Unit 3: Becoming a consumer of education research

OR

Considering culture

Here are the basic course navigation buttons:

Unit title: Becoming a consumer of education research OR Considering culture

Unit Overview:

As with your optional assignments described in the syllabus, this unit has two pathways - one to follow if you're going to complete the Hot Topics paper and the other if you're going to complete the Classroom Ethnography paper. Read and follow the directions below appropriate to your choice!

Hot Topics and Becoming a Consumer of Education Research

My goal in this class is not to turn you into a researcher - although it may have feel that way! My goal, in fact, is to help you understand structured inquiry (from a couple of different perspectives), use it to investigate problems of practice in your own classroom, AND to become a critical consumer of education research. Teachers constantly run the risk of being bowled over by researchers and policy makers who quote research in defense of their arguments. You should know enough about research to know when they're on shaky ground AND you should know enough to be able to read research and glean useful information from it. So... given these issues, becoming a consumer of education research is the topic of study for this unit.

This unit is a short one - designed to help get you started on your last big assignment, the hot topics paper. In it, you are required to find three published research articles, related to some area of personal interest, and examine it first as a piece of research and then as a potentially informative resource for you as a teacher. See the course syllabus for a more thorough description of the hot topics paper.

Unit assignments:

First, be thinking carefully about a topic you're interested in learning more about and begin to form a way to search for research studies about it. Do some initial poking around for research studies in this area.

Second, review chapter 1 to refresh your memory on all the different kinds of research designs out there.

Third, check out this link for a slightly different take on the evaluation process: http://www.sonoma.edu/users/n/nolan/n400/critique.htm

Fourth, visit this website and take the quiz to see if you're getting the main ideas involved in review research: http://wps.prenhall.com/chet_airasian_edresearch_7/0,6488,382194-,00.html

Fifth, get busy on your Hot Topics paper!

If you have any specific questions about the intent of this unit or the act of critiquing research - especially as you move toward your Hot Topics paper, send your questions to Mark via email.

OR

Classroom Ethnography and Considering Culture

Teachers spend a great deal of time and energy trying to create, maintain, and manage the kind of classroom culture they believe is most desireable - both to make their own life easier as well as to have the greatest impact on student learning. Occassionally, these ideals compete against one another and thinking about classrooms as cultures can help us see and understand this tension. Anyway... be sure to read carefully the introduction to this assignment given in the syllabus as it is comprehensive and provides some nice background. You may also want to go back to your book and read up on ethnography as a method - studying culture is a cool thing to do! In fact, I've been reading several books that do analyses of culture to learn more about this method - one called Mole People studies the culture of homeless people living in the subway tunnels in New York city and another called Bare: The naked truth about stripping studied the culture of strippers. In both cases the researchers spent time in these cultures, participating, learning, acting the part... the whole nine yards! Yes... both were very interesting... though for different reasons!

Anyway... as a way to get started... go read this paper. It is a very cool little paper that actually appeared in a journal.

The cool thing about the paper above is that it helps us think differently about a culture we know very well - did you get it? This is another service that ethnography plays... in fact one that you will play in looking carefully at your classroom and school - through new, ethnographic eyes! One caution... as the paper illustrates, ethnographers can be blinded by their own underlying beliefs and dispositions - be aware of this and try to write about your assumptions as you prepare your classroom ethnography paper.

I suggest you begin gathering some data as soon as you can, lots of notes, talking to kids and teacher about the things you see as essential to this culture. Remember that you are making an argument for the salience of some cultural elements... you may need to be very direct in your questioning and data gathering. Be very sensitive though to the nature of your questions and data as you don't want to make anybody uncomfortable in your investigations.

Here's one other little paper that talks about similiar work - check it out for additional guidance. Also check out The Culture Builder by Roland Barth - found in my library. As your paper takes shape and questions arise, converse with Mark.

Whichever assignment you choose... send your paper to Mark via email by midnight on Sunday, July 29th.

Mark