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BELIEVERS AND SKEPTICS:
A STUDY OF SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS TEACHERS'
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BELIEVERS AND SKEPTICS:
A STUDY OF SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS TEACHERS'
PARTICIPATION IN THE RESTRUCTURING
OF THEIR WORKPLACE

By

Roberto Alves Monteiro

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Teacher Education

1994

ABSTRACT

BELIEVERS AND SKEI’I'ICS:
A STUDY OF SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS TEACHERS'
PARTICIPATION IN THE RESTRUCTURING OF THEIR WORKPLACE

BY

Roberto Alves Monteiro

In this research, I studied a group of teachers as they participated in restructuring
their workplace. Although reformists have repeatedly advocated teacher participation in
workplace restructuring, there has been little investigation of the actual nature of their
participation. For that reason, I conducted the investigation described in this dissertation,
to learn how teachers participate in that process. An important result of my research was
my discovery that the teachers' participation encompassed both acquiring expertise and
sharing existing knowledge and skills.

Although the primary question remained the same throughout my investigation,
the viewpoints which gave focus to the question evolved. This was consistent with the
critical ethnographic perspective under which I conducted my investigation. As my
research progressed, I became interested in learning how teachers negotiated their new
roles, not only among themselves, but also with the researchers who worked with them
in the "Support Teacher Program."

In order to make explicit the observational and analytical lenses, I advanced a
conceptual framework. For this, I drew from sources in social theory, primarily the
concept of crisis, symbolic interactionism and psycho-sociology. I conducted the
research using an interpretive approach. In the process of this investigation, I attempted
to harmonize the principles of ethnographic research with the use of a computerized
system, the Monteiro Data Organizer, which I designed and used to handle the qualitative
data I accumulated.

Another major conclusion that one can draw from this study is that experienced,
seasoned mathematics and science teachers do significantly change their teaching

practices as they attempt to restructure their workplace. This happens as the teachers gain
awareness of the inadequacy of preexisting teaching practices in the face of external
needs (e.g., student needs arising from diverse cultural backgrounds).

I observed this as the teachers I studied incorporated a new role of Support
Teacher in their work environment during a process of acceptance of, and resistance to,
the proposed changes. This was the result of teachers approaching the changes, as they
vacillated between belief in, and skepticism of, the proposed reforms. However,
regardless of whether or not they believed in the reforms, the teachers had to ascertain the
adequacy of their teaching practice. As a result, all of the teachers I observed underwent
individual transformations, as they participated in the process. Thus, I saw that both
resistance and acceptance are active forms of participation. Finally, the study
demonstrated the importance of ownership and self-agency in the process, by which
teachers restructured their workplaces.

COPYRIGHT
Roberto Alves Monteiro
1994

To Elisa, my mother

Who has taught me two important interpretive research tools: to observe and to listen.

To Maria

Who has being a companion in all seasons.

To my children
Hektor, Marko, Mariu and Roberto

Who were wise enough to understand difficult times.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Preparation of this dissertation was made possible both by a scholarship granted
by the Brasilian government throught Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de
N 1’vel Superior - CAPES, and by a leave of absence granted by Federal University of
Juiz de Fora.

A group of teachers who's interaction I observed made the research base for this
dissertation possible. I want to express to them all my gratitude. Unfortunately,
requirements of interpretive research prevent me to nominate them in this section. I
gratefully acknowlegde the assistance of my colleagues Josephine Zesaguli and Antonio
Bettencourt for all the time shared with me in discussing various aspects of this
dissertation. I specially thanks Pericles Gomes, Dr. Perry Lanier, and Dr. Carrie Heeter
from MSU, for their important assistance.

This study could not be done without the support of my Guidance Committee. I
express my thanks to Dr. Wanda May and Dr. Edward Smith for all I learned with them.
I am specially indebted with Dr. Douglas Campbell and Dr. James Gallagher. The first
helped me to understand and overcome cultural barriers during my Doctoral Program.
The second went far beyound his professional duties as my advisor, and became a friend
and role model both due to his intense academic life, and his fine perception of human

values.

vi

Chapter

II.

III.

IV.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .......................................................... 1
Background ................................................................. 1
Major Concerns in Studying Teachers’ Participation ................... 3
Purpose of the Study And Research Questions ........................ 8
Organization of the Dissertation ........................................... 9
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK ......................................... 10
Introduction ................................................................. 10
Conceptualizations of Teachers’ Participation ........................... 11
Burnout .............................................................. 12
Critical Situation .................................................... 13
Social Character and Internal Energy ............................ l6
Intemalization of Meanings ....................................... 20
Professionalism in Teaching and Teachers’ Participation .............. 26
SOCIAL MILIEU, RESEARCH SETTING
AND METHODOLOGY ................................................... 32
The AFT Program .......................................................... 34
The Changing Demography ............................................... 41
Research Setting and Sites ................................................. 44
Summary of Data Collected ............................................... 47
Research Methods .................................................. 48
Interpretive Research in the Social Sciences
and in Science Education .................................................. 48
The Monteiro Data Organizer as a Tool in
Interpretive Research .............................................. 50
The Role of Interpretation in
Qualitative Data Analysis .................................... 50
Major Components of the
Monteiro Data Organizer .................................... 52
RESEARCH FINDINGS ................................................. 55
Entering the Field ........................................................... 55
An Outline of the Findings ................................................ 58
Support Teacher Program: An Insider’s View .................. 62
A First Look at How Teachers Participated ..................... 67
Believing and Being Skeptical .............................. 68
Vision of Support Teacher Role: STP’s Message
and Negotiation of its Meaning ............................. 77
Acceptance and Resistance as Forms
of Teachers’ Participation ......................................... 86

vii

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION .................................. 102
Overview .................................................................. 102
Changing Teachers' Practices ............................................. 104
Participation and Critical Situation ........................................ 105
Critical Situation and Individual Agency ................................. 105
Contradictory Nature of Participation. ................................... 106
Critical Situation as a Turning Point ...................................... 106
Resistance and Acceptance as Pattems of Participation. ............... 107
Power Relationships ....................................................... 108
Using a Micro Computer for Organizing Qualitative Data ............ 113
Implications for Practice and Educational Research .................... 114

Implications for Practice ........................................... 114

Implications for Further Research ................................ 115
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................... 117

viii

LIST OF FIGURES
FIGURE
Conceptual Framework .........................................................
Interpretative Framework ......................................................

Construction of the Vision of Teaching in the
Support Teacher Program .....................................................

The Ethos of Teacher's Participation .........................................

3O
6O

83
87

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION
Participation IS a strange word. Its dialectics has the fact that participation is
not taking parts, but 1n a way taking the whole. Everybody who
participates in something does not take something away so that the others
cannot have it. The opposite is true: by sharing, by our participating in the
things in which we are participating we enrich them; they do not become
smaller, but larger. The whole life of tradition consists exactly in this

enrichment so that life is our culture and our past: the whole inner store of
our lives is always extending by participating (Gadamer 1984).

W

Teacher participation has been an issue of major concern in almost all educational
reform movements. There is little contention that teachers participate in shaping school
practices and that those practices constitute a school’s culture. Since teachers contribute a
great deal to their workplace, they are accepted as active actors of the school's culture.
However, despite the constant claim that teachers are an important component of school
organization, there has been little investigation about the nature of their participation in
reforming this organization.

The concept of participation usually incorporates two meanings, one of taking
part in something, and the other of sharing something with others. When applied to
teachers, in the context of their recent efforts to take charge of their professional lives,
these two components may lead to a dilemma regarding their manner of participation.
The dilemma appears when they have to decide between accommodating a state of affairs
and taking action to change it. One could claim that this dilemma is part of every

person’s daily life. This, is true. However, it has increased relevance when studying

teachers’ professional participation. For instance, Rosenthal (1969) demonstrates that
this dilemma may result in a clash when teachers become part of an organized body of
professionals, such as unions. The clash becomes apparent when teachers have to
choose between accommodation at an individual level, for instance in their building, and
making changes in their profession through collective action outside their buildings.
Rosenthal’s (1969) observations indicate that teacher participation encompasses what
teachers do in their individual capacities as faculty members and what they do when they
delegate responsibility for action in an organizational membership.

In addition to verifying that teachers take part in these formal categories of
participation, one may also look at participation in real contexts to understand what
happens when teachers participate. The latter perspective enables a critical understanding
of what goes on when teachers share their experiences while they participate. This
perspective is based upon the understanding that by participating, teachers do play a role
in determining not only the shape, but also the ethos of the educational enterprise set into
motion in schools. Therefore, teachers’ participation, as a concept, has to encompass the
context of participation in school’s practices, culture and organization. Also, the concept
has to take into account both “taking part” and “sharing” at individual and collective
levels.

A closer look into the two fields of science and mathematics shows that the nature
of concern about teachers’ participation seems to have changed. These changes have
been more visible since the big great science education reform movement in the 19508.
Then, teacher participation was seen as a danger (Duschl, 1990) to be bypassed with
teacher-proof curricula. The current trend in these fields is to recognize the importance of
full teacher participation as vital for the success of educational reform (Duschl, 1990;
Gallagher, 1989; Sarason, 1990). As a consequence, studying science and mathematics

teachers--as they participate in formal movements and as they share their expertise in

restructuring their science or mathematics teachinguis important to enlarge our
understanding of the issue of teachers’ participation.

This dissertation describes the participation by a group of Science and
Mathematics teachers in restructuring their workplace, both as they took part and as they

shared their professional expertise in that process.

mam

As I stated earlier, there has been little investigation about the nature of teachers’
participation in changing schools. In fact, it is important to understand why such an
important question was left unattended by science and mathematics educators, even by
those trying to introduce reforms. There seem to be a combination of methodological,
socio-political and historical reasons why teachers’ participation has not been a more
visible interest or studied issue.

The methodological reasons are related to the difficulties in doing a study of
teachers’ participation. First, both outsiders and insiders usually take teachers’
participation for granted. Teachers are expected to follow the direction of change
instigated by reformers. It is very easy to overview something taken to be obvious. Yet,
what teachers’ participation means and entails may not be clear either to teachers or to
outsiders. Second, a study of teachers’ participation requires the existence of particular
situations--naturally occun‘ing in teaching settings-~that to an observer the contradictions
between a school’s culture and teachers’ practices. For instance, these contradictions
may be more visible in teachers coming back from inservice training. They may have
undergone such a transformation that they would view their workplace from a different
perspective. One may find examples of teachers in situations similar to those mentioned
here in recent studies. For instance, Gallagher (1989), Bettencourt and Gallagher (1990)
all described an attempt to restructure teachers’ professional roles to enable this kind of

situation. In Gallagher (1989) and Zesaguli (1990), the subjects were teachers involved

in a long-range attempt to restructure their professional roles by incorporating a new one,
the role of support teachers. These studies reported changes that called for teachers to be
critical of their teaching practices individually, and of their schools’ practices as a whole,
while still participating in the negotiation of their new roles (Bettencourt & Gallagher
1990). One may say that the exposure of different facets of teachers’ work in these
situations made possible an in-depth examination of these teachers’ participation in the
transformation of their workplace. Teachers may also experience a confrontation
between their past experiences and the proposed changes, before they reach a balance that
accounts for their transformation through their personal choices. Normally, this balance
is reached by evolving negotiations, happening during the enormous amount of
interactions in which teachers became involved. This can be better studied with intense
utilization of interpretive methods. I will explain this in more detail in Chapter III.

There are also socio-political reasons why teachers’ participation has not been
studied more. These reasons are related to teachers' lack of professional autonomy, on
the one hand, and changes in the learning population, on the other hand. Regarding
teachers’ autonomy, two positions can be contrasted. The first position suggests that
teachers, as professionals, are usually passive subjects of a received “culture” and
imposed wisdom which does not benefit them at all (Cooper, 1988). According to this
position, teachers’ culture is one of submission. Given this point of view, there would
be no reason or motivation to study the nature of teachers’ participation, since no
recognition is given to teachers’ own agency or how, by their own initiative, they
apprehend aspects in their culture.

The second position offers a different perspective on the issue of teachers’
autonomy. According to this position, teachers’ lack of control over their professional
lives may result from having a received view about their practices. However, the
assumption of teachers’ culture as one of submission does not follow from this

conclusion. As opposed to the first position, this one implies a significant amount of self

determination in the way teachers buy into new ideas. For instance, one observes this
view when classroom teachers are working with educational researchers. Researchers,
especially those from universities, often convey, although unintentionally, a “mystique of
expertise” that can reinforce teachers’ received views (Campbell, 1988). In this position,
teachers are viewed not as submitting themselves to a certain vision, but as buying, by
their own initiative, into that vision. What remains to be explored is how teachers can
incorporate into their practice a vision of teaching, not necessarily generated within the
realm of their experience. Therefore, the question is not how to describe a process of
submission but to understand how teachers manifest their self engagement, or in other
words, how they participate. A teacher's own initiative, self engagement, and self
determination are aspects of what has been described as human agency, a concept used
here in the same sense as by Wilis (1981).

Both of these positions address teachers’ lack of autonomy. Whereas Cooper’s
(1988) arguments leave no room to address the issue of teachers’ participation,
Campbell’s (1988) findings demonstrated that part of the problem of lacking autonomy is
explained by the way teachers participate, with help from experts, in the shaping their
professional roles. Therefore, this second position opens room for studying teachers’
participation. However, one of the problems with the second position is that it requires
participant observation of a considerable duration to reach a reasonable perception of the
multi-faceted ways teachers participate. For instance, Campbell’s (1988) research,
conducted over a three-year period, was the result of a collaboration between teachers and
researchers.

Recent changes in the student population have thrown teachers into confusion as
to how to better perform the teaching task, therefore making it more difficult to study
their participation. Their confusion is due to the significant shift in education from an

elite-oriented, to a mass-oriented, phenomenon. This is noticeable in science and

mathematics, especially at the secondary school level, and has a significant effect in
determining who should take part and benefit from science education (Fensham, 1988).

Aronowitz (1981) has explained that phenomenon as one in which
underprivileged segments of the population see education as a place par excellence to
struggle against their social marginalization. Therefore, these segments put a stronger
demand on educational services than they did before. In the American context, an
historical example of this phenomenon is the large segment of the population, especially
after the civil rights movements of the 19603, seeking a place at school. As the pressures
on school systems increase, the appeal for immediate solutions for a crowded classroom
of more diverse learners tends also to increase. The result is a mismatch between
available and required teachers’ expertise that causes them to be caught a dilemma
regarding where to concentrate their effort: (1) to overcome their real need for change in
their professional skills, usually more oriented to elite students, or (2) to find ways for
professional survival in a classroom crowded with students having diverse backgrounds.

The discrimination between which reforms are accepted and which are rejected by
teachers, on the one hand, and on the other hand the understanding of the reasons some
potential solutions are accepted, while others are rejected, make the study of teachers’
participation under these conditions a challenging one.

There are also historical reasons why teachers’ participation has not been a well-
studied issue, especially within science education. In science education, the reasons are
mainly related to curriculum development. A retrospective analysis of 30 years of science
education in the US. shows that teachers were deliberately left out of the National
Science Foundation (NSF) science projects developed since the 1960s (Duschl, 1990).
This same perspective seems to be supported by retrospective studies of the US.
education reform movement in general. (Sarason, 1990).

What the literature suggests is that the concern about teachers’ real and full

participation in shaping a subject area is a recent phenomenon, particularly within science

and mathematics education. For instance, in the 1991 annual meeting of National
Association for Research in Science Teaching (N ARST) the presence of five junior high
school science teachers, who presented papers about their collaboration with science
education researchers, was talked about as a rarity. However, their presence, was
identified as an initiative to be commended both for its importance and for its opportunity.
The main purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of the
concept of teachers' participation.

Historically, in the literature, the concept of teachers’ participation is based the
tradition of symbolic interactionism (Berger & Luckman, 1966; Blumer, 1969; Schutz &
Luckman, 1973). The interactionist’s argument is that people construct their social world
through their interpretations and actions. Interactionism stresses the negotiation of
meanings as a way to construct social order at a given level. Within the interactionist
tradition, behavior is not viewed as a release from internal psychological structures nor as
response to external pressure coming from social facts. Rather it focuses upon
emergence and negotiation. Those are processes by which social action in groups,
organizations or larger societies is constructed and transformed in everyday life.
Construction of social action is a process that occurs both in episodic encounters and in
long-lasting socialization processes over the life history of individuals.

In this research, I used theoretical insights drawn from a critical tradition, in
association with symbolic interactionism. The interactionist approach was very useful to
me as I observed the teachers and sought to identify and describe the processes occurring
as they negotiated social order. This seems to be an important first step in understanding
teachers’ participation from a sociological perspective. It lays the groundwork needed to
conduct further research aimed at unveiling power relationships developed as a result of
teachers’ participation. Therefore the investigation of teachers’ participation, seems to

call for a two-step study. The first step describes how teachers do participate, and the,

second deals with the power relationship affecting both their existing and newly-

incorporated professional roles.

s o e ues ' n

The main purpose of this dissertation is to address participation as negotiation of
meaning, in order to contribute to the understanding of the issues and nature of teachers'
participation. I first became concerned with the issue of teachers' participation between
December, 1988 and the spring of 1989. At that time, I did 100 hours of participant
observation of two teachers. I collected the data to help project staff assess the effects of
the STP . This project was developed jointly by Major University (MU), the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the Uniontown Public Schools (UPS), from now on
referred to simply as MU/AFT/UPS. During this time, I realized both the importance of
teachers’ participation and the simultaneous lack of research on this subject. Having
decided to study teachers’ participation for my doctoral dissertation, I observed a group
of four science and four mathematics teachers who were participating in the
MU/AFT/UPS program. (I will refer to these teachers as Support Teachers.) In
addition, I observed four other science teachers, colleagues of the Support Teachers, in
two different buildings (1 will refer to them as Peer Teachers.) As I mentioned above, I
utilized interpretive methods. I studied these teachers as they participated in the program
and incorporated a new professional role, that of Support Teachers.

I began my study focusing on the question of how Support Teachers were
participating in restructuring their professional roles within a context of restructuring
school practices. As my study progressed I broke that overarching question into various
others. For instance, at different points in the research, I became interested in observing
how those teachers were negotiating the meaning of the new roles with researchers, with
the Peer Teachers and among themselves. After spending time in the field, I also became

interested in understanding how Support Teachers and Peer Teachers were perceiving

their socialization into the new roles. The Support Teachers and researchers would
sometimes refer to some of the Peer Teachers as resistant teachers. After learning that I
begun directing my observations toward the difference between the socialization of
believers and the that of the resistors as they adjusted to their new roles.

My database consists of two major elements. First, I used a large set of existing
documents, audio and video recordings accumulated during the almost three years of the
project. Second, I did participant observation of activities of the MU/AFI‘IUPS program
during the period of August 1990, to April 1991, to collect evidence of interactions. The
organization of the database incorporated various techniques of interpretive method.
Examples include document analysis, participant observation, open ended interviews and

subjects’ written or spoken reactions to interpretive notes.

i Di
This study is presented from an interpretive perspective. The background
of the study, its purposes and research questions are set forth in Chapter I.
Chapter 11 contains a theoretical framework drawn from selected literature. The
teachers' social milieu, the description of its settings and the method used in the
study are presented in Chapter HI. Chapter IV contains the study findings.
While the conclusions and applications for further research are presented in

Chapter V.

CHAPTER II

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Inflation

The main purpose of this conceptual framework is to build the theoretical grounds
upon which to study the problem of teachers’ participation in restructuring their
workplace. Restructuring here means teachers rethinking the workplace on a variety of
levels, including attitudes, ways of doing things and ways of affecting peers and students
with whom they interact. Although this study refers to science and mathematics teachers,
subject matter is not the issue under examination. Instead, the purpose of this study is to
understand how teachers participate in the process of promoting changes that will affect
their professional roles.

I chose the participants in this research for strategic rather than theoretical
reasons. The teachers who participated in this research were already involved in a
restructuring effort that had gained recognition in important forums, in the fields of
mathematics and science. Thus, this was an attractive and rich environment in which to
seek to understand what role teacher participation could play as an element of successful
reform.

It is possible to construct the conceptual framework from an outline. In the
outline, educational researchers and teachers, join together to effect changes. The

changes will primarily affect the teachers. The basic theoretical issues in this outline can

10

11

be described as follows: (1) The existing relationships with in both groups are changed
because of the interactions between them. (2) The agreed-upon aim of interaction
introduces "teaching practices" that both groups regarded as new and likely to promote
change in the teachers' practices. (3) The changes in the teachers are of two basic types.
First, the group has to establish new relationships to assimilate interactions with the
researchers. Second, the group has to change the patterns of its internal peer
relationships.

This research sought to observe what happened in a group of eight teachers that
included Support Teachers and Peer Teachers (hereinafter referred to as 'participant
teachers'). Although the group of researchers and their intervention may be the object of
occasional reference, they were not the primary focus of this study.

It is possible to argue that the participant teachers underwent a process of
anticipated socialization into a set of norms, which the researchers labeled a "restructuring
pr0posal" (hereafter referred to as "project’s proposal"). Hence, this conceptual
framework seeks to offer theoretical grounds to understand how this anticipated

socialization (which I will call “participation”) happened.

angeptualizatigns of Teachers’ Paigipatigg

It is possible to assume that, through participation, teachers undergo a process of
transformation. This change involves interactions between preexisting and new
experience, such as that found in the project’s proposal. How this happens is the subject
of this study. Traditionally, ‘burnout’ is one, commonly-used explanation for teachers’
participation. This is especially true when there is a lack of acceptance of proposed
changes. However, I will argue that the ‘bumout’ approach is improper for fully
understanding teachers’ participation. Its inadequacy results from viewing the question

of participation mainly in terms of teachers’ lack of participation.

12

In order to demonstrate its inadequacy, I will first examine what the literature has
to say about burnout as an explanation for teacher participation. Teachers’ indifference is
indeed a kind of participation not incorporated in the literature. Thus, I will propose
alternative concepts to ‘bumout. These alternatives are more suitable to developing an
understanding of teachers’ participation. Critical situation, social character and internal
energy, internalization of meanings and professionalism in teaching will be presented as

more powerful concepts to explaining the issues involved in teachers’ participation.

Burnout

One can study teachers transformation from the perspective of teacher burnout.
There is a significant amount of literature addressing teachers’ dissatisfaction and
frustration from a burnout perspective. The American literature primarily explains the
prevalence of isolationism and conservatism among teachers as a result of a burnout
phenomenon. From this viewpoint, teachers are portrayed as retreating to a defensive
position, in order to avoid facing changing their practice (Hoover-Dempsey & Kendall,
1982; Penny, 1982).

