I wanted in this study to explore teachers' and curriculum leaders' understandings of their day to day work - that much at least remained consistent throughout the study. Initially, as I indicated above, and in order to make the study manageable, and to allow me to complete my occupational 'rite of passage' as smoothly as possible, I intended to gather, synthesise and analyse interview data over the course of a school year using two data analysis methods (the one statistical, the other qualitative) within a broadly phenomenological tradition. Together, these would allow generalisations to be made about teachers and curriculum leaders' conceptions of 'expertise' and changes in these over time from a pool of approximately twenty five selecting informants in a small number of schools.
Gaining Access
In my application to Massey University's Human Ethics Committee in 1995, prior to the fieldwork, I addressed a number of ethical concerns regarding the potentially sensitive nature of the research, gaining access to and consent from potential participants, and privacy, confidentiality and anonymity issues (appendix one).
I knew that schools were busy places and, on the basis of previous studies, that it can be difficult to gain access to teachers' thinking and action unless an exclusively positive stance is taken from the I made it clear in my approach to principals and to the groups of staff with whom I talked about the research project that (a) I wanted to ensure that the project was not too demanding of their time; (b) I was interested in using aspects of practice that they identified in order to generate data and my approach to analysis would be non-judgmental; and (c) I wanted their voices, thinking and experiences as teachers to be 'heard' in the public, policy and scholarly Nevertheless, even though I asked colleagues to suggest possible schools to approach, it was difficult to raise much interest beyond the principal. In order to provide an incentive and some reciprocity for the time they were contributing, and to elicit some contextual data on each school, in my approach I had offered to investigate issues of practice where they felt they would benefit from having evaluative data gathered by an intermediary from outside the school (and which would also help my study). Here I had in mind two or three days fieldwork on behalf of each participant and a report of what I had found in the style suggested by Rudduck's "school profile study - a label we use to denote a form of focussed, school-based enquiry in which researchers are commissioned by a school to investigate an issue that is important to the school and which involves the use of condensed
Establishing The Study
After several polite rejections, I eventually gained a positive response one, then two, then four principals all of whom alerted their staff to the research (and the incentive) on my behalf (see appendix two for details of-the schools and participants). One arranged for me to make a presentation to a whole staff meeting (attended by over fifty) and another, after a preliminary discussion with him, to the weekly and PR holders' meeting (approximately twenty five). In the other two schools the principals offered to participate with a small number of colleagues and we met only as individuals or a small group. I met with those staff in each school who expressed an interest, explained the procedures, gained their consent to participate and to have the interviews recorded for transcription (appendix three).
I arranged a first, group focused interview that would begin by talking about their ordinary, personal teaching routines or "normal desirable states of and then move on to priorities for development. I felt that the group interview would be less stressful and an initial focus on mundane classroom routines less threatening and awkward. A focus on concrete events
Brown, S. and D. Making sense of teaching. Buckingham, U K : Open University Press, 1993. F. Knowledge and discourse: the evolution of research on teachers' thinking. In C. Day, M. Pope and P. Denicolo (Eds.). Insight into teachers thinking andpractice. London: Falmer Press, 1990, 15-42.
Rudduck, J. The theatre of daylight: qualitative research and school profile studies. In M. Schratz (Ed.). Qualitative voices in educational research. London: Falmer Press, 1993, 8-22.
also coincided with the interview approach recommended in phenomenography, one of the two methods I had planned to use to gather and analyse In the event, discussion of these routines took up all the time I'd allowed for the sessions. It was clear from the preliminary discussions that the offer of a 'free' evaluation was a major incentive to participation. All of the volunteers had some form of curriculum leadership or administrative responsibilities, ranging from a temporary PR unit for curriculum development, to Assistant Dean, Head of Department and Assistant Principal. It was clear also that each participant had a number of important and urgent personal priorities (curriculum, management) they were grappling with but which they preferred to broach in the privacy of one-to-one interviews.
Developing An Empathetic Focus
After the first of the group interviews, the depth of these mostly mid-career teachers' thinking and strategising about their classroom practice began to dawn on me. After the first of the individual interviews I was taken-aback by the extent to which (a) local workgroup (not school) context, national curriculum and assessment prescriptions, professional philosophy of teaching and personal biography influenced what was being attempted. I was more than a little concerned that the phenomenological methods that had been suggested to me by enthusiastic colleagues paid little heed either to the histories and working contexts of individuals or to the processes and reasoning that underpinned what these teachers were attempting to do. This presented me with some dilemmas. The intended data analysis methods I had discussed with my research participants appeared redundant, and the 'condensed fieldwork' was clearly going to take longer than I had anticipated. But, there were also opportunities. The interviews with the participants about their thinking and routines were producing unexpectedly rich data and the condensed fieldwork was turning into a series of case These would allow me to examine in greater detail the dynamics of some of these individual teachers' priorities and gain a more complex understanding through the experiences of their colleagues and students.
