A new XMCAer, Tara Ratnam, is having difficulty posting the attached
message to the larger group. Until she works out the technical
difficulties, I am posting this in her behalf. M.R.
> Dear members, I have a question regarding sociohistorical approach and look forward to your response.
> I am doing research in the area of teacher development(with teachers of
> English at the Pre University level in Karnataka, India). I have two
> levels of data to explore the two following questions:
>
> 1) How do teachers' perspectives and practice develop in the
> sociocurricular context in which they work?(What facilitates and
> constrains the development of teachers in a particular sociohistorical
> cultural context?)
>
> 2) What is the nature of social interaction that can foster further
> development and change?
>
> To address the first question, I have data from interview, class
> observation and Field notes of 24 teachers. I have also assessed their
> developmental levels using MID(Measurement of intellectual development)
> and LEP(Learning Environment Preferences), both based on Perry(1970)
> scheme of adult intellectual development. However, I am not looking at
> the cognitive level data per se, to build pictures of teachers as
> decontextualised individuals, but to see it in the specific context of
> teachers' work and culture that chanels their thinking and practice. For
> instance, there seems to be a mismatch between where teachers place on
> the the intellectual scheme and their practice. LEPand MID seem to have
> provided me a source to compare what teachers perceive as ideal
> teaching/learning(reflected in LEP and MID measure) with the kind of
> they actually create in the classroom(from the qualitative data of
> interview and class observation) and thus attempt to build a more
> complex picture of teachers, not as isolated individuals, but as
> embedded in the sociocurricular context in which they work.
>
> At another level, I have also been having more sustained interactions with
> three teachers who are interested in their ongoing development. It is an
> informal collaborative setting( we have no provision, at present, for
> fromal pre- or in-service teacher education at the Pre University level)
> where we share problems,make plans and try them out in each other's
> classrooms and reflect on what happened and why. I have been recording our
> group interactions.
>
> QUESTION:
> >From a sociohistorical perspective, would it be reasonable to consider the
> first set of data(addressing the first question) as refering to analysis of
> development at ontogenetic level, and the process( more immediate) of
> change in perception and practice taking place in our collaborative
> group(addressing the second question) as development at the microgenetic
> level? And see these levels as embedded in both the immediate
> evolutionary context of the Pre University Educational set up( its nascent
> history of development of 30 years) and the larger sociohistorical context of
> formal schooloing at the national level?
> Thanks
> tara ratnam
>
>
>
Martin Ryder
http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/martin.html
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