LEARNING TOGETHER: TRANSFORMATIVE ACTION RESEARCH IN A GRADE 2 CLASSROOM
Christine Jamieson
Introduction
Since qualifying as a teacher in the early 1990s, I have looked for opportunities to strengthen my commitment to constructivist teaching practices. I am committed to sharing a learning environment that is learner-centred rather than teacher-dominated, so that learners have a voice that is sought and valued. I engage in reflective practice, and this allows me to critique my thinking and ideas and their application in the classroom with learners. I have come to understand that constructivism is as important a theory applied to my own learning about the art and science of teaching as it is applied to the learners with whom I share any given school year. It is a symbiotic dynamic in a classroom driven by the unique experiences, expressions and perspectives of its members. I am driven to search for learning experiences that captivate individual learners by pursuing answers to their questions and my own. In this way I hope to present and follow a model for life-long learning.
In September 1999, an M.Ed. course at Queen’s University introduced me to a transformative research model named "action research." For the first time I felt liberated to pose my own pressing questions about my own teaching praxis and invited to investigate my practice. Many models for action research were presented and none of them was prescriptive. Journal writing is suggested as one method for exploring action research. As I already use reflective writing practice with students to promote critical thinking skills and metacognition, I decided to use this format. Hobson (1996, p. 9) describes journal writing in these words:
As a way of developing a reflective ongoing relationship with oneself and one’s work, a personal journal is hard to beat. Teacher research represents a forming up of developmental reachings that have often been a long time in the coming. A journal can be a means by which we bring into fuller awareness, both for the student and for ourselves as teachers, some of the deeper processes through which we make meaning.
It was an attractive personal and professional challenge to document the data of a research inquiry in a reflective journal and use the unfolding narrative to analyse the experience for recurring patterns or themes. I felt immediately connected to the obvious empowerment of engaging in my own self-directed action research. I sensed that, whatever the result, it would be immediately relevant, practical and focussed on the learners and learning in our classroom. Action research represents the most significant professional development I have yet experienced. What has resulted from this self-directed year-long action research project is significant and unique. My journal captures a rich and focused study of the learning within the classroom and our year’s journey together in a community of learners. I feel my understanding of my practice this year has allowed me to reach a professional peak.
The original question that began my action research inquiry in September was "Can use of the Internet enhance the learning for the Grade 2 learners in our classroom?" The Internet has been a pivotal part of our Action Research inquiry; its use was woven into the fabric of a constructivist classroom practicing cooperative learning and reflective thinking. I realise this original question framed the work over the year but see now that it may have been too narrow a question and that it also generates another: Does the use of technology enhance the learning of all the learners in the classroom? Barth (1990, p. 43) states that "in a community of learners, learning is endemic and mutually visible." This paper explores this more comprehensive question.
A Learning Community Engaged in Inquiry
The following narrative traces the evolution of an action research project using the Journey North Internet site at http://www.learner.org/jnorth/. Self-described as "an annual Internet-based learning adventure that engages students in a global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change," it has proven to be a highly invigorating adventure. The students’ motivation and sheer excitement have carried this project through a full school year. This year’s learning was embedded in the real world and inspired us all. This account focusses on classroom activities since January 2000 but our work with Journey North began in September 1999.
Journey North was my first attempt to integrate technology into the curriculum in a meaningful way. Prior to this, my computer curriculum was limited to students using simple word-processing tools or playing educational games. I always felt that this was a sort of professional malpractice, definitely not using this technology to its best advantage with the students. Since January 2000 this Grade 2 class has followed the return monarch migration and participated in spring’s arrival across North America by planting tulips in the fall and reporting them planted, emerged and bloomed. Journey North participants report this information to Journey North in Minnesota, who post it to their database. The migration and changing seasons sweep across the continent with coloured indicators as the weeks advance, all provided by data from the field research of participants. Although the structure of Journey North is a computer-based project, it has allowed for real-life learning to take place in an inquiry where the learners became investigators in their own yards, their school, their community and the world. In addition to contributing to the Journey North web site by being researchers, they shared in the growth of my self-directed action research project as I asked them to reflect on what and how they were learning and what new questions they could ask based on this. Our inquiry became very active with our questions driving our work. Collaboration with on-line peers also helped expand the inquiry by contributing their own questions.
