Researcher’s Personal Statement

I became aware of my personal and professional interests in this topic as a beginning teacher in the period 1999-2002. I became a teacher in my mid-thirties, after having studied English, History and then Education at a regional university as a mature aged student. I was the sole parent of three children all of whom attended primary school during my studies. In my first few years as a teacher, my children were predominantly in the middle years of schooling, from pre-adolescence to early adolescence in age and stage. As a mature aged student, I re-discovered a love of learning, which had always characterised me, as I later realised during my

throughout much of my secondary schooling, I was what would have been regarded as a ‘selective achiever’ (OECD, 1998) and at times, an ‘underachiever’ as defined by Peterson and Colangelo (1996). I was a committed and passionate mature age student and, at the time, would have liked to undertake an honours year and possibly pursue an academic career. However, financial and practical

considerations, including the educational needs of my children, helped me to decide to use my final year of tertiary study to gain a practical qualification in Education. This, I hoped, would enable me to provide my family with more opportunities and overall life choices. Hence I completed a graduate diploma in Education and became a secondary school teacher.

I initially thought that my pathway would lie in senior academic teaching. However, as with many teachers new to the profession, once employed I found myself teaching predominantly students from Year 7 to 9, with the occasional class of Year 10 to 12 students; these being mainly in more functional areas of

‘foundation level’ level English, literacy or religious education. While teaching many disengaged, challenging or struggling students from Year 7 to 12, I found myself wondering why these students remained disengaged, often displaying poor literacy skills and/or exhibiting low academic confidence coupled with challenging

behaviours so consistently over the course of their education.

At the time, I did not make any connections with my own secondary school experiences, believing that my own uneven levels of achievement in high school were a matter of choice based on personal and family circumstances and were not in any way relevant to my present context or that of my students. Wondering in this way about some of the students I now taught, I found that I possessed a firm belief

that schools and systems needed to focus their resources on assisting disengaged and or underachieving students or students who struggled with literacy as they entered secondary school, rather than as they exited it. I also believed that the curriculum and learning and teaching structures offered in Year 7 and 8 were not always appropriately targeted at the students I was teaching and did not help to engage many of the students in my classes. These experiences led me to become interested in the areas of middle schooling, curriculum, pedagogy, literacy and learning difficulties-areas that have continue to define my professional interests and areas of expertise throughout my 20 years of teaching experience.

My intuitive theories were that while teachers, schools and systems may be presented with a range of models and paradigms with which to view the young adolescent learner, their beliefs are likely to be determined by their own

experiences and shaped by personal and professional influences from their own educational background. My own experiences as a teacher and as a Middle Years Coordinator and Head of School working in the Catholic secondary system led me to believe that teachers are influenced by current research to some extent.

Teachers are generally excited by the prospect of a new model or theory that may offer them a new and helpful tool to use in their primary purpose (that of educating students) but their practices are determined ultimately by what they appear to find useful (what works) combined with personal and professional beliefs about students, schools and education in general. I believed that teachers approach theories on education from the perspective of sceptical yet hopeful

consumers. The approach or knowledge needs to be useful, timely, readily available and sustainable. Middle years’ education and the learning needs of the young

adolescent are supported and valued in so far as they are helpful for the teacher, the school, educational goals and appear to address issues and concerns that are impacting on the student, the teacher and classroom learning. Thus, my personal experiences have informed my professional interests. While positioning myself as both a reflexive researcher and experienced professional practitioner within this study, it would be dishonest and inaccurate not to acknowledge how my own beliefs and assumptions have most certainly have helped to shape my own perspectives when exploring this topic.

3.12 Summary of the Chapter

This chapter has explored the methodologies used within the study, outlining the structural and conceptual framework and epistemological paradigm, including the setting, research sites, participants and three primary sets of data collected. The chapter has also expanded on the types of qualitative and quantitative data collected for the study, survey and data instruments, detailing methods used for processing and analysing data findings. Ethical considerations and permissions have also been outlined. The next three

chapters explore findings from the three main data sets, exploring the primary themes of perspectives, perceptions and practice, beginning with Chapter 4 which presents the findings from the first data set as a case overview.