Qualitative Research in Education in Canada

Other interesting qualitative work has been developed in the adjoining province of Alberta — a province with something of a tradition of social change and social scientific studies. At the University of Edmonton Faculty of Education, a fascinating and rich tradition of phenomenological teacher education has developed under Max Van Manen. It has an interesting off-shoot in the action-research work initiated by scholars such as Terry Carson at Alberta.

In his new book on the phenomenological tradition in teacher education William Pinar and William Reynolds (1992) write from a position centred in the U.S.A.: “The phenomenological movement continues to grow in Canada, and its influence is increasingly felt in the United States. However, that work remains “marginalized” in the American curriculum field, partly due to the legacy of positivism in the traditional field, partly due to the hegemony of Marxism in the reconceptualized field. Perhaps its marginalization also follows from its academic center being in Edmonton, Alberta, a city remote from most American cities, at least in imagination. Finally, even within Canada, phenomenology has struggled against other traditions in curriculum, and like many such struggles, there is an institutional element. Perhaps the central institutional rivalry in Canada is between the University of Alberta and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.

For all of these reasons the phenomenological tradition — while strong in Canada and worthy of the attention of all curriculum specialists, even by those who will reject it — remains vague in the minds of American students of curriculum (pp. vii)”.

They add:

Superficially one might be tempted to contrast phenomenology as English Canada’s counterpoint to Quebecois post-structuralism, but this ignores that a Dutch emigré (van Manen) brought European phenomenology — especially that of the Utrecht School in the Netherlands — to Canada, and that a Japanese-Canadian, Ted Aoki, has done more than anyone other than van Manen to articulate its contributions to understanding curriculum topics (ibid).

Hence we can see that in the examples provided of the most populous provinces of Canada, new initiatives with regard to teacher education at the provincial level have led to the sponsorship of genres of teacher education which both cover a qualitative spectrum. In Ontario, narrative modalities associated with the teacher’s personal practice knowledge have been sponsored and in British Columbia, a more inquiry oriented, reflective mode following the teacher as researcher pattern have been defined. This pattern of provincial teacher education reform leading to a range of interesting qualitative methodologies for teacher education can be seen at work throughout the country.

New Directions for Teacher Education: Some Canadian Perspectives

The work of Elbaz, of Clandinin and of other Canadians has argued in innovative and interesting ways that we should seek to understand teachers’ personal practical knowledge. The addition of the personal aspect in this formulation is a welcome move forward hinting as it does at the importance of biographical perspectives. Other traditions have focussed on the reflective practitioner, the teacher as researchers of their own practice or a phenomenological approach to practice. But again the personal is being linked irrevocably to practice. It is as if the teacher is his or her practice. For teacher educators, such specificity of focus is understandable but broader perspectives might achieve more, not solely in terms of our understandings but ultimately in ways that feed back into changes in practical knowledge.

There are similar reservations about the “reflective teacher” or “teacher as researcher” mode of teacher education. The “teacher as researcher” slogan seems to me to carry a number of problems. Firstly in implying that the teacher becomes the researcher of his or her own practice, it frees the researchers/intellectual in the academy from clear responsibility in this process. On the contrary, such people should have a primary, and as yet somewhat neglected, responsibility for sponsoring and sustaining the teacher as researcher.

New traditions are developing in Canada which stand against the notion that the focus of the teacher as researcher should be mainly upon practice. In some ways this is the logical outcome of the package of teacher as researcher for the converse is to “researcher as teacher”. The teachers work though is politically and socially constructed. The parameters to practice whether they be biographical or political range over a very wide terrain. To narrow the focus to “practice as defined” is to make the focus of research a victim of historical circumstances, particularly political tendencies. In many ways, the New Right is seeking to turn the teacher’s practice into that of a technician, a routinized and trivialised deliverer of predesigned package. To accept those definitions and to focus on “practice” so defined is to play into their hands.

Now of course the teacher as researcher of practice will ideally seek to critique and transcend such definitions of practice. But by focussing on practice in this way, the initiative for defining our starting point passes to politicians and bureaucrats. It would sponsor more autonomous and critical research if we adopted wider lenses of inquiry for the teacher as researcher.