As Freedman (1985) asserted, trying to prove the effect of burn out on teacher
workplace reform can be elusive. He concludes that most of the burnout literature has

not examined all the issues involved:

The number of articles and workshops that explore the issue of teacher
burnout has greatly increased during the past few years. This is occurring
at the same time in which many teachers face layoffs and shrinking job
markets. The coining of the term 'bumout' at the same time that teachers
are threatened with the loss of their jobs serves to direct the focus of each
teacher’s growing anger away from a critical analysis of schools as
institutions, to a preoccupation with their own failure. No one changes
from a dynamic teacher into a conservative pedagogue for mysterious
personal reasons. Schools as institutions create contradictory feelings and
demand contradictory actions from teachers. The rhetoric surrounding the
institution of public education often proves to be in direct conflict with the
function a teacher finds herself required to perform (p. 259).

13

The main focus of this dissertation is to find a more rational way of understanding
why teachers do participate in efforts aimed at their professional development.
Therefore, a "burnout" perspective will not be used in this dissertation. An explanation
based upon the concept of burnout does not recognize the complex occupational and
social world where teachers perform their day-by-day decision making (Barnett, 1985;
Vavrus, 1987).

Teachers frustration and dissatisfaction may be better understood within another
perspective. Such a perspective should provide teachers with opportunities to engage in
handling the outcomes of their occupation instead of ascribing their frustrations solely to
an alleged failure to cope. Such a perspective assumes that teachers frustration and
dissatisfaction, resulting in their decision to engage or not in a certain practice, may be

explained within the conceptual context of what I will call a critical situation.

Critical Situation

The idea of crisis is important to our understanding of how changes take place.
Teachers who have transformed their ways of teaching have done so to overcome critical
points in their professional lives. The concept of a critical situation may be derived
analogically from the more general concept of crisis as proposed by Habermas (1973).
In his study of issues involved in the legitimation of "late capitalism," Habermas (1973)
advanced the hypothesis that "social developments involve contradictions or 'crisis.‘ He
set himself the task of elucidating the concept of crisis. The elucidation he offered
appears within the realm of his "social-scientific concept of crisis."

Habermas (1973) began with the medical usage of crisis, "the phase of an illness
in which it is decided whether the organism’s self-healing powers are sufficient for
recovery" (p. 1). Then, he defined crisis in the social-scientific sense. What was
important to Habermas in borrowing the medical term was the idea that crisis forms a

whole with the one undergoing it:

14

The patient experiences his powerlessness vis-a—vis the objectivity of the
illness only because he is a subject condemned to passivity and temporarily
deprived of the possibility of being a subject in full possession of his

powers (p. 1).

Then Habermas borrowed from the dramaturgical tradition to include the idea that
crisis is not an entity that can be imposed over the individual from outside, nor can it be

viewed as external to individuals undergoing it.

According to him, in the dramaturgical tradition: The contradiction,
expressed in the catastrophic culmination of conflict, is inherent in the
structure of the action system and in the personality systems of the principal
characters. Fate is fulfilled in the revelation of conflicting norms against
which the identities of the participants shatter, unless they can summon up
the strength to win back their freedom by shattering the mythical power of
fate through the formation of new identities (p. 2).

Later, while addressing the limitations of systems theory in dealing with the concept
of crisis in social systems, Habermas (1973) also analyzed the issues of determining the
boundaries and persistence of social systems. From this analysis, one can derive an
additional principle: "It cannot be unambiguously determined whether a new system has
been formed or the old system has merely regenerated itself" (p. 3). The entire insight

appears in the following quote:

For organisms have clear spatial and temporal boundaries; their continued
existence is characterized by goal values [sollwerte] that vary only within
specifiable tolerances. Social systems, on the contrary, can assert
themselves in an hypercomplex environment through altering either system
elements or goal values or both, in order to maintain themselves at a new
level of control. But, when systems maintain themselves through altering
both boundaries and structural continuity [bestand], their identity becomes
blurred. The same system modification can be conceived of equally well as
a learning process and change or as a dissolution process and collapse of the
system. It cannot be unambiguously determined whether a new system has
been formed or the old system has merely regenerated itself (p. 3).

Habermas ( 1973, p. 3) asserted that systems theory has a limited grasp of the

"range of tolerance within which the goal values of a social system can vary without

15

critically endangering its continued existence or losing its identity." For Habermas, the
primary problem with the systems theory lay in its objectivistic language. That is in a
conceptual context where "only subjects can be involved in crisis, systems are not
presented as subjects." Therefore, from his criticism of systems theory, it is possible to
derive a relationship between individuals and social systems. Simply stated, there is a
relationship between individuals and social systems in the ways both are affected by, or
co-create, a crisis.

Only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical

for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak

of crisis. Social systems, too, have identities and can lose them. Historians

are capable of differentiating between revolutionary changes of a state or the

downfall of an empire, and mere structural alterations. In doing so, they

refer to the interpretations that members of a system use in identifying one

another as belongingto the same group, and through this group identity

assert their own self-identity (pp. 34).

Thus, Habermas (1973) demonstrated that, like individuals and groups, social
systems have identities, too. He points to two aspects: (1) the subjective nature of crisis
and (2) the relationship between individuals and social groups or systems. However, in
examining the concept of crisis, Habermas (1973) directed his concern to broader social
frames. Therefore, to be useful for analyzing participation in small groups or social
segments, our concept of crisis requires more elaboration, if it is to be based within
Habermas’ notion of crisis.

We must establish a conceptual bridge between the concept of crisis as it relates to
broader social frames and the same concept in relation to social segments and groups.
Theoretically, the key difficulty in building this bridge is in drawing a hard-and-fast
boundary between psychological (individual) and sociological (group) explanations. The
difficulty is present at the theoretical level and increases as one moves to empirical levels.

It is not easy to distinguish whether a certain pattern of action clearly results from

personality characteristics or from cultural characteristics. The "authoritarian personality"

16

study (Adomo, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford, 1950) exemplified this
difficulty. What they presented as a study of the first kind (personality characteristics),
Brown (1965) saw as one of the second kind (cultural characteristics). The "authoritarian
personality" study was done by interviewing a large sample of people to gather a data
base of personality characteristics. However, it was later argued that the study ended up
gathering a picture of the common characteristics of a lower—class culture (Brown, 1965,
pp. 550-553).

To build the bridge referred to above, it is important to consider the relevance of
individuals’ interpretations as a channel to study group definition and an assertion of self-
identity (Habermas, 1973, pp. 3-4). Group definition and self-identity become
particularly important when the study's purpose is to understand processes of change as
perceived by participants involved in this change. This is because change involves
restructuring the identity of individuals and their patterns of grouping. That is, the way
individuals participate in any restructuring process seems to be affected by how they
assert their self-identities and by how they interpret themselves as belonging to a certain
part of society. Some concepts proposed by From (1968) and Mead (1934) may help
us understand this idea. These are the concepts of social character and internal energy
contributed by From and Mead's concept of thought as internalization of meanings that
I will present next.

I conclude this section by asserting the importance of the concept of crisis. It
helped me focus my observations during the study and interpret my findings about

teachers' participation.

Social Character and Internal Energy
The concepts of social character and internal energy (From, 1968) can be used
in a conceptual framework to aid understanding the question of teachers’ participation.

Both concepts involve understanding existing relationships between experiences at

17

individual and collective levels and social movements. These concepts also provide
grounds for understanding both the constitutive traits of culture and its internal
contradictions (From, 1968, p. 311). Therefore, they are important in a conceptual
frame intended to explain how individual teachers engage themselves in a process of
change or resist it.

From (1968) was not interested in deviant cases. Instead, he studied
individuals as belonging to groups. His research stressed the aspects of character
structure that were common to most individuals in a group. He called this set of aspects
"the social character."

The social character comprises only a selection of traits, the essential

nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has

developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to

that group (p. 305)

Fromm’s (1968) study offered a remarkable contribution to understanding issues
involved in the question of teachers’ participation. He developed the concept of social
character by analyzing social norms as evolving from individuals’ internalization of
needs. From analyzed social character as it refers to both individuals and groups, thus
aiming at establishing how a character structure would evolve from internalization of
certain needs. In so doing, he demonstrated a coherence between individual action and
psychological satisfaction: "The subjective function of character for the normal person is
to lead him to act according to what is necessary for him from a practical standpoint and
also to give him satisfaction from his activity psychologically" (p. 310).

However Fromm’s (1968) main concern was the evolution of social character.
He stressed that if the purpose of a study was to understand human energy as a
productive force in a given social order, then social character should be the main concern
in that study. The important point to stress here is that, by having practical and

psychological satisfaction in acting according to a certain set of social traits, individuals

18

incorporate social character in an adaptive process. According to From, "The social
character intemalizes external necessities and thus, harnesses human energy for the task
of a given economic and social system" (p. 310). Therefore, needs may develop in
character structures once they have been incorporated at the individual and social levels.
As a result, individuals deve10p an inner authority that controls them more effectively
than any external authority could.

It is important to understand, however, that the unique interrelationship between
individual and social character may take one of two forms, either a cementing or a
contradictory nature. A cementing relationship, one that is "in phase" between individual
and social character, may develop when the internalized needs are "at the same time
satisfactory psychologically and practical from the standpoint of material success"
(From, 1968, p. 312). A contradictory relationship between individual and social
character may develop when "the traditional character structure still exists while new
economic conditions have arisen, for which the traditional character traits are no longer
useful" (Fromm, 1968, p. 312). Hence, acting according to internalized needs may
became disappointing and not rewarding for the individual.

Fromm’s (1968) proposition of the contradictory relationship between individual
and social character, therefore, seems consistent with the idea of crisis at a broader level,
as presented by Habermas (1973): "Only when members of a society experience
structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity
threatened can we speak of crisis" (pp. 3-4).

Thus, by combining (l) the concept of crisis (Habermas) and (2) the relationship
between individual and social character (Fromm), it is possible to speak of a critical
situation as a combination of elements coming from both the individual and the social
character of his/her group.

Another important concept introduced by From (1968) is the one of "internal

energy," which he used to explain an individual’s drive to participate in social

l9

movements. To demonstrate this concept, he used the example of the drive to work as a
trait in western society. From (1968) explained the adherence of individuals to this trait
in terms of the internalization of external necessities, generating an internal energy at the
individual level that is coherent with societal needs. In this context, the drive to work
was a situation where "psychological forces are cementing social structures" (p. 311).
According to From, the "desire [of the individual] to act as he has to act" (p. 311) made
it easy to accept the need for working.

However, internal energy does not always cement social structures. Sometimes
individuals may rely on a character structure at the individual level that is no longer
consistent with the social requirements coming from the context in which they perform.
For From (1968) changing economic conditions exemplify this issue: "The traditional
character may still exist, while new economic conditions have arisen, for which the
traditional character traits are no longer useful" (p. 312).

The social milieu may present requirements for which the individual's usual
performance is no longer a match. Therefore, a contradiction arises between the
individual character and the evolving social character. The internal energies may thus
oppose, rather than cement, social structures. However, the movement from a certain
level of coherence to contradiction and the movement from contradiction to a new level of
coherence is a long-term process. During such a process, individuals may experience a
period of ambiguity in accepting their character, established as result of their past
experiences. In addition they may be skeptical about its actual possibility to provide
psychological satisfaction. This ambiguity characterizes a critical situation in which
acceptance and resistance are both options as channels for displaying internal energy.

In this section I explored the concepts of social character and internal energy
(From, 1968). Those concepts were helpful in studying teachers’ participation,
especially in understanding relationships between experiences at the individual and

collective levels.

20

Intemalization of Meanings

Another issue within this conceptual framework is that of how external necessities
become internalized, gain meaning and, therefore, shape both the individual and the
social character. This question is especially relevant for understanding processes of
individual and group changes, as is the case in this dissertation. In this study, the
phenomenon of teachers’ participation is examined in a context where an existing order,
incorporated in teachers’ experiences, is being challenged. The challenge to the
established order may bring about new needs. Once the individual tries to satisfy those
new needs, he/she will became more and more aware of them. As a consequence they
will gain meaning and become internalized. Understanding how meaning is internalized
requires an interpretive approach to the study of social phenomena, such as teachers’
participation.

The traditions of interpretive sociology (N atanson, 1973; Schutz & Luckman
1973; Weber, 1949), of symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969), and of reality viewed
as socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) offer a conceptual basis to address
the phenomenon of internalization of meanings. Each one of the scholars mentioned
above, has contributed to what I refer to as the "interactionist argument". In general
terms, the interactionist argument is that people construct their social world through their
interpretations and actions. Interactionism focuses on social action and stresses
negotiation of meanings as a way to construct social order at a given level. Meanings
may be negotiated both in episodic encounters and in long-lasting socialization processes
over the life history of the individual.

Both Weber and Schutz were exponents of interpretive sociology. In his lengthy
discussion of the issue of objectivity in social sciences, Weber (1949) described the

distinctions between an interpretive and a quantitative approach in those sciences:

21

There are, to use the words of Vischer, "subject matter specialists and
interpretative specialists." The fact-greedy gullet of the former can be filled
only by legal documents, statistical worksheets and questionnaires, but he is
insensitive to the refinement of a new idea. The gourmandise of the latter
dulls his taste for facts by ever new intellectual subtleties. That genuine
artistry which, among the historians, Ranke possessed in such a grand
measure, manifests itself through its ability to produce new knowledge by
interpreting already known facts according to known viewpoints (p. 112)

Many of Weber’s propositions have been surpassed by the evolution of social
theory. However, one concept that remains useful in researching social relations is that
of ideal types. Weber refers to the concept of ideal types as a conceptual pattern, a
hypothetical construct built by emphasizing shared aspects of individual behavior or of
institutions which are empirically observable. As Weber ( 1949) explains it,
"substantively, this construct [ideal types] in itself is like a Utopia which has been arrived
at by the analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality" (p. 90). Further, he
describes the basic characteristics of the concept and its utility in research:

The ideal typical concept will help to develop our skill in imputation in

research: it is no "hypothesis" but it offers guidance to the construction of

hypothesis. It is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous

means of expression to such a description (Weber, 1949, p. 90).

It is important to note that an ideal type should not be confused with a model,
although both are constructs involving interpretations of components of reality. Weber
(1949) himself demonstrated the basic difference:

What is the importance of such ideal-typical constructs for an empirical

science, as we wish to constitute it? Before going any further, we should

emphasize that the idea of an ethical imperative, of a 'model' of what

'ought' to exist is to be carefully distinguished from the analytical construct,

which is 'ideal' in the strictly logical sense of the term. It is a matter here of

constructing relationships which our imagination accepts as plausibly

motivated and hence, as 'objectively possible' and which appear as adequate
from the nomological standpoint (pp. 91-92)

22

The concept of ideal types is useful in studying phenomena such as the
internalization of meanings into a preexisting frame of experience. This is due to the
intrinsic connection between internalization of meanings at the individual level and larger
social aspects. Ideal typification makes the description of those connections possible, as
well as making sense of what is happening at an individual level. Thus, ideal typification
is an important concept to be used in interpretive approaches to research.

Natanson (1973) indicates that Schutz, an exponent of interpretive sociology,
draws on phenomenology as he analyses the problem of social reality and offers his
contribution to the study of that reality. For him, interpretation is not only proposed as a
tool for the researcher but as privileged way of making critical sense of his world.
According to his viewpoint, an interpretive approach is not only a suggestion but a
requirement if social phenomena are to be understood:

The stress upon action as the starting point for a methodology of the social

sciences is not only a plea for a new kind of knowledge; it is rather an

insistence on the qualitative difference between the kinds of reality

investigated by natural scientists and social scientists. It is a plea for

appreciating the fact that men are not only elements of the scientist’s field of

observation but pre-interpreters of their own field of action, that their overt
conduct is only a fragment of their total behavior, that the first challenge

given to those who seek to understand social reality is to comprehend the

subjectivity of the actor by grasping the meaning an act has for him, the axis

of the social world (p. XLVI).

Natanson (1973) states that, within the interpretive approach proposed by Schutz,
"the social scientist’s task is the reconstruction of the way in which men in daily life
interpret their world" (p. XLVI). Therefore, if the participation of teachers in this
research is to be explained in terms of internalization of meanings, one has to find out
what interpretation the teachers studied may offer.

Interpretation, in the sense presented here, is more than just a way for people to

make sense out of their daily lives. It also is an instrument to sustain a social reality. A

popular description for sustaining social reality is the ensemble of meanings resulting

23

from individual participant’s actions, as well as from joint actions. The conceptualization
of this ensemble is one of the contributions of symbolic interactionism.

Blumer (1969) is one of the first organizers of the basic tenets of symbolic
interactionism. He understands Symbolic Interactionism within the realm of three basic
premises organized in the following sequence: (1) "Human beings act toward things on
the basis of the meanings that the things have for them" (p. 2). As used here, "things"
may include a range of notions since, according to Blumer ( 1969), the word "includes
everything that the human being may note in his world" (p. 2). The notion of "things"
comprises physical objects, other human beings, categories of human beings, institutions
or a government, guiding ideals, activities of others, "and such situations as an individual
encounter in his daily life" (p. 2). (2) "The meanings of such things are derived from, or
arise out of, the social interaction that one has with ones’ fellows" (p. 2). (3) "Meanings
are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in
dealing with the things he encounters" (p. 2).

In discussing the nature of symbolic interactionism, Blumer (1969) asserts that,
with regard to the proper understanding of meanings, the primary difference between it
and behaviorist, realist and idealist perspectives is that "symbolic interactionism sees
meanings as social products, as creations that are formed in and through the defining
activities of people as they interact" (p. 5).

However, what further distinguishes symbolic interactionism is what Blumer
(1969) describes as the process of interpretation. He describes this process as one in
which individuals incorporate the social construction by participating in it. This process
has two distinct steps:

The actor indicates to himself the things toward which he is acting. He has

to point out to himself the things that have meaning. The making of such

indications is an internalized social process in that the actor is interacting

with himself. This interaction with himself is something other than an

interplay of psychological elements; it is an instance of the person engaging
in a process of communication with himself; interpretation becomes a matter

24

of handling meanings. The actor selects, checks, suspends, regroups and

transform the meanings in the light of the situation in which he is placed and

the direction of his action. Accordingly, interpretation should not be

regarded as a mere automatic application of established meanings but as a

formative process in which meanings are used and revised as instruments

for the guidance and formation of action (p. 5)

To adopt a symbolic interactionist approach one must embrace the following key
concepts proposed by Blumer (1969), the concepts of: (1) human groups, (2) social
interaction, (3) objects, (4) human action and (5) joint action.

Human groups are defined as human beings that are engaged in action. The idea
of action is an important construct for interactionists, not only for representing the result
of human endeavor, but because action is what defines human groups:

The import of this simple and essentially redundant characterization is that

fundamentally human groups or society exists in action and must be seen in

terms of action. This picture of human society as action must be the starting
point (and the point of return) for any scheme that purports to treat and

analyze human society empirically. (p. 6)

The concept of social interaction is consistent with the concept of human groups.
It is viewed as a process that forms conduct:

Put simply, human beings in interacting with one another have to take

account of what each other is doing or is about to do; they are forced to

direct their own conduct or handle their situations in terms of what they take

into account. Thus, the activities of others enter as positive factors in the

formation of their own conduct; in the face of the actions of others one may

abandon an intention or purpose, revise it, check or suspend it, intensify it,

or replace it (Blumer, 1969, p. 8).

Interactions can be either non-symbolic or symbolic. What makes an interaction
symbolic is the intervention of interpretation. By interpreting, actors seek to understand
the meaning of each other’s action, and this constitutes the human's characteristic mode
of interaction.

According to Blumer (1969), George Herbert Mead sees symbolic interaction "as

a presentation of gestures and a response to the meaning of those gestures" (p. 9). It can

25

be said that two parties engaged in an interaction understand each other when a gesture
has the same meaning for both actors. From this, meaning is seen to flow out along three
lines, usually referred to as Mead’s triadic nature of meaning:

It [meaning] signifies what the person to whom it is directed is to do; it

signifies what the person who is making the gesture plans to do; and it

signifies the joint action that is to arise by articulation of the acts of both (p.

9).

Any misunderstanding in any one of the lines of the triad may lead to an
ineffective cormnunication that prevents interaction and blocks any possible joint action.

Symbolic interactionists see the world as composed of objects. However, rather
than indicating any realistic way of seeing the world, objects, themselves, are seen as
socially constructed. Whether they have a physical, social, or an abstract nature, objects
are a result of social interaction.

The meaning of anything and everything has to be formed, learned, and

transmitted through a process of indication - a process that is necessarily a

social process. Human group life on the level of symbolic interaction is a

vast process in which people are forming, sustaining, and transforming the

objects of their world as they come to give meaning to objects (Blumer,

1969, p. 12).

It is important to understand symbolic interactionism as a theoretical alternative to
behaviorism. That is why human beings are defined as acting organisms, as opposed to
responding organisms, as defined by the behaviorist tradition. What does it mean to act?
Blumer ( 1969) shows that the answer is a process of constant construction.

It means that the human individual confronts a world that he must interpret

in order to act instead of an environment to which he responds because of

his organization. He has to cope with the situations in which he is called on

to act, ascertaining the meaning of the actions of others and mapping out his

own line of action in the light of such interpretation (p. 15).

For symbolic interactionists, human group life consists of systematic attempts to

fit lines of action to each other. The articulation of the actors’ lines of action make

26

possible what is called " joint action." Since the term "joint action" may have wide usage
within social sciences, one should be aware of its distinctive meaning for symbolic
interactionists. Symbolic interactionism attributes a more important status to "joint
action," as a concept than would many of the traditions in the social sciences. Instead of
defining it in terms of aggregation of diverse participants’ conduct, joint action gains a
distinctive character. Although that character is constructed out of a linkage of actions, it
is conceptualized as a dimension apart from what is being linked. Thus, the whole is
made up of several parts, but gains a distinctive character as a whole. As Blumer (1969)
describes it: "the joint action may be identified as such and may be spoken of and
handled without having to break it down into the separate acts that comprises it" (p. 17).
An important implication of distinguishing individual and joint action is the
perspective opened for understanding of new situations for individuals and groups.

New situations are constantly arising within the scope of group life that are
problematic and for which existing rules are inadequate. . . we have to recognize that
even in the case of pre-established and repetitive joint action each instance of such joint
action has to be formed anew. The participants still have to build up their lines of action
and fit them to one another through the dual process of designation and interpretation
(Blumer, 1969, p. 18).

In this section I explored the idea of internalization of meanings and stated: (1) its
relevancy for understanding the processes of individual and group changes and (2) that

an interpretive approach is needed to understand how meanings are internalized.