Journey North also proved to be a highly effective way to provide connections between curriculum subjects through links to the students’ personal relationships with monarchs. What began in September as a way to explore the concept of migration through the science topic of life cycles in animals evolved into a integrated inquiry combining technology, science, geography, math and language, with the development of research, leadership and communication skills. Twice since January students have found the monarch butterfly in the media. One was a front-page story on "The Plight of the Butterfly" in a national newspaper in February. This article presented the tensions between tourists’ desires to see the monarch sanctuaries in Mexico and the risks associated with tourism in a fragile environment. The second story, in a local paper, reported on "Butterflies Face Logging Threat" by documenting the struggle to balance the needs of the Mexicans adjacent to the sanctuaries with the preservation of the oyamel trees for the monarchs. One of the highlights of this term has been having whole group discussions with the class about these important conservation issues. The complexities of these problems did not escape the students. It marked an insight for me that dialogue that grapples with complicated issues really engaged the students. At the same time we were able to explore a series of stories and photos on the Journey North site that examined the life and work of a butterfly sanctuary guide and his family. This helped to deepen student understanding of Mexican culture and demographics as we were able to make comparisons to our own lives. The students have demonstrated that they now have a deep understanding of the fragile interconnections between human activity in the monarch breeding grounds of Battersea in eastern Canada and the butterflies’ over-wintering sites in Mexico.
Creating Knowledge Together
In January we were invited by another Journey North teacher participant to play an Internet game she created titled "Tulip Pals." I asked the class if they wanted to play and explained that I had never done this with a class before, did not know how it would turn out or what we might learn by playing it. We took risks together. The other game participants were Grade 2 classes in nine unknown locations. Using the Internet as the database, one of the teachers acted as the web master and built a chart attached to her school web site to track posted questions and participants’ responses. The format was modeled on the game Twenty Questions, where the students have to ask geographical questions that require a "yes" or "no" answer. However, we were able to pose any number of questions until we were all successful. Because the questions were all generated by other Grade 2 students, they proved to be developmentally appropriate to the players and reflected a variety of individual classroom contexts. As the game unfolded, advice was sought from and shared with the other participants about how to best handle the game in the classroom. I needed to find entry points for the learners who had literacy challenges.
The game progressed at a tremendous rate once we had some experience handling all the e-mail information that began to pour in. The early questions posed by other Grade 2 students served as an effective model and introduction to posing questions by e-mail that could provide a lot of information. E-mail contact took place on my home e-mail address and this was a very large daily commitment. I would have preferred to have the students read the e-mail and participate first hand, but due to technological limitations and safety issues at our school this was not possible. As classes discovered each other, the guesses were sent by e-mail privately so that other classes could keep guessing. Once discovered, we asked the players to send postcards from their locations and share their tulip gardening data. This provided a real-life connection for our class to understand the change of seasons, how it affected their new Tulip Pals and how the data from others compared to their own. This game electrified the students and everyone was motivated to solve the mystery location.
The questions that we posted included "Does your state or province touch the Gulf of Mexico?", "Does your state or province touch the U.S.A. border?", and "Does your state or province touch one of the 5 Great Lakes?" As we got better at this game and responded to other questions, we were able to develop better questions and apply new atlas skills that ultimately were more sophisticated than the knowledge and skills than those required in the prescribed Ontario Curriculum documents for social studies at the Grade 2 level. Some of the other classes posed unique and challenging questions that pushed our inquiry into unplanned areas. These included questions like "Does your state or province touch the Mississippi River?", "Is your state or province famous for growing potatoes?", "Are you 40 degrees north latitude or higher?" and "Is your state or province west of 90 degrees longitude?" As the questions accumulated we frequently faced breakdowns in our computer lab. Fortunately, my acting as the courier from home to school allowed us to proceed. I hung up a huge tracking chart in the class and we updated this as we played. This provided a second visual display for tracking the data and gave students even more opportunities to read geography text and terms during our reading class times.
