Module+1+-+What+is+Educational+Research?

Topic 1 - Expanding Your Horizons.
Expanding your horizons – this whole topic is expanding my horizons! I trained 26+ years ago and can’t honestly remember being introduced to research or educational inquiry in any form. We certainly didn’t look behind the research or examine methods of research. As a result I am feeling way out of my depth here. These terms are all new to me and I must admit I am struggling to get my head around it all, but I am going to give it a go. For most of my career I taught things a particular way because someone convinced me that that was the best way. As Babbie, (2011) states, ‘each of us inherits a culture made up, in part, of firmly accepted knowledge about the workings of the world and the values that guide our participation in it.’ I wasn’t encouraged at that stage, to question the methods and ideals I had been introduced to as part of current teaching culture. Over the years I changed my ideas and methods as I was exposed to the theories and ideas of other ‘experts’. I realise now, that I was reaching agreement without questioning the criteria by which these experts had determined their conclusions. I was accepting ‘agreement reality’; (Babbie 2011),– without questioning the science behind the finding out. I found Babbie’s discussion of tradition and authority (Babbie 2011 p5 & 6) so true. As a profession, teaching is haunted by tradition. How often do we hear comments from the media and general public about how things were done in ‘their day.’ It is hard to move people beyond this. I believe educational inquiry is the vehicle to do this. It wasn’t until more recent years that I was exposed to research. I was fascinated by what it showed me. I began to see that there was evidence to justify the pedagogy I used successfully in my classroom. It might seem simplistic to others, but I am first and foremost a classroom practitioner so to me, educational inquiry is the process that identifies the needs of students in our classrooms and then suggests the best ways to meet these needs. To be valid in my eyes, research needs to be grounded in reality (reality as I see it). I need to be able to relate to it; real observations, of real children, in real classrooms. I don’t necessarily need numbers (quantitative research); discussion of observations made in these classrooms (qualitative research) is quite sufficient. I like to see authentic studies that involve replication as ‘replication is important to avoid generalization.’ (Babbie 2011) I don’t want fancy reports that are full of jargon, I just want a clear presentation of the outcomes that can guide my practice. For task 1 I browsed many of the articles, sometimes finding it difficult to remember I was looking at the research more than the content. I decided to focus my brief (having already half filled the page with other thoughts!) discussion on Fleer and Raban’s; It's the thought that counts' : a sociocultural framework for supporting early literacy and numeracy. This article was based on a national project to develop a set of materials to be used in the home or care facilities, prior to starting school, to help with the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills. This is an area that I believe needs to be explored deeply if we have any hope of increasing the learning opportunities for many students, so I found the article extremely interesting. The article provided a good synthesis of the international research available as well as deep analysis of Vygotsky’s theory of concept attainment; which underpinned much of the projects work. The studies discussed in the paper are mainly qualitative in nature. They are based on case studies, survey and observations and are not bogged down by statistics. As I said previously, validity to me is partly based on replication. There seems to have been multiple studies conducted in this area, literacy more so than numeracy, so I am more confident that over generalisation is not an issue. ‘Theory and research interact through a never-ending alternation of deduction and induction’ (Babbie 2011). I can see how this logical reasoning pattern has been followed as part of this study. The observations made during the studies have been used to form the theories which have in turn been used in the development of the materials to be distributed. I would be interested in reading a follow-up to this article, to explore their results. I am struggling to get my head around the paradigms of social research. Where does this article fit? They talk a lot in the pre-amble about sociocultural theory and that ‘Literacy as a social practice, is more accurately described as multiple literacies within people's local, social and cultural contexts, all of which interact in complex ways.’ (Fleer and Raban 2006) I returned to chapter 2 to read about the paradigms again. By reading the definitions, it appears to me that the symbolic interactionist paradigm fits to an extent. ‘The symbolic interactionist paradigm examines how shared meanings and social patterns are developed in the course of social interaction. (Babbie 2011, p61). Surely this study is looking at how we can influence the understandings about literacy/numeracy and their acquisition.

Babbie, E. (2008). The basics of social research. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Thomson. Fleer M and Raban B. (2006). 'It's the thought that counts' : a sociocultural framework for supporting early literacy and numeracy. Australian Research in Early Childhood Education, 13 (2), 35-53.