Professionalism in flfoaohing and Teachers’ Participation

Another important issue in this conceptual framework is the conceptualization of
professionalism. Burke (1971) sees two basic ways of conceptualizing professionalism.

The first is related to a more strict concept of profession in which the key point is whether

27

or not there is external control over the performance of the tasks involved. It is difficult
to regard teaching as a profession under this strict conceptualization of professionalism.

The essence of professionalism, in its strict form, is that the members of

any profession are not employees working for a fixed wage or salary

according to standardized rates, but they perform specific tasks for

individual clients for a fee. A professional is highly-trained and provides a

very specialized service which is exclusively available from members of that

profession. Professionals are not subject to external control in the

performance of their occupation; their conditions of work are determined by

a representative council of practitioners, which enjoys autonomy within

statutory limits. Professionalism involves public recognition of the

competence of an occupational group, as well as statutory provision,

acknowledging this competency and autonomy within the sphere of the

occupation. The professions derive their status, therefore, as much from

public esteem as from this statutory provision (p 125).

Another more general form of professionalism is also presented by Burke (1971).
He speaks of professional status rather than of professionalism: "Professionalism in this
more general sense refers to those occupational groups whose members are largely
responsible to their own consciences for the quality of their work, rather than to some
taskmaster or external yardstick" (p. 125).

According to Burke ( 1971), the teaching profession is more likely to be
considered as enjoying "professional status" than to be regarded as a profession. The
problem with professional status is its instability, which leads to weakening teachers’
autonomy instead of contributing to it. The weakening of teachers’ autonomy is the
result of their professional status being sometimes a concession of their employers rather
than their permanent conquest (Ozga, 1985, pp. 236-254).

Burke’s (1971) position does not imply that teaching will never reach full
recognition as a profession. In the following quote, Burke indicates the main problems
to be faced by teachers who wish to be recognized as professionals:

Teaching must acquire some of the characteristics generally attached to

professionalism. Teachers must, first of all, convince the public of their

competence, which may lead to an improvement in the status of teaching.
To do this they must place their competence beyond any reasonable doubt

28

by vastly improving the teacher training courses and by considerably

altering their attitudes towards their professional practice. At the same time,

legislation must be enacted which will provide teachers with some of the

rights enjoyed by other professions, especially where their own authority is

concerned (p. 125).

In the American context, there are many forces in place pushing forward the issue
of teacher professionalism. Unionism, especially as practiced by the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT), is one of them. AFT top-level officers, when speaking
about the organization’s policy seem, to indicate realization of the dilemmas imposed by
the issue of professionalism. For instance, choices at hand during a bargaining process
may show how critical it is to choose between keeping jobs and pursuing teachers’
relative professional status. In the case of the AFT, what is becoming apparent in the
news (W, November, 24, 1987 p. 66), however, is a significant
change regarding the concept of professionalism. The AFT is progressively moving
away from "bread and butter" issues -- those related to working conditions, benefits,
salaries and welfare of teachers. For instance, by offering its support to programs
involving the restructuring of schools and of teachers’ roles such as the STP, the AFT is
aiming at a longer-term goal of establishing teaching as a profession. The AFT, as a
union, appears to have chosen restructuring schools and teachers’ roles as ways to
change public opinion about teachers’ competence and, ultimately, to reach full
professional recognition for teaching (Brandt, 1990).

Teachers’ awareness of this strategy may lead to tensions between activism for
teachers’ welfare and activism on educational issues such as restructuring of schools and
of teachers’ roles. Studies have shown that these tensions may become paradoxical for
teachers (Bullough, 1982, p. 208). Teachers’ uncertainty about the trends mentioned
before may explain, to some extent, teachers’ acceptance of, or resistance to, changes

when the actual reform comes to their level (Ozga, 1985, pp. 236—254). Also, there are

indications in the literature that unless teachers are willing to undergo significant changes

29

in the way they handle their occupation, they might undermine their own recognition as
professionals (Burke, 1971, p. 125).

The concept of professionalism summarized in this section, especially the one
advanced by AFT, was very importantin conducting this study. The teachers I studied at
Uniontown were undergoing a process of balancing their engagement and activism in
welfare issues at large and in educational issues. The concept of professionalism helped
me understand and interpret that tension.

Thus far I have marshalled the theoretical grounds for teachers’ participation in
restructuring their work place from a sociological viewpoint. The challenge in studying
social phenomenona is to grasp the meaning of events for participants without imposing a
predetermined frame of reasoning over the social reality observed. I have relied on
Weber’s concept of ideal types to frame a snapshot of how teachers participated during
the time of my data collection. My understanding of the phenomenon, both during the
time of observation and during the analysis, was based on a conceptual web whose lines
I indicated earlier in this chapter.

In pulling these lines together, I will refer to Figure I, (on page 30) which
graphically represents this integration.

Teachers’ participation as a phenomenon can be seen in terms of a cycle that
begins with the interplay between individual and social character (From, 1968). This
interplay generates a drive to participate, since individuals are always trying to maintain
equilibrium between the two dimensions. In either cementing or contradicting one
another, social character and individual character generate what From (1968) calls
internal energy. It is due to the compelling manifestation of internal energy that people
engage themselves in social interactions. By engaging in social interactions, individuals
are also engaged in negotiating meanings with other individuals, as implied by Schutz &
Luckman ( 1973), Mead (1934) and Blumer (1969) in their interpretive and symbolic

interactionist perspectives. Interaction and negotiation of meanings generate a propitious

3O

 

 

 

 

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structural
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become critical
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structure's
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interactions:

negotiation and

internalization

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social character

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Figure 1. Conceptual Framework

a snapshot based upon the
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31

environment for individuals to internalize those negotiated meanings as implied by
From (1968). Meanings are internalized through a complex process as I explained on
the section on internalization of meanings at page 20. Once internalized, meanings are
incorporated into the individual and the social character, thus restarting the cycle. This
interplay is one that reinforces cementing relationships that assure stability to individuals
and groups, or widens contradictions and instills crisis. An explanation of crisis is
provided by Habermas (1973). Contradictions between individual and social character
can widen to the point where individuals or groups are compelled to regain stability by
making structural alterations to the existing structure. It is at this point that a critical
situation can be said to take place. Changes resulting from crisis will reestablish both
individual and social character in new terms. This is a process that can be established

only by an individual's own initiative.

CHAPTER III

SOCIAL MILIEU, RESEARCH SETTINGS AND METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, I will describe the research setting and the methodology used in
this study. However, before I begin, I will make an excursion into some historical and
contemporary social aspects of Uniontown the place of this study. The purpose for this
excursion is twofold to: (1) provide readers with insights into the social milieu that forms
the background against which the Support Teachers Program (STP) took place and (2)
better understand the context and the setting in which I conducted the study.

Historically, Uniontown’s community had demonstrated a disposition towards
critical assessment of its education system and searching for solutions. One of the local
newspapers which I will name, The Sword , to protect suspect's anonimity has
concerned itself with educational matters since its early issues. In addition, it is a rich
source of historical evidence about these matters. For instance, the December 15, 1847
issue published the following statement from a parent:

We have four public schools which probably average 100 [students] each,

and we do think that our schools should occupy a more important station in

the public mind than they do, and that more attention should be paid to them
by parents and by our citizens generally.

One year later (December 1, 1848), The Sword published the following editorial :

As yet no local organization has ever been adopted by our citizens, and as
consequence, we are nearly destitute of good schools, indeed without any,

32

33

except such as have sprung up under the district system. There are some

four or five hundred children in our city growing up in ignorance

The latter were references to the district schools created under a law of 1846 that
may be viewed as birth of the US. schools system. It is also interesting to note that
some of the current problems and issues of concern in Uniontown’s public school system
were also present in those early district schools. For instance, two segments of society
were left out of those early public schools: (1) the affluent and (2) Afro-Americans. The
affluent sent their children away for better schooling or, alternatively, to local private
schools called "Select Schools". TheAfro-American members of society were excluded
from the existing schools and had to find their own way to education. For instance, the
February 9, 1850 issue of The Sword described the recently-created Colored School
Association (CSA), organized in January 23, 1850. The CSA's goal was to promote
education in the localAfro-American communities. Both groups, for very different
reasons, were very critical of Uniontown’s public schools.

There are indications that these historical trends were pervasive. For instance, an
1860-era, Uniontown, tourist guide offered indications that a changing demography was
leading to a progressive ghettoizing of minorities, especiallyAfro-American minorities, in
Uniontown's urban areas. As shown in the same guide, the response of the affluent
community was to move into suburban areas.

Today, these same problems seem visible again. Current issues of 11315119151
show that Uniontown’s community did not approve a millage increase, as proposed by
the school district, to finance the current level of expenses. Articles, letters to The
Sword ’3 editor, and other sections (March 14 and March 26, 1991 issues) indicate that
Uniontown’s community is still very critical of its public school system. The extension
of the problems faced by the schools is summarized in the following quote extracted from

the January 1991 issue of The Sword:

34

The Uniontown public school crisis was not born of contemporary

circumstances. It began a long time ago. It began when rigid residential

segregation - hence, all—black and all-white schools dominated the public

school map--was a part of the accepted city mores. It began when there was

a master-servant relationship--when the power of the superintendent of

schools was absolute. When the word came down from the central

administration it was the law. It was not negotiable. The field

commanders--the supervisors, principals and assistant pfincipals--canied

out the orders of the day and the teachers obeyed like puppets. It began

when poorly organized teachers were woefully underpaid, like many other

white-collar professionals and public servants, including policeman and

fireman. It began when there was strong taxpayer resistance to providing

additional revenue to meet the need for higher salaries to attract quality

personnel and to upgrade facilities and curricula (January, 1991).

From what has been shown so far, one may infer that Uniontown’s communities
were generally, critical of the school system and willing to gauge, accordingly, the
support they would provide to the schools. As a consequence, the school district and the
school personnel, including the Uniontown teachers, were historically forced to analyze
their weaknesses and fight for community support.

These inferences are important to this dissertation. They support the assertion
that teachers in Uniontown had to survive professionally in a hostile environment.

' Consequently, self-assessment of their weaknesses and the search for acceptable
solutions have always been found in most experienced teachers at Uniontown. Some
understanding of Uniontown's social milieu is important to reach a greater understanding
of the background in which the STP was placed: (1) the AFT program--representing a
specific kind of unionism stressing the concept of “profession as ownership” and (2) the

demographic changes leading to concentration of minorities--especiallyAfro-American

minorities--in Uniontown's urban areas.

W

The AFT program is a significant component of the social milieu in which the
STP was developed. Part of this program is a distinctive kind of unionism which, since

the onset of the Association in 1916, developed around the idea that teaching

35

professionals should have a strong sense of ownership the decision-making process in

schools. Even though the AFT ’s distinctiveness is sometimes played down its roots of
connection with the labor movement gives it a worthwhile and distinctive perception of
the teaching profession.

Prior to the early 19003, life in the U. 8. could be described in terms of a pastoral
tempo within which the teaching profession should be understood. Teachers’ lives could
be summarized in terms of isolation. According to Eaton (1975), isolation for both rural
and city teachers was a pervasive aspect observed in all persons who taught. The cause
of the isolation was twofold. As explained by Eaton, the first cause of teachers' isolation
was “separation from other adults and separation from both seediness and beauties of life
that give vitality” (p. 2—4). In other words, isolation was a consequence of teachers
spending most of their time "monitoring childish whims and in checking immature
behavior" (p. 2-4. As Eaton (1975) declared, by the end of the last century American,

“teachers were not allowed to mingle with people deemed socially

unacceptable, participate in political affairs, spend their money as they

chose, and in the case of the women teachers, not even allowed to fall in

love” (p. 24). He further explained that sometimes teachers “banded”

together but, when they did it, “it was usually at the bequest of a school

official with the objective of promoting social interests” (p. 2-4).

However, regarding teachers’ professional awareness, “these groups did not
become forums for talking about solutions to the pressing school problems” (Eaton,
1975, pp 2-4). In conclusion, to be a teacher meant isolation.

The life tempo in the US. was dramatically changed by phenomena such as
immigration, industrialization, urbanization, and unionization at the turn of the century.
One by one and as a whole, these phenomena made up the substratum for teachers to set
into motion a movement to organize themselves. The AFT is one example of this kind of

organization. It was founded in 1916 as a result of the gradual formation of various local

teachers’ organizations.

36

AFT leadership came mainly from Chicago and New York. In Chicago, for
instance, the main issue that helped teachers become involved in taking their organization
to a national level was the fight against the anti-union Loeb rule of the Chicago Board of
Education (Urban, 1982). One of the most distinctive characteristics of AFT none that
still holds true (The New York Times, Wednesday, July 6, l988)--was its affiliation,
since its onset, with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and, therefore, with
organized labor in the USA.

By May 9, 1916, The Chicago Teachers Federation; The Chicago

Federation of Men Teachers; The Chicago Federation of Women High

School Teachers; The Gary, Indiana, Teachers Federation; The Teachers

Union of the City of New York: The Oklahoma Teachers Federation; The

Scranton, Pennsylvania Teachers Association; and High School Teachers

Union of Washington DC, became the first eight locals and were duly

received by president Gompers into the American Federation of Labor

(AFL) as the American Federation of Teachers (Eaton, 1975, p. 15).

Even with the help of an already-organized labor institution (AFL), the task in
front of the newly born federation was enormous. It was to try to capitalize on the labor
effervescence of the early 1900s while, at the same time, attempting to shake up teachers’
norms of silence and timidity. To understand the dimensions of this task, one could
compare Bagley’s and Dewey’s views on this subject. William C. Bagley, from
Teachers College, was a prominent writer in educational administration. In the 1919
edition of his book, Classroom Management, he made a close association between
unquestioned obedience by teachers and their efficiency. Their resignation was the only
alternative left to teachers that could not yield such obedience (Bagley, 1919).

John Dewey, an important member of the AFT, shared with Bagley the same
academic environment of Teachers College (Eaton, 1975, p. 35). His statement about
what the behavior norm of teachers should be makes clear a significant gap between what

messages were given to administrators and to teachers regarding the understanding of

teachers’ participation:

37

We should have a body of self-respecting teachers and educators who will
see to it that their ideas and their experience in educational matters shall
really count in the community; and who, in order that these may count, will
identify themselves with the interests of the community; who will conceive
of themselves as citizens and as servants of the public, and not merely as
hired employees of a certain body of men. It is because I hope to see the
teaching body occupy that position of social leadership which it ought to
occupy, and which to our shame it must be said we have not occupied in the
past that I welcome every movement of this sort (Dewey, 1916, pp. 99-

10 1 ).

It is possible to assume that this gap originated within the widely radicalized
perspectives about teachers’ roles entertained at that time. Against positions such as the
one expressed by Bagley, the AFT would propose, with Dewey’s support, a leading role
for teachers in issues affecting school life and their work. This leading role would
address issues such as curricular offerings, quality of the teaching force, and schools’
organization. The following excerpts from a manifesto issued in New York in 1913,

calling teachers to organize themselves, show that these issues were a concern to the early

founders of the AFT.

To the teachers of New York City:

Believing that the time has arrived for founding an organization of teachers
on progressive lines, we, the undersigned teachers of the city of New York
issue this call to teachers and other citizens to organize an association which
shall have for its objectives improved working conditions for teachers and
better educational results for children.

Teachers should have a voice and vote in the determination of educational
policies: We advocate the adoption of a plan that will permit all teachers to
have a share in the adrrrinistration of their own schools. In no more
practical way could teachers prepare themselves for training children for
citizenship in democracy (Eaton, 1975, pp. 13-14).

As the AFT proposed an active role for teachers in defining the policy making
process affecting schools, it developed a kind of unionism that stressed the need for

teachers to become more and more the professionals of teaching. Thus, the concept of

38

professionalism has been key to AFT ’s unionism. The origins of this concept can be
traced back to the progressive education movement. Many educators who were part of
the early progressive group at some point expressed their dissatisfaction with the
progressive ideas. They started aligning themselves with a new program of ideas called
social reconstructionism. According to Baton (1975), there were significant differences
over unionism among the social reconstructionists. For instance, George Counts and
John L. Childs were active in the teachers union movement. But, Kilpatrick and
Newlon, although sympathetic, were skeptical of union affiliation. Because of the great
importance of Teachers College in shaping American education at that time, these
differences caused confrontation between members of the Teachers College faculty. A
pivotal issue in the confrontation was the concept of professionalism and the use of
tactics of the labor movement to organize teachers into a union. Those labor tactics were
not considered as adequate since teachers were taken as members of a profession, not as
workers.

AFT ’s officers were aware of that debate. The organization’s concept of
professionalism, then, has shown potential for three achievements:

(1) strategically, to prevent the organization from sliding into a "teachers as

workers" idea, which would not be widely accepted by many teachers; (2)

tactically, to keep a strong enough association with organized labor, as

practiced by AFL, to take advantage of the labor issues that were current in

the twenties; and (3) since the strategic and the tactical movements were not

clashing with each other, to keep the long term-goal of gaining increased

power for teachers as a social group.

This concept of professionalism served as an umbrella under which content
evolved within the AFT ’5 program. Professionalism covered, in the beginning, issues
regarding the improvement of working conditions or teachers’ welfare. When submitted
to collective bargaining, these issues would bring immediate benefits for teachers. This

can be seen in a study of the role of teacher organizations in making educational policy

(Rosenthal, 1969). The activities of nine teacher organizations in large American cities

39

were examined, four of them affiliated with AFT. The aim was to analyze how and why
teachers’ participation and relative power had developed in large cities, especially in the
first half of the 19603. The study indicates that in that period, issues related to
improvement of teachers’ working conditions were the main agenda. The main argument
in favor of such an agenda was that “a favorable resolution of matters involving working
conditions or economic welfare promises direct, immediate and personal benefits to
teachers” (p. 165). Other issues such as improvements in the quality of the teaching
force, the education of the underprivileged, curricula offerings or the way in which
schools were organized and managed were not given so much attention by teachers’
organizations. According to Rosenthal (1969), they were viewed by teachers
organizations as “mainly designed to serve the entire system and only indirectly promise
to help individual teachers” (p. 165). Teachers organizations did not devote too much
energy to such matters.

Since then, the comprehensiveness of the concept of professionalism has
undergone significant change. It has moved from the “bread and butter” issues, related to
the working conditions and welfare of teachers, toward a longer-term goal of
restructuring schools. Therefore, improving the quality of teaching, education of the
underprivileged, and method of school management became issues in the teachers’
organizations. At the national level, this change was signaled to AFT locals by its
national president.

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, offers the following analysis of this new
phase.

Times have changed, and with them Mr. Shanker. The American

Federation of Teachers president--once a national symbol of militant

unionism — is widely praised as a respected educational leader who’s

visions of American school reform have shaken up the status quo. His

major theme is the need to “professionalize” teaching, to make it more like

doctoring or lawyering. 'Public education in America today is perhaps at

the same place the auto and steel industries were 15 years ago,‘ he says.
'To preserve our industry we can’t just support the status quo or rnrnor

4O

cosmetic changes. We can’t just put new tailfins on. We’ve got to build a
new car' (The Wall Street Journal, November, 24, 1987, p. 66).

Uniontown’s AFT Local has seen the STP as a program that fits this new
perception of professionalism, one that is connected with a major and concerted effort at
restructuring schools. This is what may be inferred from the following excerpt of a letter
from the president of the AFT ’3 local to MU, expressing support for the STP.

The support teacher concept fits perfectly with our career ladder and other

peer review processes. The information we are acquiring and the

techniques we are perfecting certainly should be useful to the nations’

school reform efforts (Letter to the Research Institute’s director on May 27,

1988).

This statement was remarkably consistent with the words of Albert Shanker,
President of the AFT, taken from a speech given in 1988 and reported in the New York
Times, The contention of the speech is that the recent wave of educational reform has
bypassed 80% of the student population. This means that the changes implemented have
addressed the needs of only a small number of that population:

Mr. Shanker proposed during his speech that small groups of teachers

should be allowed to design and run customized curriculum in schools.

Parents should have an option of enrolling their children in these programs.

Further he defended that these programs should involve students of a

variety of backgrounds and learning skills. He also mentioned in the speech

that he would ask AFT ’s locals to consider developing plans for such

programs. (The New York Times, April lst, 1988)

Thus, according to the letter from the president of the AFT Local at Uniontown,
the STP fit the propositions of this statement. It is also worthwhile to note that, by
advocating the pursuit of reforms with a wider time horizon, the AFT was actually
reinforcing its philosophy of fighting for a concept of professionalism that could lead to

increased autonomy for teachers. At the local level, however, not all teachers, even

among AFT membership, understood that philosophy. As a result, implementing this

41

kind of restructuring faced contradictory reactions, as will be shown in the next chapter.

We!!!

Another significant aspect of the social milieu in which the STP was developed is
the demographic change occurring in Uniontown. As mentioned earlier, a tourist guide
published in Uniontown in the 1860’s, mentioned that minorities living in Uniontown
were gradually concentrating within the urban areas. The same source indicated that the
response of the affluent groups was to move into suburban areas. I will refer to this
phenomenon as one of changing demography and will address some of its implications
for my study of teachers’ participation.

A comprehensive study of the effects of changing demography upon the mission
of a Catholic school was conducted in Australia (Angus, 1986). The school started its
activities when a group of Irish priests, referred to in the study as Christian Brothers,
came to Australia with the clear mission of working with poor Irish communities. As
time passed, those communities evolved gradually into second and third generations of
affluent means. The upgrading of living standards of that community brought
contradictory reactions among the school’s personnel, especially the teachers. Even
though the upgrading could be attributed to the action of the school to a certain extent,
teachers were unsure about their proper role. Some claimed that the school did not have a
mission anymore, for its purpose was not to serve the affluent community. This position
was supported by what was perceived as a clash between the values being conveyed by
the school and those of the attending students. However, those affluent groups that had
emerged from poor families of earlier years were still willing to have their children in the
same “good” school they once had, and which they regarded as an important element in
their social promotion. For this reason, some teachers and administrators would claim
that the school had only to adjust to its new clientele, and, therefore, to change its

mission.

42

Angus’ (1986) study describesihe effects of changing demography on the
mission of a school and on the professional responsibility understood by teachers, in a
given historical and social moment. Also, the study shows how teachers may become
confused and disturbed by the mismatch between their perceived mission and the
expectations of the families and students served by the school. Some participants in
Angus’ (1986) study were unsure about their social role as educators in the changing
social environment they faced.

In Angus (1986) study the question of changing demography is addressed in a
context of success. What threw the teachers into confusion as to how to understand their
mission was the progress toward affluence made by the poor social groups of other
times. Having their minds set to deal with poor communities, the teachers were uncertain
about what to do with students coming from affluent communities.

