Using The Cartographic Research Method In A Project On How Early Childhood And Primary education teachers learn.

Author(s):

Jose Correa(submitting)Regina Guerra Guezuraga(presenting)Aingeru Gutierrez-Cabello(presenting)Estibaliz Aberasturi-Apraiz Asuncion Martinez-Arbelaiz Josu Sanz-Alonso

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 02 B, The Professional Learning of Early Years Teachers

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

15:15-16:45

Room:

K3.16

Chair:

Ken Jones

Contribution

The project titled “How early childhood education and primary education teachers learn: implications for and challenges in facing social change. (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness EDU2015-70912-C2-2-R)” addresses the question of how teachers of Early Childhood Education (ECE) and Primary Education (PE) learn from the information they gain in group, classroom, and school settings as well in everyday life. Literature reviews show these situations to be highly relevant, yet they are little studied (Opfer & Pedder, 2011). In this project, artistic methods (Hernández, 2008), classroom and school observations, discussion groups and biographical narratives are combined in an attempt to understand how teachers learn, both from work and outside their work, about: discipline-related knowledge; pedagogical, technological, cultural and social referents; themselves, and student learning. By generating visual narratives, or cartographies, as an artistic epistemology (Hernandez, Castro, Alonso & Canales, 2017), we try to inquire into those interstices, displacements, unstable journeys, ways of knowing, assemblages and entanglementsthrough which teachers perform their learning paths. Through a systematic process of coding and analysis, we hope to contribute to knowledge about what, with whom and where teachers learn and the repercussions that this knowledge has for improving teaching relationships and educational innovation.

Aims

The main aims of this study are:

Visually narrate via cartography the spaces in which ECE and PE teachers learn, in order to reveal their value as sources of knowledge and experience.
Identify teachers’ learning experiences in those spaces and the perspectives on learning that emerge.
Explore how the ways that teachers learn move between the settings and environments identified and within their professional practices and decisions.
Create training activities that incorporate the project’s processes and results, thus allowing teacher identities to be shaped in a way that improves education.

Method

The project’s design is collaborative action research, using ethnographic approaches that describe the social lives of the participants and art-based educational research methods. Participant-created cartographies were a key data gathering tool, because what is mapped underlies what is transformed. Following Guattari & Deluze (1980), cartographies are a strategy for potentially representing all spaces, relationships and transitions, for both individuals as well as groups. It is not a method that is applied; rather, it is experienced and taken on as a stance (Rogoff, 2006). It is a research approach that makes it possible to represent and analyse experiences from the point of view of our collaborators, which we cannot explore meaningfully in any other way. The coding, categorisation and analysis of these learning cartographies generates knowledge that can help us face the challenges of training and improving education in order to respond to the challenges of social change and innovation. During the spring of 2016, 22 participant teachers (11 from ECE and 11 from PE) and were selected and asked to create cartographies that showed their learning spaces and relationships, both within and outside the school. After all the participants were recruited, in September 2016 the dates for the cartography creation workshops were set. During the autumn, we carried out the field work and an email was sent to each participant. The message informed them of the research objectives, where the workshops would take place, the schedule for the two initial workshops, the activities that would be undertaken at each workshop, and what participants would need to bring to make their cartographies (with an emphasis on participants’ pre-workshop reflections and meaningful images that could go into their cartographic compositions). Once the participants’ cartographies were completed, the analysis work began. The researchers wrote and shared two reports. The first focused on the cartographic work that the teachers had agreed to undertake; the second identified the emerging themes and described the process experienced by researchers during the data-gathering, their relationships maintained with teacher during cartographies building process and their reflections on their own position as researcher.

Expected Outcomes

Using the data gathered and a systematic process for collaborative analysis and coding that is still in progress, we expect to contribute knowledge regarding what, where and with whom teachers learn (about discipline-related knowledge; pedagogical, technological, cultural and social referents; themselves and student learning) and the repercussions that this knowledge has for improving teaching relationships and educational innovation. Our preliminary analysis demonstrates that this research approach is helping to identify certain emerging themes that contribute to improving the understanding of the learning processes of ECE and PE teachers (visualising and valuing the importance of learning and teachers’ lives outside the school, the importance of informal and non-formal learning, and the role of digital technologies in teaching and learning), all of which are fundamental questions for facing the challenges of continuous change and the up-to-date training that contemporary society demands of teachers. In addition, this research is showing us the tensions, difficulties and opportunities that are associated with methodological approaches that are based on visual methodologies and artistic methods, which lets us gain access to the information that is elicited when using means outside spoken and written language and the practice of observing, methods that the research team had been using previously.

References

Fendler, R., Onses, J., Hernández-Hernández, F. (2013). Becoming arts-based researchers: A journey through the experience of silence in the university classroom. International Journal of Educations through Art, 9 (2), 257-263. Guattari, F. & Deluze, G. (1980) Mil mesetas: Capitalismo y Esquizofrenia. Hernández, F. (2008). Investigación basada en artes. Propuestas para repensar la investigación en educación. Educatio XXI 26 1-34 Hernandez, F., Castro, A., Alonso, C., and Canales, C. (2017). Teachers’ learning cartographies as process of research entitlement. Ecer 2017. Cophenage. Opfer, D. V. & Pedder, D. (2011). Conceptualizing Teacher Professional Learning Review of Educational Research, 81 (3), 276-407. Rogoff, I. (2006). Academy as Potentiality. Zehar, 60-61, 4-9.

Author Information

Jose Correa (submitting)

UPV/EHU

SAN SEBASTIAN

Regina Guerra Guezuraga (presenting)

University of the Basque Country

Gernika-Lumo

Aingeru Gutierrez-Cabello (presenting)

UPV/EHU, Spain

Estibaliz Aberasturi-Apraiz

UPV/EHU, Spain

Asuncion Martinez-Arbelaiz

Usac

Josu Sanz-Alonso

UPV/EHU, Spain

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