Month: July 2019 (Page 1 of 2)

Birch bark biting artwork by Angelique Merasty.
Photo: Western Development Museum Collection,
WDM-1973-S-8214
similar to one I own by Ms. Merasty

Lovely meeting up with Emily to attend class virtuously virtually today. Thanks to my daughter for letting us crash her couch. Our conversations (and cat interruptions) along with today’s readings and presenters uncovered personal revelations and generated questions.

Relationships and Respect

What type of teacher would I have been if I hadn’t started my teaching career in Northern Saskatchewan? My last student teaching (I was in Music Education and at the time, they split up our practicum into parts so we could experience different situations) for Secondary Music was in a high indigenous population Prince Albert Elementary school. For my Secondary English minor, I was in Meadow Lake teaching middle and high school English, Math and Social Studies, again to a school with a high indigenous population. Being raised in southern Saskatchewan at the same time as Dr. Shauneen Pete, I was taught those stereotypes that she spoke of in class. And believed them. My practicum experiences showed me that kids are kids and each one wants to be listened to, met where they are, cared about, and be part of the conversation about how and where they need to go next.

Subbing in Band schools (yes, it still calls itself the Lac La Ronge Indian Band), teaching private music lessons and leading choirs at two of the public schools while my husband taught in a public school framed my practice after university. In all of my activities, creating community was at the forefront. If I didn’t foster community with the students at the band school, they wouldn’t attend school that day or they would leave. If I didn’t foster community with my private students, I wouldn’t have a self-employed work load at a sustainable income. It became a way of life to be part of that cultural way of being because you were living in an indigenous community. Hearing Shauneen speak reminding me of listening to Tom Roberts on CBC radio’s Keewatin Country in Northern Saskatchewan and chatting about it with everyone and anyone:  Tân’si, edlánat’e and Hello. (And yes, I felt the blow when Tom Roberts’ legacy of radio from Northern Saskatchewan was shut down in 2012.)

Relationships, Respect, Reciprocity and Relevance

By building community, you wind up getting involved in giving back to that community. While in La Ronge, my volunteer work revolved around helping to establish a competitive but supportive music festival for students as well as a coop for local artists to sell their work (my job was the bookkeeping and establishing it as a non-profit organization.) Again, at the basis of the work was respect and relationships. Understanding the relevance of the work done whether as an artist, a musician, or a student was a given, particularly as you always were working on ‘northern time’ as we affectionally called it. Face-to-face meetings and time spent together working, even if you were doing different things, established a connectivity that is difficult to do through virtual environments. Or is it?

How many times did I spend extended time with the phone tucked between my ear and shoulder chatting with a friend? How does this tiegrad WhatsApp chat connect us in community even while we are in a BlueJeans class? Online, isn’t it important to connect students both with each other and the teacher as well as just with each other? By giving students a voice in class as well as the opportunity to connect privately with each other and with the teacher, could students be more successful? The success of Snapchat is partially because there is no easily visible trail of conversations as there are in WhatsApp. We are strangely motivated by knowing we are all struggling, though not in the same way. Can we get students to open up about that anonymously the way we contributed to the Padlet anonymously today? Lots of questions, lots to think about, lots of potential when I am looking at a research project.

More R’s

How does this relate to our courses’ focus on Researcher, Research, Researched and Reader? It took me a few days for my thoughts to connect (which is why this post is dated Tuesday but posted on Friday). As a researcher, we need to be aware of the history of the community in which we are doing research. Knowledge about the community can affect how you set up your research. Respect towards your Researched can improve the accuracy of your results.  Relationships can taint your results, but they may also ensure your results are more authentic and therefore have more value.  And if your Researched believe in the Relevance of your study and that Reciprocity is forthcoming, again, honesty in participation could be more prevalent. Research that is as trustworthy as possible is what is needed for genuine positive change to take place in education.

Responsibility

Settlers can learn a great deal from the Indigenous culture. We have a responsibility to our students to educate them about the history of our indigenous peoples, but also about how they have dealt with the difficulties with grace as a positive example to our students. Therefore, we also have the responsibility in our research endeavours to carry out our work in a manner that our indigenous peoples would find responsible and respectful.

