I am the new kid on the block.
I read all of the past material and agree with Greg that: “you need substance in our dialogue.” However, rather than presentations to each other about where you are, why not collaborate on where you are going – prospective rather than retrospective.
For example, I have been invited to give a 10-minute presentation to the USF College of Education’s Fall Diversity Forum on the “achievement gap.” I’d like feedback on my preliminary draft of what I think I they need to hear and I need to say, given my take on take on education. The text follows: is that of interest and does that make sense?
Action Research
K. Edward Renner
The research that you are most familiar with starts with a theory, is translated into an application, which you as teachers put into practice.
However, what I will talk about today is "action-research;" it reverses that direction. It is best illustrated by a story in which the principal actors can be a professor, a student, or a teacher depending on the audience.
Two students were driving across a bridge when they spotted a child being carried downstream below. No sooner had they pulled the child from the stream when they saw two more children in the water. The first student headed back into the stream, while the second climbed up the bank. The first one hollered "where are you going" while the second answered "up stream to see who is throwing them in."
Going up stream to do primary intervention is widely knowledge as the most efficient intervention, but it seldom happens. If it did, issues, such as the achievement gap, would not be the intransigent social problems they have become.
Why is that?
There is considerable social pressure not to walk away from someone in need. But if you went up stream you would find that it is your boss -- your own institution -- that is participating with related institutions to throw the children into the stream.
It is called iatrogensis. It is the process by which institutions contribute to the very problems they are responsible for solving. The most common illustration is that one third of all hospital days are the result of illnesses contracted as a result of being in the hospital. However, iatrogensis is a common affliction, as when correctional institutions increase the probability of recidivism or when schools, seen as the instruments of choice to create greater social equality, actually increase inequality.
In a city where I used to live my neighbor was principal of the local high school. As you may know, pregnant teens are often excluded from school and fail to graduate from high school. He tried to create a program where the home economics classes would take care of the children as a practical learning experience and their mothers would continue in their regular classes. Such was not to be the case. Home economics would continue to be taught through books, and pregnant teens were to be left to their own devices to take care of their children and to pursue a GED for their education.
In a university where I used to teach, a professor offered a class in which his university students ran an after school program in the largely poor and ethnic minority district. The program turned vacant lots into community vegetable gardens. In addition to food, there were other outcomes: parental involvement, home-school interaction, the creation of a community organization, a community newsletter and an interest in a food related additions to the curriculum. But, of course there were other push-back effects: One absentee landlord rejected this appropriated use of his land and attracted negative media attention when picketed. The city first agreed and then withdrew from citing absentee owners of overgrown lots with a code violation and offering a plea bargain of a monthly payment to the program equivalent to what a lawn service agency would charge for routine maintenance. The absentee landowner had a conversation with the University President at the country club about withdrawing his support as a booster of the football program, and a financial officer of University questioned the appropriateness of the department owning a tractor. You see, University presidents expect Dean's to protect them from such external intrusions, and Dean's expect the same from department chairs, who in turn want the same from their faculty. The Dean spoke to the chairperson who reminded the faculty member that such activity is not scholarship and would not contribute to obtaining tenure. In the end, the faculty member was not retained, the tractor sold, and the university classroom returned to theoretical teaching on how the lack of parental involvement, home-school interaction, and a stable community contribute to the minority achievement gap.
If you you go upstream to put together the "systemic" pieces you will be reminded to go back down stream and take care of the individual cases. The “real” cause, as the explanation goes, is that higher education cannot solve the achievement gap because of the failure of the public school system. The public school system cannot solve the problem because the poor children from dysfunctional families and neighborhoods are not properly prepared for school. So, until poor ethnic mothers heading dysfunctional families living in dysfunctional neighborhoods stop having babies there's not anything that can be done.
If course that is nonsense.
We know that it is the sum of the contributions of the component systems that keep the flow of children coming. The difficulty is that the only place you, as a person, can have an influence is within your own system. But, when you go upstream to do action research -- using practice to inform policy -- you will be sent downstream to do the job you have been trained for and are paid to do. This is where cynicism and teacher burnout comes from.
Your university education should prepare you for this. You need to learn about the methodology of action research and the challenges and strategies of going upstream. You should have within the College of Education programs like the garden project, ones that your faculty contribute to on a par with standard theoretical research. You need this to prepare you for interrupting the iatrogenic habits that exist within our systems, which collectively are largely responsible for the intransigent nature of social issues such as the achievement gap.
I read all of the past material and agree with Greg that: “you need substance in our dialogue.” However, rather than presentations to each other about where you are, why not collaborate on where you are going – prospective rather than retrospective.
For example, I have been invited to give a 10-minute presentation to the USF College of Education’s Fall Diversity Forum on the “achievement gap.” I’d like feedback on my preliminary draft of what I think I they need to hear and I need to say, given my take on take on education. The text follows: is that of interest and does that make sense?
Action Research
K. Edward Renner
The research that you are most familiar with starts with a theory, is translated into an application, which you as teachers put into practice.