The pattern of data gathering that fortuitously emerged, but which, to my mind, was considerably more appropriate for a research focus on individual and collective agency within particular workgroup contexts was one of (a) group focus interview to discuss classroom teaching routines, followed by (b) individual interview to identify priorities followed by (c) fieldwork and (d) a final interview at the end of the 1996 school year (appendix four). As we
102
Brown and op. 1993.
103
F. Phenomenography - describing conceptions of the world around us. Instructional Science,
1981, 10, 177-200.
Walker, R. The conduct of educational case studies; ethics, theory and procedures. In M. Hammersley (Ed.). Controversies in classroom research. Second edn. Buckingham, Open University Press, 1993,
Yin, R. Case study research. Design and methods. Thousand Oaks, Sage,
1994; Stake, R. Case studies. In N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (Eds.). Handbook of qualitative research. Second Edn. Thousand Oaks, Sage, 2000,435-454.
went through the rounds of interviews and fieldwork, I discussed the changes in my thinking about the research with each of the participants and they seemed unconcerned with the different approach to the analysis of the data. To be frank, there was no great urgency on their part to know the findings. Their busy lives proceeded irrespective of the state of the research and although they all regularly assured me that they welcomed my appearances in the school and the periodic opportunities I provided for them to reflect on their practice, the reality was that in most instances I remained an occasional, fleeting visitor and that many of them were already working on a range of other, more urgent priorities with their immediate workgroup colleagues.
Like I was a part-time researcher with other teaching and administrative responsibilities and looking back, was and overambitious in thinking that I could simultaneously satisfy the fieldwork demands of a host of disparate initiatives in four school sites using an eclectic array of data gathering instruments agreed with my research participants. Unlike Grace in his reflexive analysis of his 1995 headteacher study, I like to think that this study was 'collaborative' in the narrow sense that participants suggested priorities they were prepared to allow me to evaluate. We also agreed both how it should be done and the specific aspects of practice I would initially focus on. Moreover, the data gathering instruments (interview, questionnaires, evaluation instruments, meeting and classroom observations) were quite specific to each priority identified by the participant and designed to meet their knowledge needs, rather than imposed by me from the
However, as the chart of the study reveals (appendix four) in a number of cases either the participant decided to take no further part in the study (Lillian), or the priority had already been addressed and the participant moved on to other work by the time I got round to it (Ruth), or was due to review the school (Ivan) or I simply did not have sufficient free time to gather adequate data in the way that I had been asked. Nevertheless, several pieces of (condensed) fieldwork were completed. The data and my analysis of these were discussed with the participants. Where this happened reasonably quickly, the data and comments that were fed back were well-received. Three of the priorities were analysed in greater depth, written up as case studies and, as with all the chapter drafts, were fed back to the participants so that they could make any additions, deletions or comments they wished. The three case studies appear in chapters eight, nine and ten.
Op. 1998, pp. 212-213.
Separately and together, they served the purposes of the 'intrinsic' or 'instrumental' case study approaches described by Stake (op. 2000, p. 437). They were not intended to provide a "collective case study" for the purposes of theory building or generalisation to a larger collection of cases (Ibid.).
Representing Lived Experience
Towards the end of the first year of the study, I had managed a preliminary content analysis of all the interview data reported in chapters five (on routines) six (responsibilities) and seven (on development priorities). A number of common administration, management and leadership themes or "distinctive descriptors of major elements of what is being were identified and I felt that it would be valuable to explore whether and how particular curriculum leaders addressed these over the course of a whole school year rather than within particular initiatives. I showed the list of themes to four of the participants (one from each school) with whom I felt I had developed a particularly good, open relationship and whose leadership work had proved unusually complex (to me). I asked them if they would be prepared to continue to discuss their work with me using the themes as an interview at the end of each term during the following year; all four agreed (chapters eleven and twelve).
All the while the interviews and subsequent fieldwork was underway, I was reading voraciously in two areas, secondary school teaching, curriculum and management; and the history of secondary education and curriculum policy in New Zealand. I wanted to understand much more about as many of the mutidimensional, embedded aspects of complex teaching and leadership practice that I could identify from the data. As I read, the data I was gathering began to make more sense and I felt that I was gradually becoming attuned to the cultural nuances of what I was observing and being told. I was beginning to work out what it actually was that these teachers were attempting to achieve with their practice. In turn, this reading, thinking and engagement with the empirical data suggested that the assumptions I had made about how the data might be represented phenomenologically were quite mono-dimensional and, as such, distorting of the lived experiences of the participants. I then began to look for approaches and methods that might allow me to incorporate my emerging understandings of the cultural, historical and political context of secondary schooling in New Zealand with my new knowledge of how secondary school subjects and workgroups operate, teachers' responses to new curriculum and assessment policy prescriptions, and the local development of expertness by teachers and curriculum leaders that was still the focus of the research.