Active, Cooperative Learning
A Social Studies oral pretest had indicated the students did not clearly understand their physical location in the world. Most knew they lived in Battersea, near the city of Kingston, but they were uncertain of larger geographical knowledge. Our class began to develop over time a connection between our village location, Canada as a country, provinces, borders, states, bodies of water, cardinal directions, and the entire layout of the North American continent. Children worked in small groups and pairs to update their information and pose new questions to gather information. Leadership skills and socially constructed knowledge that was peer supported and created began to evolve. The challenge to discover the location drove the students and they physically jumped up and down with the promise of game time. What thrilled the students was that I did not know the mystery locations either as we worked together to narrow it down as a whole class, working out which group had posed the best of the brain-stormed questions. The students recorded the discovered locations on their own personal maps of the United Stated and Canada. We also tracked the Tulip Pal locations on a large wall map. Our weekly computer time also allowed us to compare our data with that on the Internet site and see any new questions posted by others that we did not receive by e-mail.
Planning for Diversity
One of my challenges in the class involved learners with literacy challenges. What evolved were heterogeneous groups of learners with mixed abilities and skills. Peers with stronger reading skills led the group, enabling everyone to contribute actively to the inquiry through dialogue and peer support. Established group rules required the group to be responsible for all members being able to report how they narrowed down information to form their next question or location guess. I observed how the power of this dialogue helped to teach and apply new atlas skills and geographical knowledge. This structure allowed for a dynamic that encouraged the development and use of academic and social skills. Perkins (1999) summarises that constructivism can promote more than one type of role for learners. He suggests that active learning include opportunities to "discuss, debate, hypothesise, investigate, and take [viewpoints]" so that "knowledge and understanding [is] actively acquired" (p. 9). In addition, he describes how "knowledge and understanding [is] socially constructed" and that learners "co-construct them in dialogue with each other." Our highly social classroom setting allowed everyone to be responsible for personal learning and to contribute to that of their peers. It was a rich, interactive, constructivist environment and I had no off-task behaviour challenges. I simply had to contain the enthusiasm.
We decided as a class to focus our detective work exclusively on one Tulip Class location and then move on to discovering the next one. This worked well and many of the learners developed into stronger readers. Reading scores indicated that in September there were 16 children reading below grade level, but by January there were only 6 still below grade level. The students with advanced reading abilities were making developmental gains too, as the class had 12 students with above grade level reading abilities. Motivated to decode the e-mail, many reticent readers wanted to be the one to read messages out loud in order to update our wall chart. Even the weakest readers were willing to risk reading aloud to the class. The game positively affected the self-esteem of all students. The increased motivation was also seen in the computer lab, as developing readers wanted to read weekly Journey North updates and share new information or links with the class. The game had its own momentum. By the end of February we had successfully located five classes in Idaho, New York, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Florida. We asked for their "snail mail" addresses and each learner wrote amonarch postcard to a new Tulip Pal. This was a great opportunity to teach letter writing skills and other required language expectations. With an authentic audience to read their work, the students were eager to write about their village, their knowledge about monarchs and the reality that our tulips were still under snow.