In Uniontown, a similar phenomenon is occurring, although with different
historical and ideological configurations. The changing demography is displayed in the
movement of minority groups into the urban areas, resulting in a movement of affluent
groups to suburban areas. Schools once attended by affluent groups became populated
by an increasing number of minority groups. I would like to address this issue of
changing demography from a larger perspective, and identify ways in which the situation
in Uniontown seems to be similar.

As seen in the beginning of this chapter, the public school system in Uniontown
evolved from a design that was not originally conceived with minority groups in mind.
In this way, Uniontown seems to mirror a similar national pattern of schooling in places
with demographic concentration of minorities. Historically, minority groups were not
adequately considered by the public school system since it was mainly designed to
provide schooling for affluent groups. For instance, when the civil rights movement
brought equal rights for minorities, one of the major gains was equal access to schooling.

As pointed out by Aronowitz (1981), minority groups in the civil rights movement fought

43

for equal access to schooling because they saw school as the main locus of struggle for
effective social change. The price they had to pay was gaining access to schools that
were not used to considering their cultural heritage.

More recent studies have demonstrated the persistence of this problem. For
instance, what placesAfro-American students at risk is a conflict between a school’s
beliefs and its practices. This is characterized, on the classroom level, by a lack of
understanding ofAfro-American student cultural values, norms, styles, and language
(Irvine, 1990). It is also important to take into account the pervasiveness of the crossing
over of social mobility and race as an overall aspect of changing demography in some
instances. Despite concrete steps towards racial integration in the U. S. schools, some
scholars perceive integration more as an icon within persistent racism (Maraniss, 1990).

However, in this dissertation, the phenomenon of changing demography is
addressed because of its effects on teachers’ participation. Both studies, the one by
Angus (1986) and the one by Irvine (1990), support the conclusion that changing
demography can have a disturbing effect upon teachers. They may experience difficulty
in defining what to do, both in terms of self-initiated changes and in those areas in which
their participation is invited.

It is clear that Science and Mathematics teachers in Uniontown were affected by
this changing demography. In the schools I observed, this issue came into focus on
occasions when teachers’, frustrated with their teaching results, blamed the inability of
students to cope with the school’s demands. Some of the participants in the STP
recognized this blame resulted from their lack of a clear understanding of their mission
and role. Many of the participant teachers in this study recognized their awareness of

these aspects as a result of their engagement in the STP.

44

Research Setting and Sites

The setting for this research was the STP. It was first conceived by a task force
jointly organized by a state-level education association, not affiliated with the AFT and a
funded Research Center of MU. The program was aimed at improving mathematics and
science teaching in middle/junior high schools.

The basic assumption of the task force was that grass roots support in school
buildings is essential to achieve desired improvements in science and mathematics
teaching. The program defined as its goal the establishment of a new educational role in
schools, namely, “the support teacher role.” This goal was to be reached through
restructuring science and mathematics departments. To accomplish this goal, three basic
strategic actions were proposed, teachers would: (1) receive additional training, (2) have
released time to try and improve their own teaching, and (3) build up a new pattern of
relationship with their Peer Teachers while trying to establish themselves as support
teachers in their own buildings.

The propositions of the program became known to officials of the AFT, with
whom the implementation was initiated in the summer of 1987. As seen before, AFT ’s
perspective on professionalism was an important contextual element for the STP. As a
union, the AFT was ready to make more long-term and far-reaching attempts at the
professional development of teaching, taking teachers as the main agents of change. AFT
helped to implement the program in two ways by: (1) finding a school district that
already had a history of good relationships with its local union and (2) getting teachers
willing to volunteer to participate in the program. The program was set into motion in
1988, when the Science and Mathematics departments in each one of the four pilot
schools agreed to participate in the program. This was followed by identification and
selection of a science teacher and mathematics teacher in each school to act as Support

Teachers.

45

The additional training proposed by the program began immediately after teachers
agreed to participate. A team from MU/Research Center went to Uniontown and
provided the teachers with 18 days of training. This was the beginning of the
relationship between the groups referred to in Chapter H as “researchers” and “teachers.”
Researchers and teachers then met once every month for two full consecutive days of
work. The agreed-upon aim of the meetings was training the prospective Support
Teachers. The Support Teachers were trying to develop skills in conducting meetings
and in observing and giving feedback on their teaching, while getting acquainted with the
most recent research on learning and teaching Science and Mathematics. They dedicated
a fair amount of time to reading and discussing issues regarding constructivist approaches
and instructional strategies such as group work, student writing, concept mapping and
student questioning techniques. They also spent time discussing issues related to the
intellectual climate in their buildings and their future as support teachers. Those meetings
began February 1988 and continued up to December 1988 As I was a participant
observer in those meetings they constituted one of the settings for this dissertation.

In the Summer of 1988, the teachers participated in an intensive, residential
training program on the MU campus. This part of their training is usually referred to as
the Summer Program; it had a tremendous impact on their preparation for the Support
Teacher role.

In September 1988 the teachers started piloting their support teacher role. They
were supposed to dedicate half of their time to teaching and half to initiating the support
role. In each building, the two Support Teachers organized a resource room where they
had journals and teaching resources available. The resource room also served as the
Support Teachers’ office. In the same place, they would hold meetings with individual
science and mathematics teachers and with groups. Starting in December 1988, I had the

opportunity to do full-time observation of two Support Teachers during three consecutive

46

weeks. On those occasions, Their teaching, their other non-teaching roles and their work
with Peer Teachers in the resource room became important settings for gathering data.

After the initial training, the research team provided the support teachers with
continued training and technical assistance. Technical assistance and training include the
following topics:

(1) teachers’ professional competence;

(2) cooperative versus competitive and individualistic learning both
in science and in mathematics;

(3) children’s mathematical thinking and their ways of problem
solving and comprehension;

(4) understanding children's reasoning and concepts in science;

(5) teachers’ practices, knowledge, and beliefs;

(6) meaningful learning;

(7) the constructivist approach;

(8) characteristics of exemplary science and math teachers;

(9) strategies teachers could use for coping with hostile-aggressive
students; and

(10) teaching styles.

Although this list of topics is not complete, it provides an idea of the training
assistance offered to the teachers. The researchers also assisted the teachers in
developing techniques to observe both students and other teachers in science and
mathematics classes.

From Fall 1988 until Spring 1991, the project staff spent two full days each
month visiting the Support Teachers. The visits usually began with a classroom
observation of the Support Teachers doing their teaching. Most of the times these were
preplanned visits. The teachers received after-the-event feedback based on this

observation. In the language of the researchers, this feedback was described as “working

47

at Support Teachers elbows.” The next morning all Support Teachers convened in the
school boardroom to have a whole day meeting, usually referred to as a seminar. During
these seminars, they discussed both theoretical and practical issues derived from events
that happened the previous day. These seminars became another important setting for
my data collection.

The researchers always traveled to Uniontown by auto. During the trips to and
from Uniontown, the project staff would discuss many issues about their relationship
with the Support Teachers, their Peer Teachers, and other actors in the STP, such as the
district and the union personnel. Since I lacked funds to travel on my own to the research
site, I generally rode to Uniontown with the project staff members. Although it was not
possible to do any formal data collection because of the intimacy of the conversations that
occurred, these trips became an important setting in which to learn about the STP.

In the Summer of 1990, the STP offered teachers and their Peer Teachers a
training program that became known as Professional Development Seminars.
Participation in these seminars was negotiated in a two-day meeting at MU. Following
that, the project staff traveled monthly to Uniontown and conducted a three-hour seminar.
The meeting at MU and the seminars in Uniontown were also settings where I collected

data for this dissertation.

Su f at Colle ted

For nearly two years, I followed the development of the STP in the settings

mentioned earlier. The data I collected are summarized below.

(1) Regular meetings with the eight Support Teachers (mathematics and
science) were held by the project staff. This amounted to two, full,
consecutive working days, per month of technical assistance given during
the first year. Thereafter, the meetings were scheduled once a month. Most
of these meetings were audiotaped and documented by notes taken by one
or more of the participants. Also, in almost all of the meetings artifacts
were collected. For these meetings, there are around 150 audiotapes and
several different "documents" that tell the story of how the project was
developed.

48

(2) As part of their expected roles, Support Teachers observed classes,
gave feedback to their peers, and conducted meetings with them. Support
Teachers also kept a log book of their main activities during that period.
They have been doing this since the start of the 1988-89 school year. This
generated one logbook from each of the eight Support Teachers.

(3) Starting in December 1988, I became part of a group of four external
observers who conducted intensive observations of the Support Teachers. I
did three weeks of observations or “shadowing,” as it was called, of two of
the Support Teachers. These observations totaled almost 80 hours of direct
contact with the teachers. All the observations were audiotaped. I also did
systematic note-taking during these meetings and took pictures of these two
Support Teachers’ workplace. My intention in using these techniques was
to record as much as possible the Support Teachers' own perspectives.

(4) Starting in August 1990, MU held a series of Professional
Development Seminars for the Support Teachers and their peers. On one
day, Support Teachers and their peers convened for the Seminar. The next
day, the Support Teachers met to receive technical assistance as part of the
project. I was a participant observer of these seminars and meetings until
April 1991. This part of data collection generated around 90 hours of
audiotaped information as well as hundreds of pages of field notes.

(5) In 1990, one of the peer teachers received a Distinguished Visiting
Practitioner award and spent six months at MU to become more acquainted
with research in science education. During his visit, I met with him on a
weekly basis to discuss his work. I conducted three extensive interviews
with him during his visit.

(6) I have maintained regular contact and conducted interviews with

three peer teachers who were regarded as “resistant” to the Support
Teachers, to better understand their perspective of the project.

Research Methods

[otommtjve Research in the 8mm Sciences and in
S . E l .

I conducted the research reported in this dissertation using a qualitative and
interpretive approach. There has been an increase in the use of qualitative data and
interpretive methods in current social science research, as well as in science education
research. Within science education, qualitative and interpretive approaches are still
incipient. Studies published in the last decade range from the tentative to the more

sophisticated use of this approach. In the second category are the studies by Atkinson &

49

Delamont (1977) and Contreras & Gallagher (1988). As a matter of fact, it was only
recently (Gallagher, 1991) that the first effort was made to organize literature using
interpretive approaches in science education in the USA.

This recent growing concern with qualitative approaches, rooted in seasoned
research traditions such as anthropology and sociology, is sometimes referred to as a sort
of re-emergence of the socio-anthropologic traditions (Pfaffenberger, 1988; Bogdan &
Taylor, 1975). That is, despite the indisputable dominance of quantitative methods in
social science research, especially after World War II, qualitative methods are receiving
more and more attention. It is not a new fashion, but a search for sound epistemological
grounds that explains this re-emergence. Van Maanen (1982) believed the current use of
qualitative methods was the result of: (1) a great deal of disenchantment with the results
of quantitative studies; (2) the growing visibility of interpretive methods, especially those
being used in fieldwork ethnography; and (3) a more concerted effort to use an
epistemological base for social research that is not based upon positivist assumptions
(Van Maanen, 1982).

I utilized the following qualitative, interpretive research principles to conduct the
research reported here.

(1) The investigator is an important instrument in both the collection and

analysis of data (McCraken, 1988). While quantitative researchers can

sometimes delegate the analysis of their data, qualitative researchers cannot,

because interpretation is the essence of qualitative analysis. Thus,

qualitative researchers express their own instrumentality by interpreting the

research data.

(2) To perform their interpretive capacity properly, qualitative researchers
have to maintain constant contact with their data.

(3) Qualitative investigators frequently need to make sense out of
contradictions. One way to do this is by identifying breakdowns in social
interactions and seeking to understand them. This involves a search for
coherence which requires successive and interwoven interpretations (Agar,
1986).

(4) Contrary to their quantitative counterparts, qualitative researchers are
not seeking to reduce human life to a set of analyzable variables. Rather,

50

they strive to understand the process of interpretation by which new

definitions become part of a human group’s set of stable meanings (Blumer,

1969). They need, therefore, to examine many small units of data in

different contexts.

(5) Qualitative researchers are constantly coding and re-coding data to

decide whether these support working hypotheses. This process is actually

a more sophisticated interpretation using several analytical decisions. It has

to be performed by the researcher because he/she is the main source of the

necessary judgments himself. Also, during this process, data are organized

in a variety of structures that sometimes overlap or even contradict each

other (Bogdan & Taylor, 1975).

During my research, I made an effort to harmonize the principles discussed above
with the use of microcomputers to handle the qualitative data I accumulated. In doing so,
I developed a computerized system to handle qualitative data that I named the Monteiro
Data Organizer (MDO). My concern in using a microcomputer to handle data led me to
draw considerable input from Pfaffenberger (1988). He analyzed the nature of qualitative
research to identify possible contributions that computers might make to performing data
storage, retrieval and analysis.

In the following section I will present the system I designed. Additionally I will

demonstrate that using a microcomputer system is not inconsistent with the interpretation

performed by qualitative researchers.

0 ' Dtar 'ze T i re'vRe h

The Role of Interpretation in Qualitative Data Analysis

The literature cited above suggests that interpretation is a key element in
successful, qualitative data analysis. When researchers are interpreting, they have flashes
of insights concerning the potential relevance of different pieces of their data. To keep
track of these insights, they need some sort of data organization to enable them to link
and associate those different pieces of data. As I experienced the need to organize those
insights simultaneously, quickly, and accurately, I decided to make use of a

microcomputer.

51

I stated elsewhere (Monteiro, 1991) that microcomputer technologies boomed at
precisely the same time qualitative research was re-emerged. However, I
microcomputers had negligible effects on qualitative research, when compared with their
effects on quantitative research. One of the probable reasons for this is the association
between computer technologies and the handling of large, repetitive calculations. Since
the invention of the microprocessor chip, microcomputer technologies have improved in
terms of expansion of memory, power, speed, optical display, and analogic/digital.
conversion of sound and images (Calhoun, 1981). Hence, the tremendous development
of microcomputer technologies has progressed beyond the capability of just handling
large calculations. Still, until just recently quantitative, not qualitative, researchers have
taken advantage of microcomputers’ availability. The use of quantitative methods in the
social sciences, for instance, was largely influenced by the feasibility of manipulating
large amounts of information provided by computers. Microcomputers disseminated that
feasibility among researchers by breaking the dependency on hard-to-access, mainframe
computers. As a result, a close association between microcomputers and quantitative
research methods developed.

The close association between microcomputers and causal explanations with
quantitative support (Pfaffenberger, 1988) had a negative effect upon qualitative
researchers’ prospects for using microcomputers. That is, qualitative researchers
developed a relative disdain and skepticism towards quantitative methods (Kirk, 1981)
and their symbols, including the microcomputer. Until recent years, qualitative
researchers’ rejection of computer technology was consistent with: ( 1) their effort in
building a non-positivist base for social research and (2) the computational orientation of
the available technology. However, these reasons are no longer significant. First,
qualitative methods are well-accepted. Second, computer technology can no longer be
associated with large calculations only. Therefore, a gap seems to exist in the current

understanding and use of microcomputer technologies by qualitative researchers.

52

One of the contributions of this dissertation is an attempt to bridge this gap by
demonstrating the use of a microcomputer for organizing and analyzing the research data.
In order to analyze the data gathered, I developed a data organizer, the MDO. MDO was
developed as an application of Hypercard, using a Macintosh microcomputer.

Developed in 1987 (Nielsen, 1990), Hypercard, presents a complete cycle of
hypertext’s possibilities used in developing MDO. A simple way to describe a Hypertext
is to say that it is a set of organized information. In other words, it consists of a number
of pieces of information (text, sound, still images) linked with each other. Each piece
may be considered as a unit of information. Technically, in a Hypertext, existing pieces
of information are electronically organized as nodes connected by pointers called links.
The size of the nodes and the number of links between them may vary with great
flexibility. This gives rise to a web of relationships, permitting the user to go anywhere
within his/her research database, “traveling” with great freedom from one piece of
information to another (Conklin, 1988; Goodman, 1987; Nielsen, 1990; Pfaffemberger,
1988).

Qualitative researchers were using computers before Hypercard made possible the
actualization of Hypertext’s potential. Software such as “ASKSAM” (Jacobs & Aron,
1987) and “ETHNOGRAPH” (Pfaffenberger, 1988) are some examples. However,
three features make the Hypertext environment more appealing to qualitative researchers.
First, it allows researchers to construct connections among different kinds of data.
Second, it gives researchers the capability of handling information in sound formats.

Third, it gives researchers the freedom to interact with the data they seek to interpret.

Major Components of the Monteiro Data Organizer
In developing MDO, I considered: ( 1) requirements of qualitative methods, as

previously indicated; (2) hardware and software availability; (3) the possibility of MDO

53

being used by an individual or by a research group; and (4) the need to handle
information in written, graphic and sound formats.

The system currently uses: (1) a Macintosh ch microcomputer with 100 MB
hard drive and 6 MB RAM; (2) a Microtech cartridge drive using 45 MB removable
media; (3) a Mac Recorder; and 4) a Apple Scanner.

MDO is a Hypercard application, supported by word processing and graphic
software. It is structured in interconnected stacks that hold the different kinds of

information being gathered. These stacks are described below:

(1) Raw field notes can be stored in graphically-digitized format, using a
scanner. They can also be entered in conventional word processing fashion
The emphasis on the graphic format is the preservation of note-taking
originality, when that is important. For instance, orientation of text in note-
taking, drawings, graphs, and other rather personal ways of note taking are
powerful tools of recall that would be lost when typed. Expanded field
notes can be produced without destroying the original raw notes.

(2) Documents collected during the research process are stored in two ways.
First, they are organized in an event—oriented information card. This stack
of documents works as a kind of catalog for existing documents. However,
the event or events to which the document is related are the main focus.
Referents are established to ease the way towards the search and
codification of data. Second, the document may be stored in a digitized
format, using a scanner, in order to be electronically accessed.

(3) Audio-recorded information is first organized into a catalog and also
oriented towards events. A set of referents is constructed to ease the
process of both coding and locating relevant material. Further, segments of
sounds can be digitized for purposes of intrinsic analysis (regarding the
content of the segment itself) or extrinsic analysis (regarding the comparison
of different segments of sound). Segments of sound can also be digitized to
provide context to transcripts, notes, documents, reflections, hypotheses, or
assertions.

(4) Segments of sound may be transcribed and stored to be analyzed as a
written piece, or to be compared with the corresponding sound segment.

Putting text and its corresponding sound side by side provides for a more
contextualized analysis of the events they represent.

(5) Analytical, methodological, and reflective memos are stored in other
stacks which have been developed as supportive tools for analysis. Those
memos are important components of the process of interpretation that
happens during all the phases of qualitative research. Their interconnection
with the other stacks permits quick detouring into them, to enter or verify

54

data. This is useful when the researcher needs to add comments about

insights resulting from the analysis of specific pieces of data.

From a technical perspective, it is important to remember that the major limitation
of the system is related to managing sound. Sounds, such as the ones coming from
audio-recorded interviews, can be digitized and stored by using the MacRecorder
hardware and software. However, storage of audio information consumes a large
amount of memory space. For instance, a three and a half minute segment of sound will
require about 1.1 megabytes of memory to be digitized with reasonable sound quality.
The effect of this limitation should be made clear by the following information.
Managing strips of sound longer than three and a half minutes will take a computer with
four megabytes of RAM memory to its limits. The implication of this limitation is that a
dramatic constraint is placed on the definition of units of sound for analytical purposes.
Of course, the kind of limitation described before can be lifted. However, this can only
be done by imposing an increase in the cost of hardware. This point must be considered
since the advantage of being able to digitize segments of sound will be more apparent
when doing comparative analysis of different segments by having two or more pieces of
sound loaded at the same time. In that case, a larger RAM memory may be needed in
order to compare and contrast multiple segments of sound.

As experts keep working on ways to compress digitized sound information,
researchers willing to use microcomputers as a tool may have more hope of having better

support for their work.

CHAPTER IV

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Entering the Field

During my participation as an independent observer in the Support Teacher
Program (STP), I became interested in further study teachers’ participation in efforts to
restructure their working environment.

In December 1988, I was hired to do an “independent observation” of two
support teachers participating in the STP. The job was an interesting challenge to me. I
had expertise in training science teachers constructed within a different cultural
background, in Brazilian context. In addition to being literally a stranger, because of my
foreign nationality, I was also a complete stranger, to the STP. Yet, the STP directors
were interested in having an autonomous, independent observation of changes effected
by the program. The STP directors viewed my graduate training in fieldwork research
methods and my sociological perspective as important assets. Additionally, my
unfamiliarity with the STP was considered a positive element in the independent
observation required.

The observation I performed was negotiated with the participating teachers prior

to the start of my observation. Thus, my entrance was less problematic because the

55

56

teachers were already part of an established project. Later, I indicated my interest in
studying their participation in the program as the basis for this dissertation. By that time,
I was already considered by the teachers as a regular, accepted visitor to the settings and
sites I wished to research.

My task during the independent observation was to closely follow the daily work
of one Science and one Mathematics teacher. I observed and documented their activities
while they performed both their support and regular teaching roles. I conducted my
observation in three different weeks. It entailed whole-day, constant companionship
between me as observer and the two teachers. Due to this long companionship, the
process was called “shadowing.” I came to be known within the group as “Shadow,”
This nickname was applied to me, with a certain touch of humor, on occasions when I
was introduced to other people in the building.

This shadowing experience had many similarities with those described by
qualitative researchers doing long-term observation in school settings, and, particularly,
the following one by Wolcott (1973), where the term “shadow” was used for the first
time.

Before extending my invitation to Ed to participate in the study I reviewed

the kinds of activities I intended to pursue with him as a “shadow”:

Maintaining a constant written record of what I observed in behavior and

conversations; attending formal and informal meetings and conferences;

accompanying him on school business away from the building as well as
occasionally accompanying him in non-school settings; interviewing

“everybody”; and, with his permission, sifting through notes, records and

files (p. 3).

The observation I performed was not restricted to the two teachers. They had to
interact with their Peer Teachers in their department and in the building. In addition, they
had to attend meetings with their Peer Teachers and other support teachers who were

being trained in other buildings. I followed them as a “shadow” to those meetings.

During that time, I became acquainted with all of the teachers participating in the STP.

57

As a result of this, I was involved with those teachers in a process that could be described
as a “focused interaction” or “encounter.” According to Goffman’s (1981)
conceptualization, a focused interaction:

...occurs when people effectively agree to sustain for a time a single focus

of cognitive and visual attention, as in a conversation, a board game, or a

joint task sustained by a close face-to-face circle of contributors. . . . I call

the natural unit of social organization in which focused interaction occurs a

focused gathering, or an encounter, or a situated activity system (p. 7).