The data were integrated around generic themes to which I added my commentary. The of each chapter (i.e. the selected data together with my interpretation) was then sent back to the participants for comment and feedback (appendix four). The rationale for each theme is explained within each of the eight data chapters. It is important, however, to justify the selection of data and the way the data are presented, and to comment on the way in which the chapters
107
Powney, J. and Watts, M. Interviewing in educational research. London: Routledge and Paul,
1987, p. 159.
This was modelled on an experience-sampling method suggested by 1977, In Cohen, L. and L. Research methods in education. Third edn. London: Routledge, 1989, p. 247.
were received by the participants, not least because my claim is that the data chapters provide a convincing, "plausible of their experiences during the course of two years' data gathering.
In the discussion so far I have tried to accept Grace's invitation to be reflexive in order to promote integrity of research methods, conduct and analysis. As far as the analysis o f empirical evidence was concerned, my purpose was, again like Grace's, to provide an analysis of the participants' reported experiences (and my observations) that was illuminative "rather than definitive or Indeed, hopefully, as Grace puts it, "what the data lacks in numbers, it compensates for in the richness and range of the personal accounts from the
What came to interest me most in gathering and analysing the data was these teachers' talk (explanations, reasoning and strategising) about what they were attempting to do and why. To use an art analogy, I was more interested in the cartoons or preparatory drawings made by the artist and the various workings detailed in them, than I was the finished picture (Figure 4.1). The value of basing one's analysis on individual teachers' own texts (words, meanings, beliefs, nuanced modes of expression) was harshly reinforced for me after my first individual interview, with Nina. I listened spellbound as Nina talked almost continuously for forty five minutes about her introduction to teaching in a radical-progressive secondary school in Australia some twenty years earlier, which she loved, and her juxtaposition of this against the more traditional pedagogic environment and workgroup culture she worked in at the time of the interview. She articulated what she was hoping to do with her 'accelerated learning' initiative and how she was hoping to engender the enthusiasm for science among her current students, in the way that she used to enjoy in her early years of teaching. As I returned to work I rewound the tape, desperate to listen to the discussion again, only to find that the machine had not recorded anything. I was distraught and spent the next two hours trying to recall as much as I could of the stories, words and logic of Nina's account. Like Coleridge, my head was of partial images, sentences and words that, try as I could, I was mostly unable to record on paper. I rang her to explain and sent four or five pages of reconstructed dialogue back the same day for comments, additions and corrections.
The pages came back with the odd scribble here and there with a comment to the effect that it was a reasonable representation of what she had said. But to me it was not. What I had reconstructed was an impoverished representation of the largely monological account she had constructed for my benefit.
Melia, M. Producing 'plausible stories': interviewing student nurses. In G. Miller and R. Dingwall (Eds.) Context and method in qualitative research. London: Sage, 1997.
Op. 1995, p. 70.
Her account was rich, polychromatic, improvisational, and dynamic. My hurried reconstruction of it almost immediately afterwards was, in comparison, lifeless and monochrome. My account simply did not recapture "the caring and the conflict; the convictions and contradictions; the tensions and contentments; the hopes and fears; and the exhilaration and exhaustion that are embodied in teachingn."* I realised that an understanding of what these teachers did, were attempting to do, and considered important to attempt, could only be achieved by using these teachers' own stories about their work as the basis for generating about teachers' agency. Smyth and colleagues conceptualise this approach as research; the stories teachers tell as work stories, and the portrayal of these as work-storied
A Approach to Validity
With regard to the data gathered in the two areas of inquiry in the empirical part of the study, and the appropriateness of the approach, Hammersley's validity criteria for qualitative studies seem helpful To satisfy criteria, the research should, first, be plausible and credible to its audiences. Here I take this to mean both the research participants, other practitioners among the educational community and educational researchers. Second, the evidence presented should "cohere" with the argument being made. Third, a study should be judged on the basis of its intentions (and the plausibility and relevance of the evidence presented to satisfy these) not its substantive contribution to Although Scott finds problems in this formulation, it does seem to me to provide appropriate criteria for studies, such as this, that are provisional and illuminative in character and which seek through meaningful questioning to more precisely define further areas of inquiry, rather than to build definitive, generalisable theories of practice.
With regard to data gathered within the course of a study (in her case, interviews with student nurses) Melia finds the pursuit of sociological validity either in terms of triangulation of data or confirmation of findings by participants to be problematic in that "all data are shaped by the circumstances of their production, and different data produced by different research procedures cannot be treated as equivalent for the purpose of Melia suggests that these techniques should still be used, however, because they serve a valuable reflexive purpose:
Triangulation and member validation both allow the researcher to reconsider his or her analyses from a novel standpoint; it is not just that additional data are available for study,
Smyth, J., Dow, A., Hattam, R., A. and Shacklock, G. Teachers work in a globalizing economy.
London: Falmer, 2000, p. 114. Ibid. pp. 11 1-1 12.
1992, in Scott, D. Making judgements about research. In Usher and Scott, op. 1996, 74-87.
but also that these additional data may alter the perception of the initial data.