in a sacred story which they consider gives rise to one of the core dilemmas of teaching – the divide between theory and practice. When I examined my teachers’ stories closely and reflected on their experiences, I came to the conclusion that while they were influenced and ‘disturbed’, along with all teachers, by the experience of negotiating two epistemologically different spaces, there was something else, which I suspected was for them even more fundamental, that sat at the heart of their ‘disturbance’.

A third issue with the metaphor was the position of the teachers in relation to the in- classroom and out-of-classroom places. Clandinin and Connelly (1995) envisaged the teachers as moving between each of the places, by crossing a semi-permeable boundary. It was this movement from place to place across the boundary that gave rise to their disturbances. While the teachers in my study certainly occupied each place, the image of teachers apparently moving with relative freedom between the two places did not adequately account for the level of pressure and constriction that was evident in some of the teachers’ stories in my study.

For a time, it appeared that these three issues would render the metaphor unhelpful as an aid to understanding the experiences of the teachers in my study. Yet, I was unwilling to abandon it; its power as a tool for understanding the teachers’ experiences still attracted me. I returned to the images I had sketched on paper and explored them further. At the same time, I explored the concept of the two separate places on the landscape – which I began to see as different worlds – and the relationship of the teachers to those places. In one of those seemingly miraculous ‘aha’ moments, the metaphor and its role and significance in my study snapped into place. I had, indeed, laid bare “a secret that [was] hidden in plain sight” (Palmer, 2007, p. 3). As I cautiously tested out the slightly modified metaphor, my experience was as if the component parts of a musical chord had come together, each resonating at its exact pitch. When each

note in a chord is in its correct place, the chord locks together, and the resultant harmony is crisp, clear and satisfying.

The re-envisaged metaphor still owes its existence to the work of Clandinin and Connelly (1995), being built from their landscape metaphor. It retains three main features – two separate and contrasting places, and the teacher who must negotiate them both. The two places on the new landscape share much in common with the places of the original metaphor. One still has an ‘inside’ or interior quality, and the other an ‘outside’ or exterior quality, and each place still has its own language and ways of looking at the world. However, the two places in my metaphor, rather than representing the in-class and out-of-class places, instead represent the ‘inner’ world of music and the wider ‘outer’ world of the school – the two worlds that the music teacher must try to successfully navigate and draw together. As in the original metaphor, the ‘out-of-class’ place – the world of the school – is still influenced by policy and ideas from outside, but this study does not focus on the conduit as outlined Clandinin and Connelly. For the purposes of this study, the conduit and policies which are transported through it, have been subsumed into the outer world of the school.

The position of the teachers in relation to the two places on the landscape has also undergone a change. The fundamental role of music teachers in their schools is to enable the provision of music – be it in the classroom or in the wider school. They must ‘translate’ the experience and thought forms of music into the school setting. It is possible, therefore, to conceive of the teachers as being positioned at the interface between the world of the school and the world of music. Following Kahn et al. (1964), the teachers can be seen as occupying a ‘boundary position’, in this case between ‘systems’ within the wider organisation of the school. The model where music teachers are positioned at the interface, ‘between the two worlds’, makes it possible to explore in detail, and make sense of, some of the tensions that they encounter in their daily working lives.

The two worlds metaphor makes it possible to go to the heart of the teachers’ experiences and explore the fundamental tension of practice experienced by them all. Their stories of the importance of music in their lives, which motivated them to ‘enable’ music within their schools settings, suggested that they share a ‘sacred story’ (Crites, 1971) – a story which at once underpins and elucidates their connection with music. The sacred story is however, neither widely held, nor necessarily even understood, by others on their professional knowledge landscape. The sacred story and the two worlds

metaphor are revisited in depth in Chapter 10 where they serve as part of the interpretive bricolage.

4.7 Chapter summary

The purpose of Chapter 4 has been to present the design of the study, the assumptions on which it was built, and the processes used to undertake the research. The study is situated within the constructivist-interpretive paradigm, which holds different assumptions and premises from those on which traditional positivist research is based. It rejects the notion that one single, objective reality exists, and that the role of the researcher is to stand apart from the research subject. This inquiry reflects the interpretivist belief, and postmodern thinking, that no single reality exists, and that it is not possible to separate the knower from the known. In keeping with the qualitative research tradition, the current inquiry examines an aspect of the lived experience of the participants, seeking to understand their world from their own perspective. It utilises the concepts of bricolage and the researcher as bricoleur.

Issues of the trustworthiness of this project were also discussed. The rigour of research is conventionally tested using the concepts of validity and reliability. These measures, however, are built on positivist assumptions, and need to be reframed for qualitative research. While currently there is no consensus amongst qualitative researchers as to how to do this, within this project, tests devised by researchers such as Lincoln and Guba (1985) and Merriam (1998) have been used to examine, as far as possible, the reliability and validity of the research.

The second part of the chapter discussed the research design, outlining the aims of the project and the research questions. It also discussed the methodological bricolage of the study, which was informed by narrative and story, life story and life history approaches, and reflexivity. The research method of interview-conversations was explained and issues of ethics were addressed. The research processes were also examined. These included procedures used to select participants and obtain informed consent, and to collect, analyse, present and interpret the data. The final section discussed interpretive bricolage and described the development of the two worlds metaphor.