However, what I will talk about today is "action-research;" it reverses that direction. It is best illustrated by a story in which the principal actors can be a professor, a student, or a teacher depending on the audience.
Two students were driving across a bridge when they spotted a child being carried downstream below. No sooner had they pulled the child from the stream when they saw two more children in the water. The first student headed back into the stream, while the second climbed up the bank. The first one hollered "where are you going" while the second answered "up stream to see who is throwing them in."
Going up stream to do primary intervention is widely knowledge as the most efficient intervention, but it seldom happens. If it did, issues, such as the achievement gap, would not be the intransigent social problems they have become.
Why is that?
There is considerable social pressure not to walk away from someone in need. But if you went up stream you would find that it is your boss -- your own institution -- that is participating with related institutions to throw the children into the stream.
It is called iatrogensis. It is the process by which institutions contribute to the very problems they are responsible for solving. The most common illustration is that one third of all hospital days are the result of illnesses contracted as a result of being in the hospital. However, iatrogensis is a common affliction, as when correctional institutions increase the probability of recidivism or when schools, seen as the instruments of choice to create greater social equality, actually increase inequality.
In a city where I used to live my neighbor was principal of the local high school. As you may know, pregnant teens are often excluded from school and fail to graduate from high school. He tried to create a program where the home economics classes would take care of the children as a practical learning experience and their mothers would continue in their regular classes. Such was not to be the case. Home economics would continue to be taught through books, and pregnant teens were to be left to their own devices to take care of their children and to pursue a GED for their education.
In a university where I used to teach, a professor offered a class in which his university students ran an after school program in the largely poor and ethnic minority district. The program turned vacant lots into community vegetable gardens. In addition to food, there were other outcomes: parental involvement, home-school interaction, the creation of a community organization, a community newsletter and an interest in a food related additions to the curriculum. But, of course there were other push-back effects: One absentee landlord rejected this appropriated use of his land and attracted negative media attention when picketed. The city first agreed and then withdrew from citing absentee owners of overgrown lots with a code violation and offering a plea bargain of a monthly payment to the program equivalent to what a lawn service agency would charge for routine maintenance. The absentee landowner had a conversation with the University President at the country club about withdrawing his support as a booster of the football program, and a financial officer of University questioned the appropriateness of the department owning a tractor. You see, University presidents expect Dean's to protect them from such external intrusions, and Dean's expect the same from department chairs, who in turn want the same from their faculty. The Dean spoke to the chairperson who reminded the faculty member that such activity is not scholarship and would not contribute to obtaining tenure. In the end, the faculty member was not retained, the tractor sold, and the university classroom returned to theoretical teaching on how the lack of parental involvement, home-school interaction, and a stable community contribute to the minority achievement gap.
If you you go upstream to put together the "systemic" pieces you will be reminded to go back down stream and take care of the individual cases. The “real” cause, as the explanation goes, is that higher education cannot solve the achievement gap because of the failure of the public school system. The public school system cannot solve the problem because the poor children from dysfunctional families and neighborhoods are not properly prepared for school. So, until poor ethnic mothers heading dysfunctional families living in dysfunctional neighborhoods stop having babies there's not anything that can be done.
If course that is nonsense.
We know that it is the sum of the contributions of the component systems that keep the flow of children coming. The difficulty is that the only place you, as a person, can have an influence is within your own system. But, when you go upstream to do action research -- using practice to inform policy -- you will be sent downstream to do the job you have been trained for and are paid to do. This is where cynicism and teacher burnout comes from.
Your university education should prepare you for this. You need to learn about the methodology of action research and the challenges and strategies of going upstream. You should have within the College of Education programs like the garden project, ones that your faculty contribute to on a par with standard theoretical research. You need this to prepare you for interrupting the iatrogenic habits that exist within our systems, which collectively are largely responsible for the intransigent nature of social issues such as the achievement gap.
The alternative is a Millennial Generation dutifully volunteering down stream as the product of a complicit educational system helping to provide a steady supply of children who need to be rescued. All of this while the “systemic” educational system passively watches a consuming life style, in a deregulated economy thriving on a money driven political process having created a Millennial Generation dutifully volunteering down stream…
Welcome to the group! Thank you for sharing your ideas. I appreciate the notion of "action research". It's true that we often fail to wholly recognize the enormity of a situation until we feel it firsthand.
ReplyDeleteGoing "upstream" is a great metaphor. But you are correct as well in that we can only work within our own spheres to try to mitigate the damage that has come before. It is up to each of us, then, to decide what our individual spheres encompass.
An example apropos to your analogy is that of calculator use in the school system. All through elementary school, children are educated on the importance of knowing how to add, subtract, multiple, and divide. They are trained to deal with fractions and decimals. But at a certain level of the school system where I was teaching, suddenly there was a dramatic stagnation and even regression in the math skills of students. What I eventually determined was the cause was the introduction to calculators at the middle school level.
Freed from the burden of having to remember one's times tables and basic addition, students eject that information as useless and increasingly rely on the crutch that is a calculator. By the time they arrive at high school, many students are no longer capable of doing the math they did when in 4th or 5th grade.