Symbolic Monarch Migration
In addition to contributing to the web site database with real monarch sightings, each student had made a paper monarch in October in order to participate in the Journey North Symbolic Monarch Migration. Our paper monarchs were distributed in the autumn by Journey North throughout Mexico to public school children. When the real colonies of over wintering monarchs broke up in February at the monarch sanctuary near the village of Angangueo in Mexico, these same school children drew their own symbolic monarchs and wrote letters to their awaiting caretakers in Battersea. Our package of symbolic butterflies arrived from Mexico on May 16, coinciding with a promised Mexican Fiesta celebration in class featuring a monarch piñata, Mexican decorations, souvenirs and artifacts, a Mexican lunch menu prepared by the students and Mexican music. We timed this fiesta to celebrate the first monarch sighting in Canada by one of the online entomologist experts from the University of Toronto who we had been previously in contact with our class. I also presented a slide show of my two years teaching and travelling in Mexico. This was an exciting day and the children were fascinated with stories of the children I had met there and my tales of living in the tropics and visiting a variety of archeological sites.
Our package held 20 Mexican symbolic monarchs with individual letters attached, written, of course, in Spanish. These monarchs originated in four different Mexican villages and cities. I did my best to translate these and we responded that week, writing replies to let the senders know that their butterflies had arrived safely back in Canada. This was also a high impact activity that expanded into reading the Mexican maps more closely to locate the origins of these Mexican butterflies from Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, Atizapan de Zaragoza, and the monarch sanctuary village of Angangeou. I had undertaken pen pal programs in all my other teaching years but this project seemed to provide even more intrinsic motivation for the students to write. I believe this is due in part to the personal connection the students felt to the monarchs and the anticipation that built up over six months. They were rewarded as the arrival of letters and the enclosed symbolic monarchs were all unique and so carefully crafted.
Recognition for Our Inquiry
Nothing could match the children’s anticipation of the return of the real monarchs. Celebrating their arrival into Canada intensified the anticipation of spotting the first local monarch, yet the weather did not cooperate. The butterflies’ late arrival gave us lots of time to revisit and discuss the effects of weather on the migration and the natural world. This delay also coincided with several newspaper reporters spending the afternoon with us to investigate what was happening in our inquiry. The reporters asked to visit when they learned that the class had won the Cataraqui Conservation Area Foundation Ecology Award for 2000 sponsored by DuPont, a major industry in the area. This award recognized the class for being active investigators and conservationists in their natural world and for connecting this with investigation and research skills through the use of technology. Having an authentic audience to which they could demonstrate their understanding about the year’s work and what they had learned was very rewarding. It gave the children yet another opportunity to share their energy, knowledge and skills with others. I observed throughout these afternoons their steady focus and their insight and delight into the fact that the reporters were not experts on the migration or the monarchs. The reporters asked what the learner’s favourite part of the year had been and the variety of responses reveal the richness and diversity of the inquiry. Finally, on June 16, a monarch was spotted on school property and we were able to post our first spring sighting to Journey North. We were able to report this observation on the final monarch posting of the season during the last computer class of the school year.
Following these experiences I asked the learners to share any final thoughts they had about using the Journey North program this year. They knew that the intended audience was to be other teachers who will attend a Summer Institute this August, where I have been invited to present my use of the Journey North program. The learners were once again incredibly eager to share their personal knowledge and feelings about their learning. It is apparent that different learning styles were engaged throughout the year’s program. Their commentary on the video and in their end-of-year writing samples indicate that what appealed to them was as unique and varied as they are as individuals.
Looking Back: The Transformative Power of Action Research
When I reread my journals in which I collected data over a full school year and when I reread this paper, I see clearly that many of the opportunities I have sought for the learners in my classroom have paralleled my own learning opportunities afforded by undertaking an action research inquiry. This is truly transformative for me because it demonstrates that constructivist learning activities in our classroom have empowered us to be co-learners. The contributions and collaboration among students, myself, and our online peers (theirs and mine) have been critical elements in boosting our interest and participation. The Journey North experience generated a year’s worth of uninterrupted personal and professional learning about the use of technology in our classroom and about action research.