PS – interesting blog I found on training to be more aware of indigenous relations, etc.

This blog was based on thoughts inspired from the reading of Chapter 3 by S. Pete in Idle No More  edited by Fatima Pirbhai-Illich, Shauneen Pete and Fran Martin (2017), Chapter 10 by S. Pete in Meschachakanis, A Coyote Narrative: Decolonising Higher Education by Gruminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nisancioglu,   The Five R’s for Indigenizing Online Learning: A Case Study of the First Nations Schools’ Principals Course by Tessaro, Resoutle, Gaviria, Flessa, Lindeman, & Scully-Stewart (2018) and from the guest lecture/discussion with Shauneen Pete, UVic Indigenous Resurgence Coordinator.

The pieces are coming together! The massive amounts of information from the readings, the presenters, and our instructors! Exciting! I have had a number of ‘AHA’ moments over the last three days, with over half involving waking up in the middle of the night and making notes on my phone. So today, since it is about getting ready for Wednesday’s class and how information from Wednesday’s class was used, I think a long post is justified.

We were assigned a reading on mixed methods: Assessing the Quality of Mixed Methods Research: Toward a Comprehensive Framework by Alicia O’Cathain, published in 2010. I searched to ensure I had an accurate understanding of mixed methods before reading the academically worded article. This Overview of Mixed Methods from the Center for Innovation in Research and Teaching (CIRT) at the Grand Canyon University in Arizona was concise. Reading through it made me realize that I would have difficulty believing a study that presented only quantitative data since there are always qualitative factors that affect the reliability of the data collected and therefore the validity of the study. Similarly, I would be challenged to accept the findings of a qualitative study that included no quantitative analysis of data. As the article from the CIRT stated: “quantitative research is weak in understanding context or setting . . .(and) qualitative research may include biases and does not lend itself to statistical analysis and generalization.”

Still procrastinating about the assigned reading, I searched for an article in my area to share in class (as required). The top hit was Promoting Students’ Motivation and Use of SRL Strategies in the Web-Based Mathematics Learning Environment by Peidi Gu and Youngjin Lee. It was written in 2017 and published in 2018. I did not save my search and learned my lesson as I have unsuccessfully tried to duplicate the search. Yet the article was EXACTLY what I was looking for and so interesting that I have reread it and analyzed parts of it more than any of the articles I have read so far!

The 4Rs – Researcher

Alicia O’Cathain is currently a professor of Health Services Research at the University of Sheffield, UK. According to Google Scholar, she has her name on 227 articles and has almost 20,000 citations with almost 100 of her articles receiving at least 10 citations within the last 5 years. This is not surprising considering O’Cathain’s first paper was written in 1988. Interestingly, it was Mixed Method Research in Education (on my to-do list to read). Quite a contrast was the primary author of the article I enjoyed so much: Peidi Gu. Gu does not exist on Google Scholar, which worried me. Luckily the biography in the article states she “was a PhD student in Educational Technology in the University of Kansas . . . (w)ith multi-disciplinary background in Computer Science, Mathematics and Education”. Her co-author, Youngjin Lee is an associate professor of Educational Technology with 32 articles listed on Google Scholar with his first article listed in 2000. Upon further research, I found Gu’s dissertation – but saved it for later reading and bibliography mining. So both researchers are credible, not that there was any doubt about a reading supplied for class, but my reading, though engaging, could have been chaff. Valuable lesson: do not waste time reading a found article without researching the author. Fluff is not allowed as a citation resource.

The 4Rs – Research

O’Cathain summarized the difficulties in ascertaining whether mixed methods used in research are legitimate. Her system of nine types of quality assessment in four domains with a number of criteria is rigourous and complicated. But any study conducted with mixed methods should be held to high standards. But is this list really comprehensive? New technology has been created since this article was written.

The research in Gu’s study (and I am going to call it Gu’s study as it is a portion of her Ph.D dissertation which required one of her supervisors’ names to get published) combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Her choice of mixed methods made sense to me as a mathematics educator and is in the area I would like to explore for my project. My understanding of the criteria presented in O’Cathain’s article was furthered by applying it to Gu’s methods, which on a brief consideration, seem reasonable. If I use Gu’s dissertation as a I plan, I will need to assess it more carefully using Cathain’s system.

