13.2 Appendix c: the reflective practitioner  (Page 19/25)

Example #2: focusing on development

Since 1981, Vivian Paley has published a series of short books documenting and interpreting her observations of young children in classrooms (1981, 1986, 1991, 1998, 2000, 2005). Paley was interested in how young children develop or change over the long term, and in particular how the development looks from the point of view of a classroom teacher. In one of these books, for example, she observed one child in particular, Mollie, from the time she entered nursery school just after her third birthday until after the child turned four years old (Paley, 1986). Her interest was not focused on curriculum, as Clifford and Friesen's had done, but on Mollie as a growing human being; "the subject which I most wished to learn," she wrote, "is children" (p. xiv). Paley therefore wrote extended narrative (or story-like) observations about the whole range of activities of this one child, and wove in periodic brief reflections on the observations. Because the observations took story-like form, her books read a bit like novels: themes are sometimes simply suggested by the story line, rather than stated explicitly. Using this approach, Paley demonstrated (but occasionally also stated) several important developmental changes. In Mollie at Three (1988), for example, she describes examples of Mollie's language development. At three years, the language was often disconnected from Mollie’s actions—she would talk about one thing, but do another. By four, she was much more likely to tie language to her current activities, and in this sense she more often "said what she meant". A result of the change was that Mollie also began understanding and following classroom rules as the year went on, because the language of rules became more connected in her mind to the actions to which they referred.

Vivian Paley's book had some of the characteristics of action research—but with differences from Clifford and Friesen’s. Like their research, Paley's “data” was based on her own teaching, while her teaching was influenced in turn by her systematic observations. Like Clifford and Friesen’s, Paley’s research involved numerous reflections on teaching, and it led to a public sharing of the reflections—in this case in the form of several small books. Unlike Clifford and Friesen, though, Paley worked independently, without collaboration. Unlike Clifford and Friesen, she deliberately integrated observation and interpretation as they might be integrated in a piece of fiction, so that the resulting "story" often implied or showed its message without stating it in so may words. In this regard her work had qualities of what some educators call arts-based research, which are studies that take advantage of an artistic medium (in this case, narrative or story-like writing) to heighten readers' understanding and response to research findings (Barone and Eisner, 2006). If you are studying the use of space in the classroom, for example, then aesthetically organized visual depictions (photos, drawings) of the room may be more helpful and create more understanding than verbal descriptions. If you are studying children's musical knowledge, on the other hand, recordings of performances by the children may be more helpful and informative than discussions of performances.