Often my experience with professional development opportunities has been predetermined by the school I was employed in. This is typically delivered by an outside expert who parachutes in and I am often left wondering at the end of it, if that time was well spent, as it frequently does not change, inform or improve my teaching practice. I always feel that a "one size fits all" approach can never meet the needs of a diverse group of teachers. Action research has allowed me to identify an area that I had questions about and to pursue this question vigorously using reflective practice. This research framework allowed for a distillation of the recurring themes and patterns that promoted constructivist teaching and learning and initiated new teaching practices. It has led to a deeper understanding of constructivist theory and the transformative power of action research to increase my knowledge about my own teaching and learning.
Senese (2000) comments that teachers involved in action research "naturally want to share their results with others" and that their enthusiasm for action research often "[leads] them to independent actions" including publication (p. 4). My academic and personal excitement about my learning over the year drove me to pursue publication for the very first time. I now wait with some trepidation the report on whether my paper, which has been accepted for publication, will survive the editorial process and actually be published. During the writing of this submission, my reflective journal captures my wonder and surprise at what had possessed me to undertake the writing of this article in the midst of the daily time pressures of my classroom work this spring, in addition to my M.Ed. work. It proves to me that I have a deep commitment to pursuing new educational ideas like action research in the classroom. The results have potential meaning and value for other teachers wanting to use technology and searching for ways to initiate and undertake self-directed professional development.
Time proves to be a conspirator in the pursuit of action research. Pratt (1992, p. 230) describes time as "our most precious resource" and adds that "it is the only resource that is totally finite." Senese (2000, p. 4) writes that "teachers who make decisions and act from positions of authority based on their own research and on their own experiences must have time outside of the classroom." What he is describing is an enlightened educational setting that provides release time for teachers who are engaged in action research in order to collaborate without the demands of daily teaching responsibilities. My action research unfolded in the absence of any institutionalised release time or support. It was a personal and professional commitment to provide even larger amounts than normal, of evening and weekend time to pursue it. My time commitment was sustained because of the personal exhilaration I felt throughout the year and the positive benefits I observed for the learners in our classroom.
Looking Forward
As I consider the influence of this experience on my teaching career, I see that I have been provided with a valuable framework to continuously transform myself as a teacher. I am no longer tied to the limitations of prescribed professional development. I have developed skills this year that will allow my understanding of my teacher knowledge to deepen and evolve into a life-long process of inquiry. Posing questions embedded in my practice and exploring them with the learners in any year will provide answers and more questions. Action research parallels many of the constructivist learning opportunities that assist me in guiding the learners I serve. My goal is to ignite curiosity, pose questions, explore topics from a variety of perspectives, use the best resources, connect previous experience and knowledge to new learning, and share what we have learned with others. Teachers and learners are on similar journeys, perpetually co-constructing ideas, knowledge and attitudes about learning and teaching.
References
Barth, R.S. (1990) . Improving schools from within. San Franscisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hobson, D. (1996) . Beginning with the self: Using autobiography and journal writing in teacher research. In G. Burnaford, D. Hobson, & J. Fischer (Eds.), Teachers doing research (pp. 1 - 17). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Journey North. (1999). http://www.learner.org/jnorth/orientation/About.html
Perkins, D. (1999). The many faces of constructivism. Educational Leadership, 57, 6 - 11.
Pratt, D. (1992). Curriculum planning: A handbook for professionals. Unpublished manuscript. Kingston, ON: Queen’s University.
Senese, J. C. (2000, April). What are the conditions that sustain teacher research? Paper presented at the meeting of the American Education Research Association, New Orleans.
Bibiographical Note:
Name: Christine Jamieson
Academic Background: BA, Brock University/Queen’s University, M. Ed., Queen’s University, in progress.
Teaching Background: Currently teaching English at Ernestown Secondary School, Limestone District School Board (on leave from the elementary panel), International school experience in Mexico and Switzerland, in both elementary and secondary school settings.
Current Interests: teachers and technology, self-directed study, action research, reflective practice.
E-mail address: jamiesonc@limestonedsb.on.ca