Disruptions:
Finding out what is really going on
John Cripps Clark
Deakin University, Melbourne
Unpublished paper presented to Contemporary Approaches to Research in Mathematics, Science and Environmental Education, Deakin University, Dec 2, 1998.
Disruptions are a common feature of research in education yet we dismiss disruptions as incidental, even antithetical, to research. I suggest that a consideration of disruptions will reveal assumptions within our research that are false. These are assumptions of stability; that the objects of our research are predictably available and that they evolve predictably. If we are aware of these assumptions and look to what fails to happen as well as what happens we will be better able to understand the experience of students.
“You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting natura no facit satum so unreservedly”
Thomas Huxley to Charles Darwin [“nature does not make leaps” attributed to Linnaeus] (Gould, 1980, p149)
Introduction
My current research project involves visiting schools and, together with chats with teachers and science coordinators, observing two science lessons. In the first school that I visited the teacher had to postpone my first visit because the parent who was going to assist with the lesson was unable to come. The next week I observed her lesson but when I went to go to the class that I was scheduled to attend after recess the teacher was unaware that I was coming. The next time that I turned up he was having trouble with the class and asked me to come back the next week and it was then that I observed the lesson. I observed the two classes and obtained the data that I needed but what about all those lessons that I missed? What did they tell me?
We all experience disruptions in our research. This paper attempts to put these disruptions to good use.
Experience from the ‘south’
In poor countries disruptions can be even more noticeable. Valero and Vithal, (1998) in Colombia and South Africa respectively had their research projects disrupted by strikes, school closures, political conflicts, staff instability and staff and student protests. (Mwakapenda, 1998) had similar experiences of disruption in Malawi. This experience led them to observe:
Nevertheless the very failure in the application of the previously planned methodological strategy and the disruptions in the data showed the existence of problems that came to be more interesting in revealing the nature of the processes taking place (Valero & Vithal, 1998, p155)
They conclude that there is an assumption of stability in methodologies that come out of the developed world and are imported inappropriately into the ‘south’. Vithal (1998) argues that, in the context of disruptions of data, the criteria of generalisability and validity need to be replaced by “generativity” and “participatory validity”
I suggest that this ‘north-south’ divide is an illusion and that disruption is present in all educational research. The experience of researchers in South Africa and Colombia is so dramatic that it brings the role of disruption to the forefront of our attention. The experience of students in the developed world is a constant series of, less dramatic, disruptions from the routine disruptions of changes of teacher and subject or the bells to start and finish lunch and recess to the random interruptions of the PA or kids coming and going on errands. These disruptions are an intimate part of the education and should not be thought of as necessarily ill. They may serve useful educational goals.
Why do we not recognise disruptions as the norm? The situation is perhaps analogous to chaos (non-linear dynamics) in classical systems. “The general conclusion is that chaos is as rare in quantum mechanics as it is prevalent in classical mechanics” (Helleman, 1992, p3) Yet we think of classical systems as generally non-chaotic because it is easier to deal with and, perhaps, because there is an innate bias toward linear systems. As well as making our research easier our bias against disruptions and toward stability may also have its roots in the culture of our research. This can be compared to the social and political factors that were crucial in the victory of uniformitarianism over catastrophism in nineteenth century geology. (Gould, 1987)
The use of disruptions
Disruptions can give us direct information about what is going on. Thus when I fail to see a science lesson it tells me not only about the amount of science being taught but also the status of science within the curriculum for this class. It reveals competition for available time and the success of science in this competition.
Secondly disruptions can be used to reframe our questions and methods. If my project is to understand the experience of students in primary science lessons and science lessons are random and infrequent perhaps I need new techniques to capture these occasional lessons or perhaps I need to find ways of observing the incidental bits and pieces of science that students are experiencing throughout their school day. The disruptions are pushing me to broaden my questions and methods so that I am actually looking at something that is part of the real experience of students.
I recently to observed a number of mathematics lessons in prep, grade 6, 7 and 9. The disruptions varied from removing a single child for a special instruction in the prep class, selling poppies in the grade 6 class, half the students leaving half way through the lesson in the grade 7 class to a quarter of the students not returning after a break in the grade nine class. These disruptions raise questions about the amount and nature of disruption that students experience in primary as compared to secondary schools and how this influences the overall experience of students and teachers.
Although they are by their nature random, unstable and not deterministic many of the techniques that are used for research in the assumption of stability are able to be used to understand disruptions.
How disruptions challenge our assumptions in educational research
Educational research that ignores disruptions makes assumptions of stability; such as that:
• the research object is predictably available to the researcher
• change is predictable and evolutionary rather than catastrophic
• the researcher is interested in what happens (not what fails to occur).
When you are looking for problem solving in a group of students and they fail to use models this is not non-data, this possibility is part of the research design, when they are at the swimming pool rather than doing a maths lesson that is non-data. We often have such huge amounts of data that it is easy to neglect the data which you do not have. This non-data may be even more revealing. Thus we can extend Russell Tytler’s (1998) analysis of what children do not say or notice to what is not done and what we fail to do as researchers.
Implication of disruptions for research
“Educational researchers are answering questions that no-one is asking” Peter Jones (Sullivan, 1998)
Disruptions can refocus the research causing us to reexamine our questions and methodologies. Once we start treating our research as inherently unstable, methodological issues which were previously central start to seem less important. For example rather than being constantly aware of the disruption that our observations cause we can embrace the constant disruption and make it part of the story that we are constructing. Thus the research is richer because it includes both the disruptions our observations cause and all the other disruptions that are experienced.
When I fail to see a science class it tells me much more than the amount of science that is being taught and how teachers place the importance and practicalities of teaching science in the primary classroom it also refocusses my attention onto the students; how they experience a science lesson and the disruption that is the commonplace of their school life. By placing disruptions at the centre of my research practice the experience of students in the classroom becomes central to my educational research.
Dealing with disruptions causes us to reconsider the criteria for judging our research and build a stronger link between the researcher and research participants. The generative capacity and “democratic participatory validity” come to the forefront while generalizability and validity become less important. (Vithal, 1998)
Disruptions are the gaps through which we can glimpse a deeper knowledge of what is happening and by developing instruments to peer into these cracks we can advance research in new and innovative ways.
The journey of a thousand kilometres starts with a push from stability into instability
References
Gould, S. J. (1980). The panda’s thumb: more reflections in Natural History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press..
Gould, S. J. (1987). Time’s arrow, time’s cycle : myth and metaphor in the discovery of geological time. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Helleman, R. G. H. (1992). Chaos toys. In R. L. Dewar & B. I. Henry (Eds.), Proceedings of the fourth Physics Summer School: Nonlinear dynamics and chaos (Vol. 4, pp. 1-13). Canberra: World Scientific.
Mwakapenda, W. (1998). Doing educational research: possibilities for knowledge growth and improved classroom practice (Postgraduate research seminar ). Melbourne: Deakin University, Burwood.
Sullivan, P. (1998). Research in education: who is it for? Paper presented at the Contemporary Approaches to Research in Mathematics, Science Health and Environmental Education, Deakin University, Burwood.
Tytler, R. (1998). What’s not said; what’s not noticed - silences as evidence of children’s conceptions. Paper presented at the Contemporary Approaches to Research in Mathematics, Science Health and Environmental Education, Deakin University, Burwood.
Valero, P., & Vithal, R. (1998). Research methods of “north” revisited from the “south”. Paper presented at the 22nd Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Vithal, R. (1998). Disruptions and data: the politics of doing mathematics research in South Africa. Paper presented at the sixth annual meeting of the Southern African Association for Research in Mathematics and Science Education, University of South Africa.