Are we looking at the wrong data?

#datadriven #education #askingthewrongquestions #praxis

A preamble about my worldview

The preamble is not particularly important to anyone other than me, but it does position my thinking line. On top of that it may even totally bore some.

Whilst I am an educator, I hold a “theoretical perspective” (Crotty, 1998, 10) around the conceptualization of reality and knowledge, which rather than coming from the social sciences arises from an earlier career as an ecologist with a theoretical background in the disciplinary heritage of phytosociology (the sociology of plants) a branch of cenology on the boundary between Odum's ecology of energy flow and the narrative process of describing biomes within Von Humbolt’s biogeography. Unlike the positivism usually associated with “the sciences”, phytosociology is almost uniquely a natural science, situated in interpretation and in particular the interpretation of living things and their relationships with their environment expressed through a description of “the community concept” as a subjective structuralist endeavour (Vincent, 2021, 34–35). On the surface, this places my understanding of reality in a worldview aligned with Platonic Idealism, rather than Aristotelian empiricism (Willis, 2007, 350) and accepting of Feyeraband’s (1993, 8) assertion that objective criteria for establishing a deductive truth may not exist in most investigations.

My worldview is influenced and leans heavily towards the Foucaultian position that knowledge is not attributable to a set of beliefs or sum of true beliefs but rather is a “space where the subject stands as a knower, and the field in which concepts are determined and statements are arranged” where knowledge is not a “possession” of “truth” (Vukovi? and Fran?ois, 2014, 250). It is a view of reality from a particular European philosophical perspective where even objective reality is subject to changing conceptualisation within a “théorie de la connaissance” (Vukovi? and Fran?ois, 10–11; Simons, 2017, 42).

Thus my epistemological and ontological stance is rooted in an interpretive approach. It stems not from a hypothético-déductive approach and its need for critical tests to distinguish the “truth”, but rather from hypothético-inductive approaches which question reality through subjective generalisations as relativism (Raymond, 1982, 778; Quinn and Dunham, 1983, 604; Easterby-Smith, Thorpe and Jackson, 2015, 140). As Umberto Eco (1990)(1990) expressed all scientific processes require assumptions which are taken to be true by the scientist to progress (158-159).

Therefore, this leads to a general embrace of “way(s) of understanding what it means to know” (Crotty,10) again rooted within a certain philosophical underpinning, that separates “théorie de la connaissance” which aligns more towards the Anglophone notion of epistemology than épistémologie as concerned with “philosophie des sciences” within the European sense (Vukovic, 10-11; Simons, 42).

OK None of that was particularly important - but it means that I do not need the crutch of data and deduction to accept something may be a phenomenon!

So the question:

Given all of the above, where do I as an educator sit within the framing of education as “data” driven? Well, our data is only as good as the questions we are asking of it. As a phytosocioloist if I ask the question is vegetation plot A different (actually we use similarity not difference) from Vegetation plot B, I can collect data on plant species and abundance and then at a certain level of similarity decide they are different. But at a higher taxonomic level, they both may just be part of a forest system.

The same applies to data drawn from assessments. If we ask the question about differences between students we may get answers which suggest we need to do more to bridge those differences. However, as John Hattie, suggests, evidence on its own without dialogue is not enough without thinking about its use (Knudsen, 2017, 256). This allows educators the time and space to develop the links between what needs to change (reflective practice) and the data collected (research) which John Hattie sees as often missing in the rush for evidence-based panaceas that improve teaching practice on their own (Knudsen 2017: 257). As Hattie has often pointed out his evidence-based approach is not a pedagogical methodology. His high-effect “strategies” tend to be an automatic part of the praxis of effective teachers.

So does this mean we are not asking the right questions? Well as a phytosociologist data is just a tool not an answer. I intuitively recognise Garigue vegetation from Maquis in the Mediterranean Type Ecosystems even when the data doesn't automatically separate each out. But and its possibly a big but! the defining difference between them is often not the vegetation per se but the environmental factors in which they develop -? in ecology we call these abiotic factors.

In education, we seem to have become a bit obsessed with the data from tests rather than the data from teaching - education’s abiotic factors. Elizabeth City (2009)? has clearly shown how many students at Grade 10 are only ever exposed to work and assignments which are more Grade 8 level than Grade 10 level. Alongside this Fullen and Hargreaves,from years of working in the classroom, have shown that developing teacher's professional capacity has the greatest impact on learning and school improvement. Wasn’t that what Finland did?

So are we actually looking at the right data when we talk about data-driven education? Does the data need to be numerical? Because as Connelly and Clandinin “those aspects of practice that might be described as being part of their (teachers) knowledge base” as a continually developing narrative (Loughran: 34). A narrative developed within a “professional knowledge landscape”, positioned at “the interface of theory and practice in teachers lives” (Clandinin and Connelly: 24).?

How much data do we really have on that “knowledge landscape” of being a teacher do we really have in our own schools? Axiomatically I think we may spend too much time looking at the least important data and may need to spend more time having dialogue to draw out the inductive answers. Because at its core education is a community process.

References

City, E.A. ed. (2009) Instructional rounds in education: a network approach to improving teaching and learning. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Education Press.

Clandinin, D.J. (2015) Stories to live by on the professional knowledge landscape. Waikato Journal of Education, [online] 20(3). https://doi.org/10.15663/wje.v20i3.233.

Clandinin, D.J. and Connelly, F.M. (1996) Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes: Teacher Stories. Stories of Teachers. School Stories. Stories of Schools. Educational Researcher, 25(3), 24–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/1176665.

Connelly, F.M. and Clandinin, D.J. eds. (1999) Shaping a professional identity: stories of educational practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Crotty, M. (1998) The foundations of social research: meaning and perspective in the research process. London?; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.

Easterby-Smith, M., Thorpe, R. and Jackson, (2015) Management and business research. 5th edition. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Eco, U. (1990) The limits of interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press (Advances in semiotics).

Feyerabend, (1993) Against method. 3rd ed. London?; New York: Verso.

Foucault, M. (1986) ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics. Translated by J. Miskowiec, 16(1), 22. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

Knudsen, H., 2017. John Hattie: I’m a statistician, I’m not a theoretician. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 3(3), 253–261. https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2017.1415048.

Loughran, J.J. (2002) Effective Reflective Practice: In Search of Meaning in Learning about Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(1), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487102053001004.

Quinn, J.F. and Dunham, A.E. (1983) ‘On Hypothesis Testing in Ecology and Evolution’, The American Naturalist, 122(5), 602–617.

Raymond, J.C. (1982) ‘Rhetoric: The Methodology of the Humanities’, College English, 44(8), 778. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/377330

Vincent, B. (2021) ‘What has become of our cenosis? For a renewed cenology’, Plant Sociology, 58(2), 29–40. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3897/pls2021582/03.

Vincent, B. and Catteau, E. (2021) ‘Sciences naturelles = sciences humaines?? Rééquilibrer les sciences naturelles’, Carnets botaniques, (71), 1–13. Available at: https://doi.org/10.34971/8267-XC69.

Vukovi?, I. and Fran?ois, A. (2014) Epistémologie fran?aise-French epistemology. 1st. Toulouse: Université de Toulouse - Le Mirail équipe de Recherche sur les Rationalités Philosophiques et les Savoirs.