After some time in the field, I perceived that, in order to understand the changes
the teachers were reporting, I should make an in-depth investigation of two questions.
First, since many teachers were accepting the proposals of the STP and changing their
practice accordingly, what was the process by which those changes were taking place?
Second, what was the nature of the resistance of the small number of teachers said to be
resisting the STP proposals? As my observations progressed, I became convinced that
both the teachers who were accepting and those who were resisting were using their
acceptance or their resistance to probe their own experience. As a result of this, they
were participating in the implementation of the STP. I decided then to pursue this
question beyond the more evident labels of “traditional” and “changed” teacher. Thus the
focus of my dissertation became teachers’ participation in their changing workplace.

As I stated in Chapter I, participation is defined here as more comprehensive than
taking part in something. Rather, participation means that teachers may play a role in
determining both the shape and the ethos of the educational enterprise set into motion in
school. Therefore, it became important to understand how those teachers involved in an
attempt to restructure their working environment participate in that effort.

Having decided to study teachers’ participation, I observed a group of four
science and four mathematics teachers in the STP. I will refer to those teachers as
Support Teachers. I also observed four other teachers, colleagues of the Support

Teachers, in two different buildings. I will refer to them as Peer Teachers.

58

Using interpretive research methods, I studied them as they participated in the
restructuring of their workplace and incorporated a new professional role, that of Support
Teachers.

An Outline of the Findings

Next, I will outline some of the more salient findings in this research and present
the interpretive framework I used. This outline is intended to offer a summary before a
more detailed examination of data, which is the core of this chapter. The interpretive
framework facilitates connections between theoretical underpinnings and the findings.
Thus, the purpose of this outline is to offer readers an overview of the findings.

In this study, both support and Peer Teachers were experienced, seasoned
teachers. A number of them described themselves as “pretty traditional teachers.” The
teachers were working in an environment being effected by two significant social
elements: (1) the professionalism of teachers as pursued by AFT and (2) the demographic
changes responsible for the increasing concentration of minorities within urban areas.
The interplay between these two elements affected the teachers I studied. In varying
degrees, these circumstances exposed the inadequacy of their teaching expertise,
especially when dealing with students coming from minority groups. Prior to the STP,
one constant complaint teachers discussed in lounge conversation was that students could
not learn what the school was offering. The teachers were experiencing successive
realization of the limits of their expertise, both in terms of their ability to solve their
teaching problems and in terms of what they were lacking.

Findings indicate that participant teachers incorporated the new role of support
teaching in their working environment during a process that included both accepting and
resisting the STP program’s proposals. The findings also indicate that teachers’ .
traditional character was shaken by the external social components mentioned above (i.e.,

changing demography and AFT ’s professionalism). On the one hand, these elements

59

were out of the teachers’ control. On the other hand, both elements were happening in a
highly unionized town where teachers’ involvement in decision making was appreciated.

Teachers were already wondering that traditional teaching was not working
anymore. However, they usually blamed it on the students’ inability to learn. Most of
teachers were perceiving the mismatch between teachers’ past experience and the needs of
the new kinds of students. This combination of elements was producing contradictions
in teachers’ behavior prior to the arrival of the STP. As a matter of fact, most of the
teachers who first began the program indicated that dedicating their time to the STP was
due to their dissatisfaction with the results they were achieving with their existing
expertise.

The STP arrived when some of the teachers I studied were already deeply
frustrated with their traditional ways of teaching. Based on the conceptual framework in
Chapter 11, one could say that those teachers were experiencing a latent crisis. That is,
for these teachers their previous experiences was not working, and new experiences that
could improve ability to cope was not yet in place.

Such contradictions are inherent in an established critical situation. Those
contradictions forced most of the teachers to examine their own experience in search of a
more comfortable way of handling their professional life. This happened within the
realm of the STP. However, the teachers whom I studied still approached the proposals
oscillating between belief and skepticism.

During the training period, the STP directors encouraged teachers to pursue their
search for new grounds for their expertise. Within this process, they associated their
expertise with the authority of the project staff to whom they assigned an advanced
status, as compared to them, in terms of research-based knowledge. As the program
evolved, and they had an opportunity to revise their expertise, they became more able to

impart their own expertise --strengthened by the project proposals-- to their Peer

60

The program provided them with an appropriate and legitimate way to pursue that search
without having to face responsibilities for eventual failures. However, not all of the
teachers performed the examination of their experience in the same fashion. Some
teachers followed an approach of acceptance as described before, while others took a
resistant stance regarding the STP’s proposals. As a result of their specific ways of
participating, each teacher’s retrospective assessment became the starting point for
individual transformations. In both approaches, I found examples of teachers being

confronted with the inadequacy of their teaching practice within the environment enabled

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by the STP program.
confrontation with
inadequacies of
one's way of
teaching
4
: acceptance E
I / unencum-
l-——) resistance a
L
A “
i . , E F“ L52
beltevrng g
in phase = cementing / f nucleon": change
one each other being skeptical
t AFT's professionalism A
changing demographg I I
experienced =
- seasoned A 7
5; traditional
5 teachers
it

 

out of phase = contradicting
one each other

1 iIIIIIIIIIIIII

 

 

' --—---—-‘
-----------

Q ongoing process

 

 

 

 

Believingi being skeptical as well as acceptance
and resistance are taken as ideal mes

 

Figure 2. Interpretative Framework

 

61

In this chapter, I will expand on these research findings. Figure 2 presents an

interpretive framework to enable the reader to see the connections between the theoretical

framework presented in Chapter II and the findings reported in this chapter.

Figures 1 (on page 30) and 2 correspond to one another. Figures 1 illustrate ideal

types at a conceptual level while Figure 2 the provides an application to my study on

teachers' participation.

The following are relationships between pictures one and two

Figure 1
Concept Level

social character

existing patterns of individual
character

internal energy and drive to
participate

interactions, negotiations and
internalization of meanings

structural alterations become
critical to sustain structure's
identity

crisis

change

Figure 2
Study Level

structured around AFT 's concept of professionalism
and Uniontown's changing demography

teacher's individual character is shaped in terms of
experienced, seasoned teachers viewing themselves as
traditional teachers.

internal energy and drive to participate comes from
tension between believing and being skeptical.

the process of interaction evolves around negotiation
of meanings in which the teacher sometimes adopts a
posture of acceptance, sometimes resistance and, at
other times, oscilates between them.

teachers' professional identity was shaken when they
were confronted with inadequacy of their current way
of teaching.

teachers were in a crisis stage when they found out that
students were having misconceptions resulting from
their teaching.

change resulting from crisis is an ongoing and lengthy
process

62

The Support Teacher Program: An Insider’s View

This chapter presents segments of interactions transcribed from tape—recorded

material. The following are the transcription symbols that may be found within the text:

(( )) Contextual notes

( ) Unintelligible utterance(s)

(pause) Long pause between utterances
Short Pause within an utterance

[ ] Simultaneous utterance(s) by two or more
speakers
[ Utterance by one speaker interrupted by

an utterance from another speaker
Prolongation within an utterance
. . Long prolongation within an utterance
// part of the original narrative is omitted

To describe the STP I will rely on Mr. Kevin’s account. On several different
occasions, the Support Teachers gave me accounts of what happened in the very first
meeting when teachers and researchers were together discussing the STP. I chose this
particular account because it represents what the Support Teachers said to me on different
occasions. Also, I chose it because Mr. Kevin’s narrative put the program into an
historical perspective that helped me to understand it more from the teachers’ point of
view.

Although the narrative I will present next is a continuous and integrated piece of
communication, I have segmented it. I have done this so as to introduce before each
segment both assertions and remarks I found to be helpful in the interpretive process.

The teachers in Uniontown perceived the AFT local as the initiator of the whole
process. This can be seen in the following segment of the narrative. In truth, the
program was made possible by long-term cooperation already existing between the union
and the school board.

Ah--my recollection is that this full event started in the Fall of 1987. And,

what happened was that the director of math called a meeting of the
department chairman of the junior high schools. And at this meeting the

63

President of the Federation of Teachers ((refening to the president of the
local of AFT )) was there and wanted to say some things to the people of the
school. And what he said to us was that he was interested 1n a program
whereby teachers could share ideas and // novel ways of teaching certain
mathematics or science concepts.

The teachers I observed were pretty much aware of the problems affecting science
and mathematics and which required an effort to restructure teaching. All of them were
experienced teachers and some of them were currently department heads. Their account
of those problems may be summarized by what this teacher described as “kids turning off
or shutting down” science and mathematics as they moved on to the higher levels of
schooling:

This all stemmed, I guess, from the basis that both math education and

science education were not in the kind of condition that they should be in.

That there should be an improvement. What was happening was when the

kids, the students, go to the high school they are somewhat turning off or

shutting down, and not taking as much math and science as we would seem

to need in this technological age.

The next segment of the narrative demonstrates that the AFT Local considered
teachers' expertise to be “good” and worthwhile enough to be shared and disseminated.

So he ((the AFT Local President» proposed that there are some quality

teachers in the school system , teachers that have been around for a long

time, and he was going to retire in a very short time and he was wanting to

find out what made this teacher a good teacher. And, what were some of

the ways in which he taught math that made him a good teacher. And ah--

somehow he was using the idea that there was no vehicle to share ideas, and

share ways of teaching.
The participant teachers consistently perceived the STP as: (1) a result of an
initiative by the AFT and its local in Uniontown, and (2) a joint venture between AFT and
MU. I observed that the board's role was rarely mentioned. In addition, I noticed that

the support teacher's role was understood as something that evolved with the unfolding

of the project.

64

And-so--what he was doing was asking us to think about a program that
was brought to his attention by the American Federation of Teachers from
the MU/Research Center. // he kind of justutold us in this little brief idea //
what he thought that program might be about. And what he did was he set
up a meeting for people from MU to come down to Uniontown and make a
presentation to us. Andl/at that time , at the meeting at the Board, that
included the people of MU, the program was explained a little more in detail
as to what the // program would be. At that time they said that they wanted
a pilot program for a Support Teacher // the Support Teacher would be a
half classroom teaching teacher and a half other teacher. And that other
teacher was not really exactly spelled out verbatim as to what the other half
would be. But they basically knew that there would be a three class-period
teaching day and a three-class-day doing something else. And I don’t know
if any of us really understood what we were going to be doing for the other
time.

The program managers considered all members of the science and mathematics
departments to be prospective participants. The department heads were asked to reach a
consensus about whether or not their departments would participate and who to nominate
to be the Support Teacher trainees The AFT Local officials insisted on these
requirements. They believed that in so doing they would ensure participation from the
bottom up. The participant teachers I observed did not question this notion. However,
all of them had some knowledge that the program was first conceived at MU and its
funded Research Center. Mr. Kevin’s account and perspective seems to indicate that he

shared the AFT local's perspective of a bottom up start for the program.

So based upon that information when the professors from MU talked to us
// they thought that four would be a workable number for both math and
science. And, basically, from that meeting we had to talk to the other
people in our departments and we had to ask them if they would be willing
to cooperate in this venture. And, we more or less had to get a unanimous
agreement among the department members, as to whether or not they would
be willing to participate in this program, because we didn’t want to have
some people that would be agreeable to work, and other people that would
not be willing to work. And this was all stated before we even knew
exactly what a Support Teacher would be or who the Support Teacher in
each Building would be also. 80, based upon that information, the
Department chairmen went back to the schools and talked to their peers, in
their departments.

65

The Union’s local also required the mathematics and science departments in each
building to participate. In the following quotation, we find the teacher attributing that
requirement to the “MU pe0ple”. He probably did that because at that time the MU
researchers were the active counterpart in the dialogue with the teachers. It is important
to note in Mr. Kevin’s account that some schools did not qualify for the STP because
their teachers did not reach an agreement in which both the science and the mathematics

departments would participate in the program.

I think we then had a follow-up meeting to that. Because at that time we
were trying to get the commitments of the four schools. And, basically that
was on a first-come first-served basis as to first of all the schools had to
agree. And in some cases if they didn’t have unanimous agreement, and
that was in both math and science, it couldn’t be just in math and not in
science. // the MU people wanted to have both the curriculum fields, from
the same school. Not have math in one school and science in another
school. They wanted both in one school! So that eliminated some schools
right away, because some schools could not reach an agreement. // And for
those four schools that were willing to accept this role then we (started)
from there.

Competition among, and selection by, Peer Teachers were both part of the
process by which the individual teacher trainees were finally chosen. This selection can
be viewed as the juncture of two power sources present in the program. The juncture is
the point at which the teachers and those who conceived the project needed to negotiate
power. That is the program was conceived at MU but its implementation needed to be
based upon teachers’ consent. However, that was not the actual outcome. According to
Mr. Kevin’s account, the decision about participation was a mixture of agreement among
the teachers and selection by AFT officials based upon a rating process.

Now what went from there was the selection of the Support Teachers

themselves and this was done by--(( he took some time reflecting and then

said)) Well, in some schools it was done differently. In some schools there

was only one person, in the Department, that applied. Therefore they just

automatically were granted the position. In some schools, where there was
more than one person that wanted it, there was a decision-making process

organized by the Union which sent out a kind of a rating form or a survey
form that was to be filled out by the opposing teachers. To give you a

66

specific example, in my school there were three that wanted the Support
Teacher position. Myself and two other ones. And what happened was
that, the other two people got a form to fill out on me. I got a form to fill
out on the other two, and so forth. And based upon those ratings, plus the
(ones) of the principal of the building, and plus the recommendation of the
Union officials, all those components weighed in to make up the decision-
making process of who was ((going to be)) the support teacher.

All the teachers I observed made clear to me that in the beginning they did not
understand the aims of the program. This point is clear in Mr. Kevin’s narrative. Also,
he describes their teachers' individual transformations in terms of their changing outlook

and way of teaching as a result of their participation in the STP.

Once that decision was made // Once those eight teachers, four in science,
four in math were selected, // we started between January or February of
1988, ah -- until the end of the school year in June, of 1988, with in-
servicing of the eight teachers. And by that in-servicing I meant that Perlan
and John (MU faculty members) came down to Uniontown, a couple of
days each month and worked with us for two days in the Board of
Education. Ah--two days per session, and explained to us what exactly was
going to be our position. And this is kind of where things got a little--
changed. What I think we perceived at the beginning to be as a Support
Teacher turned out to be much more than that. Ah-we were more or less
thinking on the lines that Mr. Elly ((the AFT local president)) had said we
would be‘ trying to--find out those things that made up the, you know what
novel ways, what ideas or what unusual ways in what a teacher teaches a
certain aspect of the curriculum. To make it be something that we could
share with other teachers. And that perhaps could produce a better
environment to learn and also ((become)) better teachers in that subject area.
But what we found out was that it entailed a lot more. Not only it would
entail-~It entailed a lot of a--. First of all it entailed-—((thinking)). Most of
our lead teachers, in fact I think, may be all eight, will probably agree with
this was that it entailed us to change us teachers ourselves. It made us
change our outlook and our way of teaching.

On various occasions during our relationship, teachers would refer to their
individual transformation as a result of their participation in the STP. They liked to
describe themselves as moving from a traditional to a more “constructivist” or
“constructionist” view of teaching, one that is based upon students’ understanding.

And the professors introduced us to what they call a constructionist point of

view of teaching math and science. And that caused us, I think who // I
think by the most part all of us were pretty traditional teachers if we can use

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that word 'traditional.’ And, to change from being a traditional teacher to a
teacher that is conceptually or constructively based, was a change not only
in ourselves, but then to effect that kind of change in the people that we
work with. During this course of time there was a big transition // it
involved the eight teachers observing each other in classroom observations,
and talking about what we were doing. // if we were teaching for
understanding, // if the kids were learning what we were teaching. // and a
lot of techniques on teaching that // broke away from the traditionalist way
of teaching, and went to a more student-based or- student-centered way of
learning.

A First Look at How Teachers Participated

Ideas can become powerful forces, but only to the extent to which they are

answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character

(From, 1968, p. 308).

In trying to understand how the teachers I studied participated in the STP, I began
with an assumption based upon Fromm's (1968) concept of social character. From
(1968), introduced the concept of social character to explain both the constitutive traits of
a group’s culture and its internal contradictions. "Social character" is a useful concept for
understanding teacher participation because it is concemed with the aspects of character
structure common to most individuals in a group.

The social character comprises only a selection of traits, the essential

nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has

developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to

that group (Fromm p. 305).

Based on Fromm's (1968) concepts of individual and social character, I assumed
that the disposition to accept or resist, reject or submit, to what the STP proposed was
already a constitutive trait of the individual as well as the social character of the participant

teachers. To investigate this assumption, I made a number of assertions that I will

discuss in the coming sections.

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El" 15.51.]

The teachers studied first reacted to the STP proposals by alternating between
believing and being skeptical. Believing and being skeptical will be described as
behavioral alternations derived from individual accomplishments and frustrations.

The vignette I will present refers to Mr. Kesini, one of the support teachers. It
describes one instance in which he alternated between belief and skepticism.

In May 20 1988, during one of its preparatory meetings, the STP’s staff decided
to observe Mr. Kesini's classroom. Classroom observations were to become a regular
practice in the program. The primary purposes for those observations were to: (1) find
out more about each participants’ teaching, (2) improve their own teaching by means of
providing irmnediate feedback to them and (3) model skills for the future task of support
teaching that would include peer observation with subsequent feedback.

The interaction I will describe next took place during the post-observation
feedback Dr. John, one of the STP’s researchers gave to Mr. Kesini. Dr. John's
feedback followed his observation of a lesson in which the students had been studying
weather symbols using a newspaper weather page. The transcribed dialogue concerns air
pressure symbols.

It is relevant to note Mr. Kesini's ambivalence towards the proposed innovation
and also his behavior alternating between belief and skepticism regarding innovation. It
is an important piece of data to understand the ideal types of believing and being
skeptical. These two types were the Support Teachers’ first motivation to participate the
STP.

First, Dr. John observed that Mr. Kesini did not probe his students with
questions that required reflection. At the beginning of the interaction, Mr. Kesini did not
agree with that observation and he resisted the idea that he was not probing his students.

To Dr. John's observations, he interjects, “I always do that.” However, at the end of this

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interaction, one can see Mr. Kesini beginning to agree with Dr. John's observations
when he finally says "right!"
Dr. John: “For instance, one of the things I would suggest is that you could
have asked // What does 143 mean? You would have this here, what does
143 mean?
Mr. Kesini: It was there, I always [do that] ((very soft))
Dr. John: [Yeah!] and then the next one is -- what ((does)) 987 mean?
And, and what symbol would you put in front? -- See? Well, when there is

a high number you put a nine in front, and so it will be 998.7

Mr. Kesini: Right!

In feedback sessions similar to the one reported here, the purpose was to help
teachers gain awareness of strong and weak points in their teaching. That was probably
the reason why Dr. John kept stressing his message, as if he was not paying attention to
Mr. Kesini’s interjections. In the dialogue above, Dr. John kept stressing his point until
Mr. Kesini agreed and said, “right!”

After this first agreement, Dr. John’s strategy was to point out the differences
between what the STP proposed and what Mr. Kesini practiced. The next segment
shows the use of that strategy

Dr. John: OK? That will be the rnillibar ((structure)). You might ask

questions about why is pressure important --to review that. So that you can

maintain a high pace--and you know-Because -- I see you as a pressure

cooker teacher. You’re not a laid back teacher/l You have a different style

and I respect that style. But what I want to do is to help // What I am

suggesting is a way that you can use your style to increase student

engagement // and review // ideas that you are trying to get across.

(pause)

Now give me your reaction to that!

In the next segment Mr. Kesini gives his reaction and, although he first expresses

agreement, he soon demonstrates his first ambivalence towards the proposition.

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Mr. Kesini: Fine! . . ((with a half smile))

Then, he makes a disclairning statement.
Mr. Kesini: I don’t know what kind of reaction [to give] I will try it!
Dr. John, however, tries to push Mr. Kesini beyond his ambivalence.

Dr. John: And what do you predict?

Mr. Kesini’s answer was evasive. According to Mr. Abe, a graduate student
member of the STP staff who witnessed that interaction, the situation became rather
uncomfortable. Dr. John tried to keep the conversation going and he offered Mr. Kesini
a way out of his discomfort. He did so by inviting Mr. Kesini’s opinion on eventual
problems in dealing with the proposed strategy of probing students’ understanding by

questioning them.
Mr. Kesini: I don’t [know!]

Dr. John: [You predict] problems with it. You foresee any difficulty!?

The following segment shows a break in the dialogue. Mr. Kesini reaffirms his
past experience and demonstrates that the proposed changes would not be easy.

Mr. Kesini: I just have to give it a shot and see what happens to that. Here

again you’re trying to break a pattern of 23 years --You know I’ve been like

this ((refening to his teaching style)) for 23 years--breaking that pattern is

going to be tough as hell but I’ll give it a try.

Recognizing Mr. Kesini’s discomfort, the researcher backed away and tried

presenting the changes as minimal, when compared to Mr. Kesini’s teaching pattern.

Dr. John: I am suggesting that you don’t break the pattern very much. It is
just -- that’s a little thing to change and instead of going on to the next topic,
stop and say 'OK! Now, I am on this topic, what are some questions I can
ask to check understanding?‘

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On many occasions, the staff referred to this event in cautioning teachers about
feedback strategies and implications. For instance, Dr. John said: “I almost scared Mr.
Kesini out of the project by pushing too much the issue of changing.” I have also heard
that event remembered on occasions when the project staff and the other support teachers
were together.

In the following conversation, I will highlight part of an interaction where Mr.
Kesini made it clear that he could use the STP propositions in his teaching and still not
believe in the STP’s proposed way of teaching. First he stated his skepticism by using
the analogy of coaching.

Mr. Kesini: It’s like coaching -- I only coached one way. And -- you know

if if I read books on that stuff I can do it their way -- but I don’t believe in

Then, in the sequence of the interaction, Dr. John requested that he state his belief

in the STP’s proposals.

Dr. John: But you believe in [this? ]
Mr. Kesini: [Yeahl ]
Dr. John: [I think] you do.

One has to be aware that this interaction happened in the presence of the entire
group of science teachers. Perhaps this could explain Mr. Kesini’s evasiveness and
ambiguity. However, again, the researcher pushed Mr. Kesini beyond his ambiguity,
almost to the point of a declaration of conversion.

[Yeah I do, ] I keep talking to people in school about it and I think 'don’t

forget the one guy who converted you a little bit,‘ I talk with them about it,
you know.

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On another occasion, during one of the monthly meetings between the support
teachers and the MU researchers, at the Uniontown Board of Education, in Uniontown I
observed another instance of alternation between believing and being skeptical.