The 4Rs – Reader (About Me)

O’Cathain’s article was definitely instructional in nature and will be very helpful as a tool. Gu’s article (and later her dissertation) will be extremely useful as I develop what I anticipate my project will be. I am looking at the difficulty motivated international students have coming into our secondary programs at the Grade 10 and 11 level and trying to fit themselves into our mathematics courses. Canada’s integrated mathematics programs do not align well with American programs. Other countries’ programs do not integrate topics in the same years as we do. Our focus on inquiry learning particularly at the Grade 10 level is also very new to most of our students. My hope is to curate as well as create resources that motivated incoming students can explore in order to be more successful in our mathematics programs. Yes, it will be specifically aimed at our school, but hopefully will be adaptable by other math teachers. In addition, I want to include the types of questions found on our British Columbia Education Numeracy Assessment which is now required of students graduating in BC. I believe the cultural basis of some of the questions exclude our international students from success on the assessment (although I have limited data). Although this new assessment should not require preparation, those new to BC or Canadian culture can find some of the situational questions posed are just inaccessible.

Literary Review

The lit review was introduced in class and my head spun. It made sense and yet it didn’t. To me, a lit review sounded like a OPVL (Origin, Purpose, Value, Limitations) form yet it was Chapter 2 of your project? I went home and found a couple of videos that made sense:

So without reading the assigned article, which our instructor previewed in class, I went to Gu’s article to compare her bibliography with her Chapter 2. The colors are not exactly the same, but you can see the relationship between the information presented in the Introduction of the article to the bibliography. There were some citations that were only included in the Measures or Research Implications sections, but the majority are in the area that would become the Chapter 2 of a dissertation or project. Analyzing an article this way made reading David N. Boote and Penny Beile’s Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation much more meaningful.

I did a review of Gu’s article based on Boote and Beile’s rubric. As it is only a 20 page portion of a 146 page dissertation, I thought the level of achievement quite good!

I don’t need convincing that good research is important before undertaking a task, whether it is a thesis or a project. Even in my regular work, I would rather spend a bit of time researching rather than ‘reinventing the wheel’ in case someone else already has a perfectly good ‘wheel’ which I can choose to use or customize. I want to make sure I am using the best of the information that is out there (and free) to create something that is new (or at least new to being free). I feel like one of our Grade 10s, embarking on my International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme’s Personal Project! Just like our incoming Grade 10 students, I am in the Investigating stage, doing my research and coming up with my problem.

Finally, something I know something about! Rich McCue was in today with an Excel workshop. I adore Excel! It is a great way to manipulate data. There are times of the year, like when making the timetable, that I am in it for hours a day. Not a week goes by that I don’t turn to it to keep track of some type of data. And I am so geekly excited when it comes to finding a new function that does exactly what I need. The image is a screen shot of my timetabling excel spreadsheet, developed with a former colleague. My school has chosen to set our timetable based on student requests, not by creating a timetable first and then trying to slot students into it.

When I taught computers/design, I had the students do some exercises in Excel to understand how powerful and useful it can be and then we would do an assignment in tracking their work for a week (like I do more simply now in Toggl) or budgeting or investing. Part of reaching the top band of my rubric for them was for the requirement to figure out how to do something we had not covered in class exercises: a function or a chart or moving data to another page or spot on their page. Choosing what information to display, how to display it, and inquiring into how to do something they wanted it to do was helpful for their further studies in sciences in particular, where they had data to show in their experiments.

So how does this fit into the 4Rs? If I, the classroom teacher, was the researcher, then my students were unknowingly the researched, providing me with the research of new ways for me to play with Excel (yay!). That’s what I enjoy about teaching an inquiry model – the knowledge is in the room and I don’t have to be the one to find it or impart it to the students. The students were also the readers, because they were free to check out each other’s work as we went so they could also use other students’ ideas; this turned them also into a researcher with multiple collaborators. Round and round we go, just on a tighter cycle than what happens in the type of academic research we are looking into in this course. On the larger, academic research scale, there is a lot of knowledge ‘in the room’, but the researcher is aiming to take it further, where no one has gone before.