What is the solution to such a problem? I'm sure I don't have all the answers. What I can say is that we need to teach students not just facts but how to learn. Effective learning strategies are not typically innate. Ironically, learning strategies are themselves learned. In the calculator case above, perhaps if instead of providing "crutches" to students, the teaching staff provided mnemonic devices or similar technique-oriented education, students would retain the knowledge they have gained at a far greater capacity. Knowledge that has been internalized remains more deeply seated in our memory, more readily retrieved than knowledge that is superficially learned.
All of which is to say (for TL;DR folks), a METHOD (e.g. the scientific method) is more important to teach than specific facts. If people know HOW to learn, they will learn what they need to know.
I am of two minds about whether or not to respond, but at the risk of being a buzzkill, I think I need to step in here.
ReplyDeleteWhile I understand, appreciate, and agree with the very real need to DO SOMETHING to mitigate the social ills that surround us, I would also like to add a note of caution to this notion of 'Action Research'. In the strange land I come from (Anthropology), action research, or activist research, or applied research... or any of several other names for the same basic idea, has a long history. The 'trendiest' branch right now is probably Participatory Action Research, where the researchers not only get involved in solving the social ills they are studying, but also work very hard to involve the members of the communities they are studying in the process of conducting the research and solving the problems. (I'm going to avoid a digression on the specific methodological problems of that approach... not sure it would be germane to this topic...)
What advocates of this sort of this kind of action-oriented research often lose sight of (and, to be fair, many 'purely academic' researchers do as well, but it causes far fewer problems for them...) is that they often don't have a good handle on the situation they will be facing prior to actually arriving at the research location. For academic researchers this is often not a big deal, and the good ones revise research models and change methodologies to adapt to the environments they find themselves in, even if this process is completely left out of the proposal/granting procedure that brackets the research, and usually the post-research write-ups as well.
For 'action researchers', this problem is much more severe and has huge ramifications, which are often compounded by the extremely time-sensitive nature of the 'action' part of the 'research'. For instance, teaching basic sanitation techniques and providing access to clean water and soap for an isolated Central American village might seem to be a great way to study and mitigate health problems associated with disease... but if washing their dishes with soap means that those same people will no longer be able to feed their pigs the dishwater, which leads to sickly, underfed pigs and ultimately to hungry, undernourished people, then most of them are probably not going to wash their dishes, no matter how may diseases the public health officials say that practice will eliminate.
I'm trying not to go on too long here, but my basic point is this: It is of vital importance, in any 'action research', intervention, public health program, whatever... to first conduct sufficient exploratory research to understand the problem as it exists for the people you are trying to help, and the probable ramifications of any changes you might want to try to make to alleviate the problems you are addressing.
Hope this is helpful, and not too didactic.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteNOTE: The text to which I am responding is no longer available.
ReplyDeleteJoel, I get that same message at the end of each comment I post. I'm not sure what's causing it, but I suspect it's a blogger issue that we cannot control. Just to be safe, I suggest copying the text of any comments to your clipboard before posting, but so far each time I've received that error message, the post has actually gone active after all.
Also, I really appreciated your comments on this subject. The bit about the pigs was very interesting and good food for thought. (Besides merely, "Mmmm, bacon!") Your assertion that many researchers do not fully comprehend the system they are intending to research "actively" seems so intuitively obvious, and yet clearly it's not the case for many individuals. Surely if the point is research, the subject should not be altered until research material has been gathered. If the point is intervention, then there is no problem. I think where the problem arises is when you have an individual or group deciding that they want to make a significant change for the better to some aspect of the world--and they want everyone else to know by how much they have improved it.
For this, I think of Haiti and the efforts to help the Haitians recover from the earthquake earlier this year. Everyone in the US seems to want to be able to slap a dollar figure on any natural disaster, but we also want to try to help people as quickly as possible to recover from such a disaster. While this rapid response reflex can reduce the perception of overall damage caused by the quake, it is the appropriate and humane response. Alternately, Hurricane Katrina's damage wrought upon New Orleans seemed to lean far more toward assessing the financials before taking any active measures toward alleviating the situation. I would judge that this is a less appropriate and less humane response.
Clearly there are situations in which intervention can be safely delayed in order for proper research to be conducted beforehand. For example, in finding cures for deadly diseases, doing adequate research on the causes of a disease and the effects of any potential treatments in advance of prescribing medical treatments to those affected at large...clearly that's the more appropriate and humane response. We would not, after all, want to be subjected to the whim of a doctor who says, "Well, it might work. Seriously, if you shoot yourself in the foot, you probably won't feel it when I do your dental surgery."
Education is a bit of a hazy realm in comparison. Some people feel that the system is sufficient because look at how many college graduates we have now! And yet...I've seen the stats on the performance abilities of college students, and it seems to me that the bar has merely been lowered to admit more students. Those who feel that the situation is more critical are more disposed to intervene before concluding a complete diagnostic of the educational system.