This meeting was the first to be held in 1990 after the start of the school year.
These monthly meetings had a predictable structure. The people of MU would be already
in the room when the teachers arrived. Usually, Mrs. Polly would come in before the
others and bring a box of donuts that teachers would enjoy upon arrival, along with
morning coffee.

The demarcation between the coffee time and the actual beginning of the meeting
was fuzzy, but was always indicated by an agenda question by one of the MU people.
The agenda would then be negotiated and established and the meeting would flow in a
very informal fashion. A report about what the teachers did in the past days was always
the first part of the agenda, but not always mentioned during the negotiation. Everything
happened as if that was taken for granted. During the report, all teachers would
participate in examining problems, alternative solutions and suggestions for further action
to be taken by the one reporting.

During my observations of these meetings, I took advantage of my accepted role
as shadow to quietly observe the unfolding interactions among the teachers and between
them and the MU people. These meetings were important because various philosophical,
pedagogical or strategic issues would be discussed and actively clarified. Subject-matter
issues were the most commonly discussed.

The instance I will mention next came from one of these reports I observed. Mr.
Kevin was reporting on the beginning of the school year in his building. After his report,
the other support teachers commented, debated some points and gave suggestions. I will
present Mr. Kevin’s report and interaction with Mr. Kevin and Mrs. Cyle, as a context

for understanding the explanation of teachers alternating between belief and skepticism.

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Kevin: Well, ((clearing his throat)) we had a kind of stormy beginning.

Someone: Stormy?

Mr. Kevin proceeded, describing how he had a meeting with his fellow
mathematics teachers and the issues with which they were dealing. He mentioned that he
was concerned about talking with the teachers about teaching for understanding, and
“making sure we were doing it in our classroom.” He said in his report that he addressed
the issue by stressing to his Peer Teachers “Of course, we were not practicing it.” In the
report he mentioned that four teachers began debating whether or not they were teaching
for understanding. Two thought they were, whereas two others did not.

These meetings were building level replications of the seminars the support
teachers had with the people from MU. In those replications, the support teachers would
impart to their Peer Teachers the information they acquired from the STP staff, as well as
try to affect changes in their Peer Teachers' teaching.

Concerning one of the teachers who said she was “teaching for understanding,”
Mr. Kevin said:

Mr. Kevin: I don’t feel comfortable with her idea of teaching for

understanding. And, (she said) they ((the teachers)) always try to teach for

understanding. ((Dr. Perlan laughs)). Yes what I see and what I hear is

that they want the kids to know how to do the math, but I don’t interpret

that as understanding and yet they do.

Mr. Kevin proceeded to report on how he got into an argument with one about
her approach to teaching for understanding. Here is what he said:

Mr. Kevin: And we had, ((an argument» and even Mrs. Carol jumped in

when we had this thing. And she just kind of got a little heavier and I guess

they’re being somehow resistant. I think so and it just kind of clashed a

little bit. In the afternoon she calmed down and we had a little talk and got

her involved. -

During his report Mr. Kevin offered his interpretation of what made the teacher

angry, and why the meeting "became heavy," as he described it. His interpretation:

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Mr. Kevin: But I guess she thought I was being negative about her
approach and I was just trying to get her to question herself and her practice
and what she was doing with her kids.

Mr. Kevin also reported how the other teachers reacted in the days that followed
that meeting. He explained that they actually requested that he schedule more formal
meetings of the department so that they could discuss further the issues presented in that
first meeting. He also mentioned the reaction of the particular teacher with whom he had

the argument. In his words:

Mr. Kevin: // Well they wanted formal meetings more often and that was
one request (of them). And she invited me to come into her class because
she was concerned that her lesson was not -- that she did not have a good
flow to her lessons. That she // that her lessons were really choppy and
weren’t flowing correctly, whatever she was concerned about // and so she
wanted me to go observing her class.

Finally Mr. Kevin presented his impressions after observing that teacher's class,
and his assessment of her way of teaching. It is important to remark that in observing the
teacher’s teaching, Mr. Kevin was replicating the observation plus feedback procedure
that I mentioned earlier being used by Dr. John with Mr. Kesini. In other words, Mr.

Kevin was already performing his role of support teacher.

Mr. Kevin: So I did (observe her class) and ((clearing his throat)). We
haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet. But I see some things that she is
doing that--she does always, and are not neat things to do. Instead of
letting the kids talk, she does more talking. She didn’t listen to responses
from them that will be, I think, helpful for, not only for her being able to
see how the kids were thinking about her ideas that could be beneficial for
the class as a whole. She kind of tells them what they should be thinking
rather than letting the kids talk (to her). So, but I do think that on the
positive side she is starting to realize that there are things that she can do and
that we can do together--we are going to do a lot more. ( ) I think she came
along pretty relaxed when she got ( )-—might have something to do with the
fact that she and Mrs. Grace were interacting more. (( Mrs. Grace is
another support teacher in a building other than the one where Mr. Kevin
works.))

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As I said before, it was usual in these meetings that one teacher's report would
generate discussions about many problems, suggestions for interventions, alternative
solutions, and further actions to be taken by the one reporting. All of the Support
Teachers would participate regardless of their specific subject matter affiliation. For
instance, Mrs. Cyle, who is a science Support Teacher, offered the following explanation
for the happenings in Mr. Kevin’s meeting with the mathematics teachers:

Mrs. Cyle: My, that is very threatening to say, 'I don’t understand. I don’t

know.’ ((T he utterance became very soft and difficult to understand

furthermore, others interjected making it difficult to understand what was

told in the sequence.»

It was literally impossible to transcribe the ending of Mrs. Cyle’s sentence.
However, she expressed her empathy with the observed teacher who was confronted
with inadequacies and had to recognize this.

Mrs. Lite, who is a mathematics Support Teacher in a different building,

continued this pattern of participation as she interacted with Mr. Kevin in the following

example:

Mrs. Lite: What I was thinking is like all of sudden we’ve made her ((the
teacher with whom Mr. Kevin was having the meeting he reported before»
aware that there is a shopping list. This [is not her first year].

Mr. Kevin: [she said she didn’t feel comfortable] ((refening to the teacher in

his meeting».

In the continuation of this interaction, Mrs. Lite’s comments on this teacher is an
example of a critical situation. Mr. Kevin saw in that teacher’s behavior an instance of
resistance to his approach to teaching for understanding. However, Mrs. Lite perceived
the teacher’s behavior with a different perspective. Here is what she said:

Mrs. Lite: OK. this is not her first year. So what made her to change? You
know, what made her aware that she is no longer comfortable with the way

things are flowing? ( ) She is aware that it ((her way of teaching» never
bothered her before and all of sudden, now, she is not sure.

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At this point, Mrs. Lite changed the subject in the sentence. The one doing the
action became “we” instead of the “she” used before. This new way of constructing the
utterance with “we” is seen next as it contrasts with the ongoing use of “she”:

Mrs. Lite: At first we don’t wanna buy in and then we don’t really know

how to give in -- OK, so, she’s buying, you know, you say 'come on in.‘

So you tell her 'well, ( ) you need to do this.’ That was (what) she wants

you to do. Sit down and tell me step by step what I need to do. Maybe take

the same lesson and show her how you would approach it. Not just say,

'well you need to do this, that and the other.‘ Just like telling the kids ( )

'take that map and put it over there and I want you to do the page so and so

and I want you to do the problems so and so and so ( ) leave a margin'--I

think she needs to be ( ) may be she will come in and observe your class,

that may be the best experience for her.

During my observation, I did not notice the change from “she” to “we.”
However, listening to the recorded interactions again, I noticed the change. I started
reflecting about the meaning of this. In the next month, I had an opportunity to mention
that to Mrs. Lite, and she gave her explanation for the change. According to her, in the
process of trying to implement the STP with their peers, “we” the Support Teachers
sometimes forget our own path to change and how we move on by sometimes believing
and doubting. “I know that,” she said, because I joined the group later, and “I did not
have as the others did, a starting training.” She mentioned to me that in many
opportunities she was really skeptical about what the people from MU were proposing.
At some point she was able to accept it, but still she was not able to put it into practice.
Only after talking about the ideas many times was she really able to merge them with her
daily practice in her classroom. “That’s why,” she said, “I can see that teacher not really
giving a hard time to Mr. Kevin.” Instead, she may be seen as “learning while being
skeptical. ” That was a very short conversation with Mrs. Lite, but one that enlarged my

understanding that teachers could participate in the STP while being skeptical about its

propositions.

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Visioa of she Soomn fifeaeher Role: SITP’s Message and Negotiaiioo of its
Memos

Next, I will assert that the vision of the Support Teaching role was constructed
jointly by the teachers and the researchers during their interactions. In order to
contextualize this argument, I will refer back to the interaction between Dr. John and Mr.
Kesini, reported earlier. What was it that Dr. John was talking about and Mr. Kesini was
supposed to believe? In other words, what was Dr. John proposing that elicited Mr.
Kesini’s ambivalence (showed in terms of believing and/or being skeptical)?

In the specific interaction presented previously, Dr. John was concerned with
demonstrating Mr. Kesini’s failure to probe students with questions requiring reflection.
In actuality, this issue was part of a larger set of issues that constituted what I will call
"the STP message."

I was introduced to this message in a national seminar attended by science
education researchers. Dr. John made a presentation about the history of the STP
program. In his speech he presented a summary of the STP’s message. My summary of

his presentation follows:

First, he gave his understanding of the role of support teachers. He said:

Right from the beginning the staff was concerned in providing the teachers

with skills in conducting meetings, observing and giving feedback on

teaching, and providing leadership in the department to improve the

intellectual climate.

Dr. John went on, stating that teachers should be given additional training and
research based information, in order to fulfill this role. He described the content of the
training offered to the Support Teachers. This point is important to mention because that

content is indicative of the STP’s message. He presented the content in a transparency

and said:

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In the inception ((of the program» we agreed that they ((teachers )) should
be reading and analyzing recent research on several issues:

0 the learning in science;

0 the teaching in science;

0 construcuvrsm;

0 instructional strategies such as group work, writing, concept
mapping, questioning techniques;

0 supervision and peer coaching;

0 techniques to conduct meetings.

Dr. J ohn’s historical account of the STP supports my assertion that prior to
working with the teachers I studied, the STP staff had an idealized message about what
teaching practice should look like. I started my observations with the impression that the
STP’s message was researchers' manifestation of their vision of what support teaching
should be. My observations proved that first impression to be wrong. The vision of the
support teacher role was negotiated during a long interactive process between researchers
and teachers and depended on the latter's active participation.

The STP’s message was organized around two axes: (1) research-based
elaboration made by the staff, individually or as a group and (2) propositions upon which
they would reach an agreement, even though they were not clearly sponsored by all the
members of the staff. However, that message, in the viewpoint of the teachers I studied,
was not necessarily carrying the vision of what the role of support teacher should be. I
learned over time that the STP’s message reached the participant teachers and contributed
to changes in their own vision of teaching, by improving their awareness of their
strengths and weaknesses. It contributed to, but did not solely constitute the vision of
support teaching.

Analyzing my data, I came to the conclusion that the vision of the support
teaching role was a joint construction involving the researchers’ message and the
teachers’ pre—existing experience. The vision was the result of cross-fertilization between

teachers’ experience and research-based elaboration, or an agreed-upon set of

propositions that were embedded in the STP’s message. Supportive evidence for my

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conclusion came from data the teachers provided on various occasions when they were
interviewed.

Next, I will present two of those cases. They are important because they are
empirical indications that meanings and external needs, as suggested by From (1968)
and Blumer (1969), are internalized in processes of interaction involving negotiation.

The next two segments were taken from a recorded interview done in April 1990.
The characters (besides the interviewer) are one female (Mrs. Grace) and one male (Mr.
Trackman). Both were seasoned, science teachers in two different schools. The
interviewer was trying to get their perspective on the changes they underwent while being
trained, the former as a support teacher and the latter as a visiting practitioner at MU. The
importance the teachers attribute to their own experiences in their careers is the key aspect
to note in these interactions.

Mr. Trackman, a seasoned teacher with 21 years of teaching experience, told of
his experiences as aAfro-American student and why he ended up in a teaching career.

His story shows how deeply rooted his teaching experiences are. He said:

Mr. Trackman: Oh, that’s a long story but I’ll make it short. In my junior

year in college I was in, actually I was in the pre-med. program. I wanted

to become a doctor. And doctors from Bigtown came to our university to

interview a group of youngsters. And one doctor in particular pulled me off

to the side since I was the only black kid. I didn’t realize it at the time. He

pulled me off to the side and he asked if I had ten thousand dollars. And I

looked at him and I said, “No.” I said, “Why? ” He said, “Well, you’ll need

ten thousand dollars.”

Interviewer: For what?

Mr. Trackman: He never explained.

Interviewer: For the fees?

Mr. Trackman: I guess. I don’t know. But, by him saying that I turned

around, and left that meeting, and went over, and changed my major to

secondary education, biology.

Interviewer: OK. But then why did you become a teacher? Why did you
choose to go into teaching instead of something else related to medicine?

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Mr. Trackman: I just found out that I got along well with kids. But I never
knew it was my calling then. Then in college, like I said, I made that
change, then I decided I’d try teaching since I didn’t know anything else I
could get into. Medicine was my ultimate dream and that was knocked out
from underneath me so I tried it.

Interviewer: But why science?

Mr. Trackman: I liked the biological science mostly. And I enjoy the
outdoors because I’m a fisherman. And I like to track animals and follow
them and see how far I can get without them noticing me. Because of my
love of science, I mean the outdoors, I just felt that maybe science was the
best thing and biology fit right into it.

Interviewer: OK. Now, how would you describe this change process? Did
the change in your thinking occur as a one time thing or was it continuous
or is it just // now? Can you trace the change in your vision?

When I asked him to describe the changes he had undergone, Mr. Trackman
expressed his view that the vision of teaching, towards which he was moving, was

actually an outgrowth of his feeling that he was a “free wheeling teacher.”

Mr. Trackman: The change in my vision?
Interviewer: Or is it a change at all?

Mr. Trackman: Oh, my vision, I think, has changed. I think you can see
that just from this conversation here. But it didn’t change that much
because I also realized, and I’m not honking my horn, I also realized that I
fit into a lot of the schemes of these things because I was one of those free
wheeling type of teachers. I was willing to take risks. And I’m always
willing to take a risk. And whether it, how would we say it? Some people
say it--whether it passes or fails doesn’t matter to me that much. What
matters to me is what did we learn? And if we learn something from it, so
be it. And if it didn’t meet the particular criteria, that maybe someone else
set up or I set up or a student set up, then what were those things? What
did we learn and then how can we get to that point? That’s what I like. So
I’m really a 'way out', I guess you might say, free wheeling, risk-taking
type teacher. I don’t mind trying anything new that’s going to help a kid.

Mrs. Grace, also a seasoned teacher with 21 years of science teaching experience

had two things in common with Mr. Trackman: (l) a lengthy teaching experience and (2)

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coming into science teaching as an alternative to another profession. Here is what she

said:

Interviewer: Why did you become a teacher?

Mrs. Grace: Why did I become a teacher? Um, I don’t know, to tell you the
truth.

I think it was because probably I enjoyed working with kids and, I think ,
back in the sixties I wasn’t interested in secretarial work. The motivation
was definitely to go to college; there was no other. You know, to me there
was no other choice, and, ugh science was definitely the area I was most
interested in. And, I had thought that one time, and--I know this is a round
about way of answering it, but I thought of one time becoming a
pharmacist, but ugh, it was too expensive a field to be in and I found myself
in the college of education. I guess because I really, you know, enjoy
working with, you know, other people and it fit my interests.

Mrs. Grace was far more explicit than Mr. Trackman in indicating her perception
that the vision of the support teaching role was a product of her own construction.

Interviewer: So what you are saying is both the training sessions by making

you read and discuss on constructivism and your interaction with other

science teachers, the discussions with them and discussions with the MU

staff, all influenced your thinking?

Mrs. Grace: All these things. Yeah, I mean reading the article/land Dr.
John, the two, you know.

Mrs. Grace went on, saying how important the process of change was for her; to
be doing things that would provide her with exposure to new ideas. For instance, getting
excited about teaching, reading articles and working together with other teachers. She
saw it leading to two results: “starting to be open" and “getting out of isolation.”

Interviewer: Oh! OK, now ugh how would you describe the progression of

your change in thinking?

Mrs. Grace: 1 don’t know how to approach that.

Interviewer: Oh! OK was it a one-time event or, or was the change
continuous?

Mrs. Grace: [[Oh sometimes it was spurts.]]

Interviewer: Huh?

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Mrs. Grace: Sometimes it was in spurts.

Interviewer: Spurts, I like that!

Mrs. Grace: Um, you know something would really hit me, you know, and

I, as soon as there was a point of awareness, then I started looking, you

know, for, what I was doing, becoming aware.

Interviewer: For example?

Mrs. Grace: Um, OK one of the first things, like I said, we were hit with,

was looking at our own misconceptions and questioning ourselves. OK,

ugh now how was that interpreted? How am I getting? Am I setting up

something incorrectly, you know, and really looking at things, and taking

time, and asking the kids to play back instead of me just-- you know-- and

I’d run out and give all the information.

In the next segment of this interview, Mrs. Grace’s narrative indicates some of
the positive signals of her change in practice. She said:

Mrs. Grace: I think I’m doing a real good job, taking time, cutting down on

the amount, not--and just trying for quality instead of the quantity, but I

mean I continually throughout, you know, tried to perpetuate, you know

new techniques.

I probed Mrs. Grace with a question that is important to take into consideration in
understanding her perspective. Her answer indicates that she did not attribute the
changing in her teaching to the STP’s message or to the content of her training, (either
taken alone or together). Rather, she indicated that her participation, (i.e. reaching
awareness of her misconceptions and constructing [or better reconstructing] her own
experience) accounted for her transformation. Mrs. Grace’s account shows the contours
of a critical situation.

Interviewer: OK so when you say the change was like a spurt and it hit
you, it hit you from what has been said, (or) what you have read?

Mrs. Grace: In other words what I’ve constructed, when it’s made sense
and it’s almost like I’ve constructed my own, the, but it’s been in spurts, I

83

  
 

 
 
     
   
 

ore-existing
dimensions of
teachers'

experience

 

C——_D
.1 BELIEVING ‘-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    
   
 
     

{ \
alternation derived 1" ."
from individual 1' '1
acomplishments II 0 1|
and frustrations l u |
. i I '5 I
{BEING SKEPTICAD a: E
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Research-based
elaborations or
agreed-upon set
of proposrtions

Figure 3. Construction of the Vision of Teaching in the STP

 

84

think there was-- uh resistance to change at first. We all had, you know all

of us knew we needed a change, but we weren’t sure how, you know, how

to, and at--sometimes it’s like--working with the other teachers it’s kind of ,

looking for a foothold or, or an opening, you know but, but with a lot of

the reading and then just taking more risks, you know, it’s been easier to

take the risks as we’ve gotten encouragement and that and then you know

and, and like I said it’s still spurts, and, that--but how I am now I can’t go

back to the old method.

My findings indicate that, in the STP, the process of constructing the vision of
teaching practice was a joint action. It occurred during a long-term process of interaction
and negotiations between teachers, their peers and the researchers involved. It is relevant
to remark that this construction was going on at the same time that support teachers and
their peers were vacillating between skepticism and belief, acceptance and resistance.
Habermas (1973) has suggested that the interplay between new and old is part of the
process of crisis and its resolution. This is shown clearly in Mrs. Grace’s account.

Figure 3 (on page 84) illustrates both the complexity of, and input into the
construction of the STP vision of teaching. Figure 3 indicates that the STP message,
when codified and transmitted to the teachers, entered into an interplay with their pre-
existing experiences rather than reaching them in a void. This is indicated by a two-
headed arrow connecting the two parts within the circle. In addition, two-headed arrows
indicate that what happens with teachers and researchers both influence in and receive
influence from the vision of teaching practice being jointly constructed.

Also, Mrs. Grace’s account indicates that her ambivalence between belief and
skepticism was being resolved as she gained awareness of her own teaching practice.
She recognized the importance of the STP in terms of providing encouragement for her
risk taking in attempting to change her teaching, but she stressed strongly her awareness
as her turning point.

As I spoke with various other teachers, the majority of them indicated that, at

some point after experiencing ambivalence or contradictory reactions to the STP’s

85

proposals, they reached a point of awareness that something had to be done, on their side
as teachers, to improve students’ learning.

Therefore, it is fair to state, that the ambiguity or contradiction represented by
being skeptical while participating in the program did not disrupt their participation.
Rather, it contributed to the quality of their participation. The data support this belief,
especially as advanced in Habermas (1973) view of crisis: That no transformation --
either individually or in society - is possible without a critical stage where structural
changes have to be made to keep the structure’s identity stable.

Implied in Mr. Kesini’s interaction with Dr. John, in Mr. Trackman’s, and in
Mrs. Grace’s accounts of their experiences is that contradictory reactions -- such as belief
and skepticism -- were equally valid choices for channeling their participation. They
were all active participants in the STP and contributing to the fulfillment of its purposes.

As the data indicate, the teachers were reviewing their practices in light of what
they were learning in the STP. Thus, STP became for them an environment in which to:
(I) express their ambiguities, (2) feel dissatisfaction with themselves and (3) fully realize
their traditionalism. In doing so, they reached the critical stage summarized by Mrs.
Grace: “But how I am now I can’t go back to the old method." From that time on, her
only choice was to adopt new practices, which required her personal transformation.

The data I have presented thus far indicates that the Support Teacher Trainees
displayed contradictory reactions. The participant teachers were volunteers and believed
to be accepting STP proposals.

I observed other reactions to the STP’s proposals that led teachers to check their
own experiences from another viewpoint. My findings indicate that teachers participated
in the STP not only by accepting its proposals but also by resisting them. The next

section will provide detailed examination of those aspects.

86

Acceptance and Resistance as Forms of Teacher Participation

As I described earlier, during my period in the field, I conducted close
observations of the group of four Science and four Mathematics teachers who were
participating in the STP. For the most part, I observed those eight teachers as they
participated in the seminars designed by the MU people to provide them with technical
assistance

For triangulation of data, I also observed four Peer Teachers of the science
teachers. My motivation for observing the Peer Teachers was the recurrent use of the
terms “resistance” and “resistant,” applied to some Peer Teachers during the seminars I
mentioned above. Data for this part of the dissertation will refer mainly to Mr. Trackman
and Mrs. Kelly, science teachers in one building, and Mr. Simpson and Mr. Star, also
science teachers, but in another building. I will not include all their stories in this report.
However, my observations and interviews with these teachers were very important to my
understanding of the issue of resistance.

