A complex system analysis of practitioners' discourse about research

Focus on Learning Problems in Mathematics, Wntr, 2008 by Randall E. Groth

Methodology

This report can be described as an intrinsic case study (Stake, 2000), because the goal was to understand and model the dynamics of interaction among a particular group of practitioners rather than to make broad generalizations. Nevertheless, it is likely that readers will draw personal generalizations from the case study by recognizing common empirical ground with their own experiences. In essence, the goal of the case study is to facilitate the formation of such naturalistic generalizations (Stake & Trumbull, 1982).

Participants

Nine practitioners from a school district in the Mid-Atlantic U.S. participated in the study. Three taught mathematics at one middle school in the district, two at another district middle school, and one taught mathematics part-time in after-school and summer programs. The remaining three played supporting roles for teachers, as one was a district-wide resource teacher, one was a new teachers mentor, and another was the curriculum coordinator for the district. A summary of some of the characteristics of the participants is provided in Table 1. All names in Table 1 are pseudonyms.

Procedure

Participants took part in the conversation described in this study as part of an ongoing professional development program I had designed and implemented (Groth & Bergner, 2007). This placed me in the position of a participant-observer (Glesne, 1999) rather than that of a detached researcher. The conversation took place online in an asynchronous learning network (ALN). Harism's (1990) definition captures the key characteristics of an ALN: "(a) Many-to-many communication; (b) place independence; (c) time independence; (that is, time-flexible, not a temporal); (d) text-based; and (e) computer-mediated interaction" (p. 43). Data gathering was facilitated by the fact that the text of the discourse was captured immediately when entered online. The ALN conversation described in this study took place over a one-week span.

In addition to facilitating data collection, there were pedagogical reasons for having the conversation in an ALN. Shotsberger (1999) and Newell, Wilsman, Langenfeld, and McIntosh (2002) each reported using ALN environments to promote peer discourse and reflection among mathematics teachers about pedagogical issues. The many-to-many feature of an ALN allows individuals to engage in a number of threads of discourse simultaneously, therefore encouraging the emergence of a complex system. The place and time independence features allow individuals to participate where and when suits them. This was important for the participants in the present study because their professional lives took place in different buildings within the school district.

Since participants received credit toward recertification for participation in the online discussion, I set parameters for taking part in it. All participants were to make at least four posts to the discussion board each week. At least three of the four posts were to be responses to others. This parameter was set in order to help the group move toward collective knowledge construction, which can be a positive outcome of participation in an ALN (Salmon, 2004). However, no guidelines were given for the specific content of the posts, since such moderator-imposed restrictions had been counterproductive to reflection and peer discourse in previous studies (Dysthe, 2002; Wickstron, 2003).