Accounts of and Accounting for Emerging Researchers' Transformations: Graduate Students' Perspectives

• In Event: 58.052 - Transforming the Research-Practice Connection in Mathematics Classrooms With Nondominant Students

Abstract

In addition to the transformations in mathematical understandings and identities that teachers and school students experience in this participatory design-based research project, we as graduate students have experienced our own transformations as emerging researchers. As the research methodologies that guide this project blur the lines between the assumed analytical researcher and analyzable participant, we both have interrogated naïve expectations of reaching a stage of expert researcher. Through interactions with participating teachers, students, principal investigator, and each other, we continue to explore our roles, connections with each other, and ultimately alternative ways to research mathematics teaching and learning.
Our participation in this project has helped us refine and expand our understandings of the concept of disciplined inquiry. Shulman (1981) characterized disciplined inquiry as consistency among the “theoretical or ideological commitments of the investigator” (p. 12), the social issues considered, the questions asked, and the methods involved in the research process. Mason’s (2011) distinction between account of and accounting for has motivated our understanding of disciplined inquiry. Accounts of are vivid descriptions of an incident in a way that is “as free of theorizing, emotional content, justification, and explanation as possible” (Mason, 2011, p. 39). Postponing accounting for (theorizing about and explaining the incident) promotes openness to multiple interpretations and meanings. The teachers and principal investigator in this project have contributed to our preparation as future researchers by being intentional in accounting of prior to accounting for, in order to “act freshly rather than automatically out of habit” (Mason, 2011, p. 36).
As we interact with students, teachers and the principal investigator in the classroom lessons, and participate in debriefing, co-planning sessions, and project meetings, we make sense of the concept of disciplined inquiry. In classroom lessons, we take field notes on participants’ noticings, interact with students and teachers, and occasionally teach mini-lessons. In debriefing and co-planning sessions, we take notes focusing on teachers’ past experiences and future goals in the classroom, provide information from inside or outside the classroom when requested, pose queries when appropriate, and observe our principal investigator in his role of supporting the teachers in seeking their goals during the session. In our project meetings, we listen to our principal investigator articulate the framework of the project to motivate our reflections and future actions. We also share descriptions of observations, and we participate in making sense of the observations. In a process that mirrors the process in which the teachers and the principal investigator engage when noticing students’ mathematical thinking, we have recorded our accounts of before accounting for what we observe. Ultimately, we see our participation as genuine and intentional interaction with students, teachers and the principal investigator. Those interactions have embodied disciplined inquiry in ways that permeate our emergence into the field of educational research, as we continue to reflect on our accounts of interactions with teachers and students in order to account for our ideas about mathematics teaching and learning.

Authors

• José Manuel Martínez, Michigan State University

• Kenneth R. Bradfield, Michigan State University