I conducted these observations in two different contexts. Mr. Simpson, Mrs.
Kelly, and Mr. Star's observations took place in a set of seminars, parallel to the ones I
described earlier in this section, designed for the professional development of the Peer
Teachers. I will call them "Type H Seminars", to distinguish them from the meetings of
the support teachers, which I will refer to as "Type I Seminars". Although the Peer
Teachers were not required to attend the Type H seminars, more than half of them
actually did so. At that time, the Support Teachers were involving their peers more
actively in the restructuring process and the Type H seminars were viewed as an
opportunity to advance that process.

Data gathered during those observations support the assertion that the ethos of
teachers’ participation included acceptance as well as resistance to STP’s proposed
changes in their practices. My findings indicate that teachers did participate in the STP

project sometimes with one disposition, sometimes with the other, and some other times

87

by oscilating between acceptance and resistance. This means that resistance was also a
valid way of participation used by some teachers.

This idea is illustrated in the following figure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘ Teacher's
Pr 016°“ ACCEPTANCFJRESISTENCE Pm’CXiSting
proposals 1N EXAMINING Experience
and Practice
>

 

 

 

 

Figure 4. The Ethos of Teacher's Participation

Some of the teachers I studied valued their pre-existing experiences more than that
which the STP was proposing. They sometimes displayed a disposition to resist STP's
propositions. It took me some time to realize that. When I first focused my attention on
the issues of resistance and acceptance, I had my mind set to look for teachers rejecting
the STP program and its ideas.

Quite often Support Teachers in the Type I seminars referred to their “resistant”
peers. When I heard this, my first impression was that they meant “rejection.” Rejection
happened as well, but not to the point of compromising the program as a whole. For
instance, among the teachers in the building where I did the shadowing, only one teacher
could be said to be rejecting the STP. Informal conversations with the Peer Teachers and
their interaction with the support teachers led me to rethink my first impression. I
suspected then that I was looking in the wrong direction as far as understanding
resistance. The idea that resistance and acceptance could be part of the same process
of participation took shape after reviewing an interview I had with Mrs. Polly and Mrs.
Cyle. Mrs. Polly was the mathematics teacher and Mrs. Cyle was the science teacher

being trained to be Support Teachers in the building where I did the shadowing. This

88

happened in May 1989, when Mrs. Polly was giving me her assessment of the past
year's chained set of tasks (mentioned earlier) in her building.

She gave me a long interview in which she told me how much her mathematics
department academic environment had improved. The improvement was visible to her in
the way the seventh and eighth grade teachers reacted to their academic meetings. As she
explained it, they were now seeing more meaning in their meetings, as compared with
previous years. She described her Peer Teachers in mathematics as follows:

They’re willing to get together and I’m going to have to be the person that

says, 'Let’s have a meeting. Let’s pick a date and do it'. But they are

willing to do it. So there’s been a lot of progress along those lines too.

They’re enjoying the communication that exists at the meeting.

This reference to teachers’ reactions to meetings is significant, especially because
departmental teacher assignments were planned more for administrative than teaching
purposes. I had observed this during my shadowing period in her building. For
instance, teachers had to take a vote on administrative issues such as: (1) whether or not a
program like the STP should be adopted, and (2) managerial curricular questions such as
which book to use. However, in our interview about five months after I initiated my
shadowing, she described teachers getting together in meetings to discuss their ways of
teaching. This was something very different from voting about administrative issues.
This was a higher and more positive level of participation. However, as we continued
our conversation, she mentioned that resistance still existed within this overall positive

environment of participation. She said:

As far as an overall look at this whole program thus far this year, there has
been frustration at times over the obvious resistance of some of the people.
// not all resistance has disappeared. That I think has been the biggest
frustration. But there’s been a lot of improvement there, too. I mean, some
of the people have come a long way in a year’s period of time, further than I
really thought they would.

89

Mrs. Polly and Mrs. Cyle gave me their own explanations for the resistance. I
found in their explanations that both resistance and acceptance were explained in terms of
insufficient information given to them about the STP.

Once, in December 1988, Mrs. Cyle was talking with me about her perception of
the STP and its evolution. In the following segment she mentions that STP was seen by
most of the teachers as something that would not come to impact them, but their students.
She said:

Well -- When we first heard about the project, the idea was - and if

memory serves me correctly -- it was that we have a program that’s going to

help improve the students’ learning if we want to participate. We had no

idea just what it was going to involve, what it was going to entail. Most of

us thought we were getting involved in something that was going to have a

direct effect on the students.

Mrs. Cyle also indicated to me that resistance took shape as the teachers began to
participate in the STP and to perceive that their teaching was the primary target for the
STP-initiated changes. Here is how she indicated this:

Mrs. Cyle: As we got into the program more and more and more, it wasn’t

((that» the ultimate aim was a direct effect on the students, but the change

had to come from the teachers. And that’s--that was the misconception of

most of the teachers on the faculty. They wanted something, as long as it

was going to change the kids. But when they found out that it was going to

involve them, they began to resist. In fact, I’ve had more than one tell me

that if they’d known what this was all about they would have never voted to

have had it come in. But that’s because it means that they have to change

and change is hard. It’s much easier to blame the kids, it’s much easier to

find something that the kids are going to do to get more learning, but it’s

very hard for the teacher to have to take on the responsibility.

I learned from Mrs. Cyle that resistance was structured during the process of
participation initiated by the teachers. It is important to note that, whereas strategically it
is possible to set stages of development for the program, the social phenomenon involved
is a continuum. One can speak of training teachers as a first stage and having them affect

their Peer Teachers as a second stage. The process of interaction, however, is such that

everybody is participating in a whole social process. In this sense, the resistance that

9O

started taking shape developed within a process of participation. The STP, in fact,
managed to appropriate this social phenomenon to its own advantage. It did so by
implementing what I previously termed a chain of tasks (that is, training the support
teachers and having them affecting their Peer Teachers all at once).

Mrs. Polly also perceived that the information given in the beginning of the STP
was insufficient. However, she took this in a rather positive way, as being wisely meted
out, so as not to scare people away from the program:

Mrs. Polly: They [pe0ple from MU] were wise enough not hitting us with

too much all at one time. I guess one example I could give was that they, at

the beginning, told us that we were going to be in observing. I mean--You

know-~they never said we weren’t going to do that, but they didn’t put a

heavy emphasis on it. They put the emphasis on 'the things that you are

going to do are going to help to improve student leaming' ((stressing».

She did not suggest that the information provided was misleading. Rather, she
indicated that the given information helped to create a consensus among the teachers. She
saw a purpose in the way the information was provided. According to her
understanding, the MU people were in fact modeling for the prospective support teachers
the way they should approach their Peer Teachers.

Mrs. Polly: None of us are going to argue with the fact that we want to

improve student learning. And of course, now we realize that they were

modeling to us what they wanted us to do in turn. We could not come in to

our people ((referring to the peers» and say at our first meeting , 'and by

golly every last one of you is going to change everything you’re doing

now.‘ ((stressing»

As if talking about her own experiences as she bought into the STP proposals,
she explains how a process of change must be established. She stresses the need for
teachers’ active agency in this process, both in terms of gaining awareness and in
building new internal structures.

You can’t do that. It has to be done slowly. The awakening of the whole
picture has to come slowly and it has to be something that you build up

91

within yourself--You have to realize that it’s necessary, that it’s important,

and come to some conclusions on your own.

Next, Mrs. Polly indicated what, in her perspective, was the basis of her
participation. She does not necessarily believe in giving full information just for the sake
of information, but rather in giving just enough information to start up the process of
joint action.

Mrs. Polly: If we had walked into that first meeting and they would have

said, 'now you’re going to be in and observing “X” number of times and

you’re going to have to hold “X” number of meetings, and you’re going to

have to do'--we all would have said, 'No. We’re not!‘ ((stressing»

Because that really would have frightened us off immediately (pause) So

they were wise in not giving us a total picture right away.

When she talked with me and gave her understanding of that situation I took it as
a reasonable viewpoint. However, in our interviews she did not demonstrate awareness
of the disempowering potential of such an understanding. Mrs. Polly was willing to
accept only a partial picture of a complex task in which she had asked to engage. By
accepting partial knowledge as compared to that which was necessary to accomplish a
task she was contributing to, and legitimating, a rather perverse power relationship, that
of suppressing opportunities to learn. As Mills (1955) points out:

Only when mind has an autonomous basis, independent of power, but

powerfully related to it, can it exert its force in the shaping of human affairs.

Such a position is democratically possible only when there exists a free and

knowledgeable public, to which men of knowledge may address

themselves, and to which men of power are truly responsible. (p. 613)

So far in this section, I have marshaled data that indicate that: (1) “resistant” was a
label mostly applied to Peer Teachers, even though Support Teachers also recognized
they were sometimes resistant, too; (2) both resistance and acceptance were structured as

a result of the perceived meaning of the information provided about the STP, in the

beginning; and (3) resistance should not be confused with rejection.

92

In the follow-up, I will provide data to support the assertion that participation,
displayed as resistance, also involves a comprehensive revision of teachers’ pre-existing
experiences and practices. Findings in this research suggest that resistance to proposed
changes, required from observed teachers, increased awareness of their own limits, This
improved the understanding of their own experiences and practices.

Having described snapshots of the processes involved in establishing a crisis
from the viewpoint of acceptance, I will now do the same with respect to resistance. In
order to do this, I will highlight my observations of Mr. Simpson.

Mr. Simpson was the first teacher described to me as being resistant. This
happened after I observed a repeated use of the term, applied to Peer Teachers, by the
support teachers in their meetings. During my shadowing, I asked Mrs. Cyle to give me
examples of resistance. The first teacher name who came to her mind was Mr. Simpson.
Here is what she said:

Mrs. Cyle: Oh--Uh--Mr. Simpson initially saying that he did not-~you

know--he’ll try almost anything but don’t ask him to do group work. He

did not want to even think about group work because he was afraid of

losing control. I think from yesterday he may be trying a little bit more of

it. His first idea, I think his first check was when we were talking about

misconceptions, he came back that very first day and put up a mind

structure that he was going to prove us wrong. You know. He had

probably taught that lesson very well and they were going to be able to do

well on it. And he was very surprised that they didn’t know what he

thought they knew. So, it’s been slow coming, but I think he realizes that

we’ve got to try and do some other things.

Mrs. Cyle’s description did not quite fit the label of "resistant," if Mr. Simpson’s
resistance was to be understood as rejection. Furthermore, in clarifying her proposition,
she explained that he was resisting performing some of the proposed techniques (group
work, in this case), not the core of the propositions. In fact, as I observed her teaching,
she was struggling with the same questions as Mr. Simpson. She was also attempting to

do group work in her classes and had the very same concerns about being able to

maintain control. Having been already skeptical about resistance being the same as

93

rejection, after my interview with Mrs. Cyle, I dropped the idea for good. What I was
facing was a different method of participation.

Mr. Simpson was not prepared to check his experiences against the STP’s
proposals. He decided to check the STP’s proposals against his experiences instead. He
felt a need for more clarification about the program and expressed that at its onset, a time
when the project staff was not yet ready to provide a full picture of what a support teacher
was supposed to be. When they proposed to pilot the program, they were proposing a
fully collaborative enterprise. That was not completely clear to Mr. Simpson and the
project staff did not fully understood his reaction. He decided to be a vigilant observer
of the program. That was considered to be resistance.

Next, to marshal] support for my assertion I will present data from my
observation of Mr. Simpson. Once, I did ask Mr. Simpson about his personal history
with, and within, the STP. He said:

Mr. Simpson: I was there in the beginning. The staffs of the Junior High

science and math departments were invited to a meeting at the Board of

Education Building to hear of a new program that would enhance our

teaching techniques.

He is referring to the same meeting Mr. Kevin described earlier in this chapter.
He proceeded:

Mr. Simpson: One question was asked at that meeting that I will never

forget. The question set the tone for me to be labeled a 'skeptic'. I should

say it was not the question but the answer that has kept me on the defensive.

Mr. Simpson is referring to the meeting I mentioned before where the STP's basic
ideas were explained to the teachers, before they were asked to decide whether or not to
join the program. Mr. Simpson's statements indicate his perception of what the STP was
about one that is quite distinct from that of other participants as I described earlier in

other parts of this section.

94

Mr. Simpson: Question. Has this program ((the STP program» ever been

attempted before? Answer. Yes but it was not successful for reasons that

we had no control over. This mystery has always haunted me. The

president of the AFT in Uniontown spoke of this being an opportunity to

share the best of our ideas. To the best of my knowledge, we were not

informed that the program would reteach us how to teach. Ancient proverb:

never volunteer.

Based on his profile, perhaps “challenger” is a better name for Mr. Simpson. I
interpreted this piece of his understanding of the STP within the frame of ideas about
teacher's professionalism, as presented in chapter IH. I believe that Mr. Simpson made
up his mind at the very beginning of the program that he should be radically alert about
his professional autonomy. He viewed the STP as one more attempt to invade teachers’
already impaired professional autonomy. I observed his behavior on various occasions
when he participated in the Type H seminars. He was always inquisitive and eager to ask
questions in terms of "why", and I learned by talking with him that he had his reasons for
this. As an experienced teacher, he had a good historical perspective about what had not
worked before, and why it had not, although it had been imposed on teachers in the name
of educational reform.

In a long interview on April 25 1991, we talked about how, in his perception,
teachers had been treated so far by reformers. In that conversation I learned many
interesting things about Mr. Simpson. For instance, being of immigrant origin he had to
struggle a great deal for his professional education. Because his family neither had the
knowledge to advise him nor did they valued education to the point of really helping him,
he had to make decisions on his own about his education at a very early age. He became
accustomed to taking a highly critical approach to opportunities and ways of doing
things. He maintained this perspective while participating in the STP.

Mr. Simpson’s resistance of the STP’s proposed changes constantly challenged

other teachers’ acceptance. The following quote is from an interview with the science

support teacher, Mrs.. Cyle, who was working with Mr. Simpson. The quote illustrates

95

that, in a way, his challenge helped Mrs. Cyle keep herself alert about the outcomes of

the project.

Mrs. Cyle: He'll try almost anything but don't ask him to do group work
because he is afraid of loosing control. I think from yesterday ((referring to
a meeting she had with her peers as part of the project» he may be trying a
little bit more of it. His first idea, I think his first check, was when we were
talking about misconceptions. He came back that very first day and put up a
mind structure that he was going to prove us ((the two support teachers))
wrong.

However, in resisting, he was unknowingly contributing to the process of
legitirnizing other teachers’ acceptance, as the next piece, from the same interview seems
to indicate.

Mrs. Cyle: You know, he had probably taught that lesson very well and

they ((the students» were going to be able to do well on it. And he was

very surprised that they didn't know what he thought they knew. so, it's

been slow coming, but I think he realizes that we've got to try and do some

other things.

In an interview Mr. Simpson expressed some of his ideas about the relationship
between researchers and teachers. The following segment of the interview mentioned
above serves to summarize his perspective.

First, he makes it clear that the researchers’ agenda is not necessarily the same as
the teachers'.

Mr. Simpson: Well you’re interested in getting your research (done), and--

the people from MU are interested in conveying their ideas, because that’s

what they are interested in at a particular time. But everyone else looks at it

as another program coming along-because we have--every so many years,

it appears or it feels like someone comes up with a new and better idea and

«how many times can you listen to that new and better idea and say this is

great!?

Mr. Simpson was adamant in his irritation over the never-ending plethora of

"fantastic" ideas invented by researchers and which they imposed on teachers. As he

described it: “That is hard to swallow.”

96

And here we go again! ? ((stressing»

You know--it is the same thing. Everyone has--someone comes along with
data, research, whatever you might wanna call it, and then come up with
something fantastic ((stressing». Where does a person like myself and
everyone else in the school draw the line and say (pause) You know--is this
going to work or is this another one of those ( ) like the others!? Now
every program has its merits. Don’t get me wrong. There are some things
that I learned in the past that I still use today. I feel like I use them--I feel
like I use the ideas whether I will do or not another approach but -it is
always a new and fantastic idea. It is hard! It’s hard to swallow! It really
is!

Although it involves a different route than acceptance, resistance, also, involves a
comprehensive revision of teachers’ pre-existing experiences and practices. Therefore,
both acceptance of pr0posed changes and resistance to them are significant ways for
teachers to improve their understanding of their experiences and practices. For instance,
as the STP program unfolded, Mr. Simpson, did assess his previous experiences to make
sure he could keep his autonomy as a professional. His examination was not made
necessarily for the purpose of changing, but instead for the purpose of being assured of
the possibility of keeping his choices open, including eventually trying some of the ideas
presented by the program. In talking about this aspect of his reaction to the STP, he did
not see himself as resistant. Rather, he perceived himself as skeptical; as he described it,
“resistance - no, foot dragging - yes.”

As we continued our conversation, he indicated that he underwent an examination
of his practice. However, in the next topic, he asserted that the reason for the
examination was professional autonomy rather than anything else:

Mr. Simpson: Even with a program like ours, we are still independent. If

there is an aspect of the program that I don’t feel comfortable with, I won’t

use it! We are supposed to be an educated lot. Yet, because we must

perform everyday many (times), a teacher has a very large ego. We don’t

like to be told that what we are doing and the way we are doing it is wrong.

Resistance to an untried program and methodology not completely written is

called scrutinizing. If we ((teachers» did not observe, inspect, and criticize
and critique, who would?

97

It is important to take note of the choice of words that Mr. Simpson used to talk
about the STP program. Refening to the STP, he said "Even with a program like
ours..." Although his mood was still resistant, he clearly expressed a sense of ownership
in considering the STP "our" program. In this entire segment Mr. Simpson was
affirmative about the STP, although using a negative way to articulate himself. I
interpreted Mr. Simpson as saying: "yes, I would try the ideas proposed by the STP, as
long as I am comfortable with them and, as long as my autonomy as a teacher is
preserved. As he said: "we ((the teachers)) are still independent."

Mr. Simpson's transformations were rather different from those of some of the
other teachers I observed. In his case, individual transformation, started from the
perspective of his skepticism and disposition to assess his past experiences and to
positively value them.

It is a commonly accepted that one can participate in something about what one
have substantial knowledge. However, restructuring educational settings may involve
working to bring a vision into real existence, without completely knowing what the
whole picture will look like. In the next section I will report findings about how my

subjects came to realize all that was involved in the STP and how they felt about that.

The Coalition
As I explained earlier in this chapter, the STP program was an ongoing project by
the time I began my observations for this study. Sometimes I found myself curious
about aspects of the program and my participant observation provided me with no
answers. For instance, in the winter of 1991, I was observing a meeting in which the
support teachers and the researchers were interacting. Among other issues, they
discussed ways of making the STP more visible and solving problems of temporary

financial support. The focal point of part of the discussion was an alternative, suggested

98

by the researchers, that teachers should pay credit hours to MU so their technical training
could continue. That suggestion elicited a strong response by one of the teachers. He
asked: "Are you suggesting that we pay for your affordability?" He said. The other
teachers supported him indicating that they had assessed this and other alternatives at their
own meeting some days ago. The researchers and teachers finally agreed about the issue
and decided to write a proposal to a funding agency. The key aspects were that the
teachers: (1) began meeting on a regular basis and (2) had their own ideas about what to
do in difficult situations. These key aspects had an effect of bonding the teachers
together to face the challenges of the new role of Support Teacher.

I was aware of those meetings and their purpose (discussing how Support
Teachers would do their job). However, I was unable to attend and observe them. In
my field notes I referred to those meetings as "the coalition" due to its importance in
helping me understand how the teachers I was studying realized what the project would
involve and their feelings about it.

The study progressed and the question of knowing when that realization started
became important to me.

In my field notes, I recorded three opportunities that provided answers about the
coalition. The frrst was an occasion when I was talking with Mr. Abe, the graduate
student who assisted Dr. John on this project, and he explained his perceptions about the
STP. On the second occasion, I had a conversation with Dr. John about the program's
start. The third was an interview with Mr. Kevin during which we discussed the
coalition's early days.

Next I will try to summarize those three actor's perspectives because I believe
they provided an answer to my concerns. During the time I was doing my research I had
many opportunities discuss the STP with Mr. Abe. Once we spoke while he organized
the STP documents into files and we began discussing the importance of documentation

in qualitative research. He caught my attention, saying: "for instance, look at this

99

document! It contains the schedule for what became known as the 1988 Summer
Program." Then, after a short pause, he added: "Just looking at the document, nobody
would guess that a revolution happened there, in the meeting." I was curious and asked:
"what do you mean?"

In summary, he told me that teachers came to MU and stayed on campus for
almost a week. That was after seven months of training at Uniontown. As part of the
summer program and as support teachers for their schools they were supposed to
organize a plan for the next academic year's intervention.

The first day ended with a cookout meeting at Dr. John's house. Next morning
they asked for a private meeting with Drs. John and Perlan to talk about the task they
were required to do. They spent the whole night, after returning to campus from dinner,
discussing among themselves what they did and did not intend to do. As Mr. Abe
recollected, they were all very tired. However, it was only after speaking with Drs.
John and Perlan that they started doing their advanced planning for the coming academic
year. According to Mr. Abe, after that night, teachers really took responsibility for the
Support Teacher role.

Dr. John referred to that event once when we were talking about the STP
program's beginning. In his opinion, the teachers' stay at MU together for a week, was
influential to their effectiveness as Support Teacher. I asked him his opinion of what
happened. He said that no one still knows what really happened that night. However it
had visible effects on teachers' engagement. According to Dr. John, that was the biggest
turning point for the teachers because they decided, as a group, to try the support teacher
role. They also formulated some plans of action that would help them initiate the
program when the school Opened a few days later. That decision came after almost seven
months of listening to, and intearctin with, the researchers' ideas of the role of a support

teacher.

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I also had a chance to discuss the Summer Program with Mr. Kevin about.
According to him, teachers from Uniontown came up to MU and stayed a week on
campus for more in-service training, working preparation and planning for the fall of
1988. Fall 1988 was the initial year of the-three year pilot program. Then, he said, "We
were off and running for the school years of 1988/89, 89/90 and 90/91."

I saw an opportunity to get an insider’s perspective on how the coalition started
and its implications. So, I said to him: "Some people say that this summer session was
the actual starting point of the coalition." He replied:

"Yes, exactly. I think it all came together when we were all on campus here."

Mr. Kevin told me about the in-service training and the concentrated information
to which they were exposed during the first seven months of the program in Uniontown.
In his words

So much had been packed on us and packed upon us. We got so much in a

short amount of time that it was almost overwhelming to all of us and we

felt a certain amount of frustration.

He also told me that while they were in Uniontown with their heavy teaching load
and other concerns, frustration did not surface. However, being on campus at MU
caused it to surface. The following excerpt from our interview demonstrates how he
perceived the starting point of the coalition.

Things finally just kind of all came together when we were up here on

campus. We would spend concentrated days in classrooms with John and

Perlan. Afterwards going back to our rooms we would get together, eat

dinner together, seat down and study together. We would talk together and

try to see if we all could make sense of this whole past six or seven months,

whatever it was that we had been working on. We still were not sure of

what that was that we were expected to do. And exactly how to do it, even

though we worked trying to prepare for that. I think we all sat down and

shared our ideas and frustrations. // and from all that came like you said a
coalition. A kind of a bonding, if you will.

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We talked more about the relevance of the summer program, especially for the
participant teachers. Mr. Kevin viewed the Summer Program as the actual start for most
of the support teachers. Mr. Kevin's perception was an answer to my concern about
when the teachers I studied realized all that the project would involve. His perspective
also provided an insight into what those teachers felt about their proposed role. They
started with information that did not make much sense to them. Acquiring information in
that way generated many frustrations. By sharing their frustrations and the new ideas
about teaching, they began putting things together and were able to make a conscious
decision, one that they were unable to make when they first decided to be part of the
program. All that seemed to have happened when they left a posture of isolation and
moved toward their coalition. Here is how he referred to that:

I think we finally took charge of our positions. We were kind of laying

back until then because we all felt somewhat unsure of ourselves. But I

think we got to the point where we were just pressured enough into it and

that was forcing us to come together. That was what happened I think, up
here.

Findings in this section, demonstrate that the teachers I studied took a great deal
of time to feel comfortable about working to actualize the Support Teacher vision. In
addition, my findings demonstrate that only when they felt themselves really "in charge"

of the task they were comfortable about its practice.

CHAPTER V

Overview Conclusions and Suggestions
for Further Investigation

This final chapter is divided into three parts. First, I will present an overview of
the study, including research questions, methodology and findings. Second, I will
present a set of conclusions that summarize what I learned with the research. Third, I

will present suggestions for further investigation.

Overview

In this research, I dealt with the empirical task of learning how teachers participate
in restructuring their practice. To date, I believe this issue has not been studied in
appropriate terms. Reforrnists often state that teachers should actively participate in the
efforts at restructuring. However, there has been little investigation on the nature of their
participation. Mainstream research on teachers' participation was conducted under the
burnout perspective (Hoover-Dempsey & Kendall, 1982; Penny, 1982). However, the
burnout perspective does not address all of the complexities of the question as implied by
Vavrus (1987) and Barnett ( 1985).

I conducted this investigation to learn how a group of teachers participated in a
project that was designed to restructure their workplace and what was involved in the

process of participation.

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Support Teacher Program (STP), an ongoing project with a focus and an
environment appropriate to learn about the questions in my research, greatly facilitated
my learning process. STP is an attempt to restructure the Science and Mathematics
departments in four schools located in a middle-sized midwestem, city in the United
States. My pseudonym for the city is "Uniontown." STP's primary mission is to
develop a new role, called support teacher. Thus I "negotiated entry" (Erikson, 1986)
with teachers participating in the STP, to study and learn about their participation. From
December 1988 through March 1991, I recorded the participant teachers' interactions in
various stages of the STP's development.

The primary question in my investigation dealt with how those teachers were
participating in restructuring their professional roles within the context of modifying
school practices. Although the major question remained the same throughout the
investigation, as evolution occurred the viewpoints, within which I focused the question,
evolved.

On different occasions, I became interested in learning how the teachers were
negotiating the meaning of their new roles with researchers and among themselves. In
addition, I became interested in understanding how the teachers perceived their
socialization into the new roles. Finally, I directed my attention to the role socialization
of those accepting and those resisting the STP. My purpose was to learn if and how that
socialization was different. As a consequence, as seen in Chapter IV , the nature of
resistance became another important focus of the dissertation.

I conducted my investigation within a critical ethnography perspective. From the
beginning, I advanced a conceptual framework to make explicit the interpretive lenses I
used for the observations and data analysis. The framework draws from sources in
social theory primarily the concept of crisis (Habermas, 1973; Habermas, 1981), the
symbolic interactionist's argument (Blumer, 1969), psycho-sociology (From, 1968)

and tools of interpretive investigation (Weber, 1949). I then derived an interpretive

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framework from the theory and used it in data interpretation and analysis. This
framework is an application to this study of ideas used on Figure I to conceptualize an
ideal type of participation

In the process of doing the study I made an effort to harmonize principles of
ethnographic research used in my investigation (Agar, 1986; Bogdan & Taylor, 1975)
with the use of a microcomputer to handle the qualitative data I was accumulating. In
doing so, I developed a computerized system to handle qualitative data that I named the

"Monteiro Data Organizer" (MDO).

Conclusions

This section covers two kinds of conclusions. First, in parts 1-7, I will
summarize what I learned from a theoretical, methodological and empirical standpoint as I
studied the Support Teachers and their Peer Teachers. Second, in part 8 I will refer to

the use of a computer as an instrument in my qualitative research.

1. Changing Teachers' Practices

I have learned that experienced, seasoned teachers, such as the ones I studied, can
make crucial changes in their teaching practices. Teachers, in this study went through a
range of changes. I observed in them the following: (1) became more disposed to listen
to criticism regarding their current teaching practices; (2) began self-initiated
conversation among themselves about STP's ideas to improve science and mathematics
teaching; (3) actually attempted to put into practice STP's ideas within their classrooms;
and (4) began actively sharing with others the expertise they acquired during those
attempts. It seems fair to say that teachers moved from being "listeners" to being

"practitioners" of the STP's ideas.

105

2. Participation and Critical Situation

Teachers’ participation in the STP, can be explained in terms of searching for a
way out of critical situations. The idea of critical situations is derived from the concept of
crisis. Habermas (1973) asserted that we can speak of crisis when structural alterations
become really necessary for the continued existence of a structure (individual or social)
and its identity is threatened. The consequence of crisis is twofold. Upon reaching a
critical point, two possibilities are open. Either it assimilates alterations and overcomes
the crisis or it begins to collapse. The focus of this research was the first possibility
most of the teachers observed went through and overcame critical situations or crisis

while participating in the STP.

3. Critical Situation and Individual Agency

During interviews with my subjects I tried to uncover the process by which critical
situations were encountered. As a number of them agreed, that was associated with how
teachers entered the program and how the support teaching role was negotiated between
teachers, researchers and among themselves. Teachers being trained as support teachers
and their Peer Teachers bought into the STP program by their own agency. Self agency
was expressed in two ways. First, they voted, in each building, to be part of the
program. That vote set teachers as participants in the program, no matter what was the
predisposition of each one of them individually. As their participation evolved, self
agency was further expressed, and by their own initiative, they tried ideas coming from
the program. It was then that critical situations emerged. During our conversation, they
acknowledged two social elements as having significance to them: (1) the professionalism
pursued by AFT and (2) the demographic changes occurring in Uniontown. These two
elements contributed to the climate for teachers' participation in the restructuring
proposed by the STP. The first, brought an increased responsibility to teachers, although

stressing their ownership and autonomy. The second, a concentration of minorities

106

within urban areas which increased diversity among students. The STP program added a
third element, an opportunity for teachers to increase their awareness about the effect of
those elements on their teaching expertise.

The interplay between these elements exposed, in various degrees, the inadequacy
of the existing teachers' teaching expertise, especially when dealing with students coming
from non-affluent and minority groups. It was their acknowledgment of that inadequacy
that actually set up a context to negotiate the meaning of their new role of support

teachers.

4. Contradictory Nature of Participation

The teachers I studied participated in the STP program in two pairs of apparently,
opposing ways: believing and accepting, being skeptical and resisting. The inclusion of
categories such as "being skeptical" and "resisting", does not imply the idea of rejecting
the STP program. During my observations, I heard about teachers who could fit the
category of rejecting the STP program. However, they were not a pattern I focused on in
my study as they essentially refused to participate. A key conclusion in this study is that
being skeptical and resisting are both valid forms of participation. My data suggest that
those two paired forms of participation unfolded as a process in which critical situations

were encountered and OVCTCOITIC.

5. Critical Situation as a Turning Point

Findings indicate that teachers participated in the program by means of accepting
and/or resisting the proposed changes. Using Fromm's ideas about individual character,
one can say that those teachers’ traditional character was shaken by the social elements
mentioned before. Teachers in this study were already realizing that traditional teaching
was not solving their teaching problems. In their context, the usual habit of blaming

teaching problems on students' inability to learn, was not satisfactory anymore. I will

107

call this phenomenon a mismatch between teachers' experience and social needs
represented by students' diversity. That was already perceived by most of the teachers
and was producing contradictions in their behavior before the STP arrival. Through their
involvement with the STP, the teachers were becoming more and more aware of that
mismatch. During my study, I learned that the more they became aware of that
mismatch, the more they retrospectively assessed their own practices. As a result, they
became more receptive to the STP ideas.

I asked some teachers if they had a specific issue, event or conceptualization that
acted as a turning point toward being more receptive to the STP proposals. One of them
said it has happened to him when he had a chance to deal with the issue of his students'
misconceptions. That conversation took place in the presence of several other teachers
while we were waiting for a meeting to start. Most of them agreed with their colleague,
acknowledging students' misconceptions as having an impact on them that motivated
them to look for new styles of teaching. Therefore, I concluded that they began a process
of change after realizing the inadequacy of their practices when measured against
students' actual learning or, to use the insiders' words, their "misconceptions." That

realization was critical for them to move toward new ideas.

6. Resistance and Acceptance as Patterns of Participation

In this study I tried to understand how believers differed from skeptics. In Chapter
IV, 1 indicate that the research question related to this issue changed during the study. I
began the study looking for patterns of rejection. Then I focused on looking for
examples of teachers who were not willing to be part of the STP program. However, the
teachers I studied approached the STP's proposals in an oscillating pattern, sometimes
believing and at other times being skeptical. Therefore, resistance and acceptance can
both be forms of participation. Believers were not different from skeptics because

believers accepted and skeptics resisted the STP program. They were living through

108

contradictions in their profession that were forcing most of them to assess their
experience and at the same time to search for a different style of teaching. What was
different was the departure point from which they assessed their existing experience.

In the acceptance mode, teachers used STP propositions as a parameter to assess
their experience. The main concern was to see what had to be changed in their teaching
style to match the requirements of STP program. In the resistance mode, teachers used
their preexisting experience as a parameter to assess the STP propositions. The main
concern was to substantiate preexisting experience. However, in the resistance mode the
teacher's own expertise was more valued than it was in the acceptance mode.

Although teachers performed this assessment in two different and apparently
opposing fashions, they underwent individual transformations as a result of their
participation. According to my findings, the different perspectives produced the same
qualitative result. That is, teachers were confronted with the inadequacies of their

teaching practices and changed.

7. Power Relationships

1 stated in Chapter I that this dissertation’s main purpose is to address teachers'
participation as negotiation of meaning. The aim is to offer a contribution to
understanding some elements that would help in describing the nature of teachers'
participation. To achieve that purpose, I observed a group of teachers while they
interacted among themselves and with a group of university professors I called
researchers.

To conduct the research, I developed a theoretical framework detailed in Chapter
H. That framework is based upon sources within the social sciences and draws mainly
from the following traditions: (1) symbolic interactionism and interpretive sociology
(Berger & Luckman, 1966; Blumer, 1969; Schutz & Luckman, 1973; and Weber,
1949); (2) critical theory (Habermas, 1973); and (3) social psychology (From, 1968).

109

The reason to advance a set of conceptual perspectives and use them during the
research, was the need in terms of Interpretive Sociology, to establish the theoretical
lenses I used and the light they would throw on the social phenomena I was to interpret.
According to Weber (1949):

Without the investigator's evaluative ideas, there would be no principle of

selection of subject-matter and no meaningful knowledge of the concrete

reality (p.82).

The symbolic interactionist’s argument played a considerable part in helping me to
make sense out of my observations. The main point in this argument is that people
construct their social world through their interpretations and actions. Therefore, the
argument strongly stresses negotiation of meanings as a way to construct social order at a
given level.

Sometimes when I was conducting my observations, I observed situations where
power relationships surfaced. I will give some examples. The methodological strategies
I used to observe teachers' participation focus on negotiation because that was the main
purpose of my study. Moreover, since domination and control are not necessarily
negotiated issues, the research approach I used for the observations (symbolic
interactionism), although very important in describing the negotiation of meanings, was
not the most adequate to unveil power relationships. Therefore, I concentrated my
research on the flow of understanding in interactions, rather than in their discontinuities.
The study of power relationships would be more appropriately done by focusing on the
discontinuities. That is what the literature suggests, since power relationships can be
found in the background of social processes involving negotiation of meanings
(Harnmersley & Woods, 1976).

Having said that, however, qualitative researchers cannot claim that their eyes are
closed to events other than those at the focus on their research. The following examples

of power relationships are important on two counts: ( 1) as a reason why people

110

involved in programs, such as the STP, should care to do further research on the issue of
power relationships and (2) as a possible answer to the question of why the STP program
seems to work well in Uniontown.

Example 1. Mrs. Polly's Case: Knowledge

Flow as a Source to Structure Power.

Mrs. Polly's case is an example of power expressed in terms of knowledge.
Also, it is an instance of power relationships defined from a micro-level perspective.
Micro-level analysis, unless it is pursued historically over many events, does not serve
the purpose of generalizability. Therefore, the example I present in the following
paragraphs serves the purpose of stating that power relationships were present in the STP
program. However, Mrs. Polly's case cannot be used to establish how power
relationships were structured in the STP program. But, by accepting limited information
to carry out a complex task and being a person expected to disseminate information about
that task, she may become a potential social agent in structuring domination if, and only
if, she actualizes that potential as I will explain further in this section (see also Clegg,
1989, pp. 66-85).

Mrs. Polly was a mathematics teacher I observed while doing my research in the
STP program. We talked many times about what being a support teacher would mean to
her and how she would go about starting to work with other teachers. She did not
necessarily believe in giving full information just for the sake of information, but rather in
giving just enough information to start up a process of joint action. She got that
perspective from her own experience as one of the teachers who voted to be part of the
STP program. She said:

If we had walked into that first meeting ((the one which launched the STP

program» and they would have said, 'Now. You’re going to be in and

observing “X” number of times and you’re going to have to hold “X”

number of meetings, and you’re going to have to do'--we all would have
said, 'No. We’re not!‘ ((stressing» Because that really would have

111

frightened us off immediately (pause). So they ((the researchers» were
wise in not giving us a total picture right away.

In my presentation of the research findings, I pointed out the disempowering
potential of such an understanding. By accepting partial knowledge, she was legitimating
by herself a rather perverse power relationship, that of reducing opportunities to learn.

By using Mrs. Polly's case to illustrate the issue of power I am in no way implying
she is anything but an exceptional mathematics teacher. However, Mrs. Polly's case is
potentially problematic from the perspective of power relationships. One can speculate
that, although her interpretation of what the researchers said may not be what the
researchers actually did say, such an episodic event could develop into a predisposition,
after which she might reproduce the behavior, and legitimate it as a form of domination.
Since it was a one-time occurrence one can draw no conclusion from Mrs. Polly's case
beyond speculation. However, calling attention to Mrs. Polly's case serves the purpose
of cautioning managers of programs similar to the STP program about the possibilities
for unintended structuring of power relationships. Mills ( 1955) is a conceptual source
for this analysis. He stresses the need for "an autonomous basis, independent of power,
but powerfully related to it" (p. 613) in order to have democratically—ordered human
affairs. He continues (p. 613) by stressing the need for a "free and knowledgeable

public" to balance relationships in which the goal is to transform complex social affairs.

Example 2. Uniontown's Case: Exchange Relationships an

Relative Distribution of Power

As part of the conceptual framework of this study, I dedicated a section to what I
named "The AFT Program" (AFT). The main argument in that section is that AFT
managed to incorporate an ideology involving the idea of "teachers as professionals" who
should have a strong sense of ownership over decision making. In Uniontown, AFT 's

ideology found a fertile land to develop, due to a unique balance of power achieved in the

112

years prior to the STP program. Three, important, social actors were identified as
responsible for that equilibrium: (1) an assistant superintendent who initiated
cooperative work with teachers and organized labor; (2) a strong local AFT president
who recently succeeded in negotiating teacher contracts (which allowed him to be a "real
partner"); and 3) a group of teachers willing to support the assistant superintendent and
the local AFT president's alliance so that teachers would benefit by maintaining control
over their work and workplace. Uniontown is probably one of the few places where such
an agreement has survived for as many as 10 years.

The STP program in Uniontown seems to fit the model described by Coleman
(1977) where equilibrium of power can be achieved by engagement in an exchange
venture. Coleman's argument states that, when actors are willing to gain control over
issues about which they are strongly concerned equilibrium is possible when the actors
give up control over those events where they have little or no interest. It follows that
power is relatively evenly distributed (Coleman, pp. 183-184).

The STP program for instance was possible due to that relative distribution of
power. The Major university had developed an outline of a plan to improve the quality of
teaching and students' learning in mathematics and science. That plan was brought to the
attention of the Assistant Superintendent who thought it fit the school system's plans to
hold teachers more responsible for their practice. On the other side was the AFT local
President who also saw participation in the plan as an opportunity to maintain teachers'
control over the issue of quality in teaching. The Assistant Superintendent's important
requirement (together with the MU researchers) was that the two departments (science
and mathematics) should both participate. The AFT local President's important
requirement was that teachers in each building should take a vote to decide whether to
participate or not. However, nothing would have worked unless teachers, through their

participation, were willing to assume increased responsibility as a price for keeping their

113

professional autonomy and control over the changes. It was their vote and
willingness to participate that set in motion under the STP program in their workplaces.
Based upon Uniontown's case, one can make the argument that successful
attempts at restructuring are those that are a combination of well-articulated ideas plus
social agents in context, having reasonable participation in establishing the frameworks

of power and the decision-making process.

8. Using a Micro Computer for Organizing Qualitative Data
In terms of methodological conclusions, I have learned that a microcomputer can
be effectively used as a tool for organizing qualitative research data. I have learned this
in the process of designing and using the Monteiro Data Organizer (MDO). As the
name suggests, MDO is an organizer. It has two organizers. The first one organizes
sound information from audio or videotaped data. It has fields to organize: (1) generic
information, (2) the transcription of sound data and (3) analytical comments about the
sound data. The second, is a text organizer that organizes pieces of data (mainly
expanded field notes) in a pre-analysis mode. Some other aspects of MDO are the
following.
(1) With Mac RecorderTM hardware and its software (SoundEditTM) as
well as the MicrosoftTM word processor installed in the same hard disk,
MDO will interconnect these software and make them available for
handling data. For instance, MDO will open word processing files and
allow the qualitative research analyst to move back and forth between

them and the organizers in the data base.

(2) MDO will perform “copy and paste” operations within the database
as well as between the database and word processing files.

(3) MDO will open any stored segment of sound (important bits of an
interview for instance) allowing fine micro-analysis of pieces of sound
information by using SoundEditTM.

(4) As data are handled within the database MDO allows their
organization into categories of insights, assertions and evidence one can
marshall to support the other two categories.

114

Implications for Practice and Educational Research

implicaiioas for Eraeo'ce

The present study makes two major sets of conceptual contributions for
educational reform based upon the Weberian concept of ideal types. The first
contribution includes the notions of believing and being skeptical. This study has
demonstrated that teachers participating in the STP program oscillate between the two
positions in the process of gradually reaching awareness of problems in their existing
teaching experiences and alternative solutions. The second contribution includes the
notions of acceptance and resistance as equally valid channels for teachers to assess their
existing experiences. These contributions have implications for educational reform on
three levels. First, they confu'm a common-sense appreciation about the need for
lengthened time frame for the identification, negotiation and implementation of
meaningful reform. Second, these contributions signal to the managers of reform, the
need to provide an open and supportive environment for teachers to change. As
conceptualized here, change includes perceiving, living through and, hopefully,
overcoming professional critical situations. Third, these contributions signal the need to
recognize, appreciate and assimilate resistance. Reform efforts will especially benefit
from distinguishing resistance from rejection and support the participation of those who
resist or seem to resist. Within a structured relationship, supporting resistance can be an
important way to sharpen ideas and to keep at higher level, the teachers' awareness of
what there is to be changed.

These contributions also have implications for the community of teachers. The
study has demonstrated the importance of ownership and self agency in the process by
which teachers practices are restructured. Ultimately, it has indicated that teachers are

able to participate in a restructuring process with researchers, provided that researchers

115

work with them in context, negotiating meanings and strategies for change. Work in
context here suggests that researchers and teachers agree about a set of basic principles
with the aim of keeping their relationship in a state of relative equilibrium. As I
mentioned earlier in Chapter H, this kind of strategic context already existed in
Uniontown. Uniontown's negotiated context is the key to the success of its STP

program.

' a ' n es c

The interpretive framework used in this study drew, among other sources, from
symbolic interactionism as proposed by Blumer (1969). Symbolic interactionism was
used primarily as the basis for the identification and description of processes occurring
during the interactions in which the teachers were involved. The many opportunities
where teachers were observed together in the seminars illustrated this. As I identified and
described these processes of negotiation, I was able to establish believing and being
skeptical, as well as acceptance and resistance, as valid processes of participation. This
is the major contribution of the investigation reported in this dissertation and certainly a
significant first step toward understanding the participation of teachers in restructuring
their practices.

However, as I argued in Chapter H, although an interactionist approach is useful
for identification and description of processes of negotiation, it does not serve as well, in
methodological terms, the purpose of studying power relationships that might surface in
those processes. I have chosen the approach of identifying and describing processes of
negotiation because this is a necessary step, should power relationships be further
addressed. The literature indicates that overlooking the micro level in studying social
phenomena in schools has been a basic problem among scholars studying power

relationship issues (Aronowitz, 1981). The problem to which Aronowitz (1981) calls

116

attention can only be solved in a more extensive and methodologically-focused kind of
study, for which the time span of my doctoral program was not enough.

Since this research laid the groundwork for further investigations of power
relationships, raised as a result of teachers’ participation, this should be a next step for
further investigation.

The STP's training and technical assistance program included strategies derived
from various traditions including constructivism, Piagetian psychology and student's
spontaneous conceptions. Focusing on those strategies was not the scope of this study.
However, teachers I studied were noticeably mindful of their student's misconceptions.
Moreover, they acknowledged the awareness of that as an important input to their
reaching a turning point toward adhering to the STP proposals. That occurrence indicates
that another question for further research is the assessment of different strategies, in

increasing teachers' awareness of their teaching problems.

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