5.2. The Choice of Ethnographic Research
5.3.2.1. Some Of The Drawbacks Of Using Participant Observation
One major limitation of using participant observation was that the observation was limited to one small group and the situation in this teacher training college might not typify those of other teacher training colleges. This, though, would be true of any organisation. As Frankenberg (1982) pointed out "people in general participate in societies (however large) through small
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groups. Sharing their experience is the most direct way of seeing how the characteristics of the larger society affect them" (p. 51). I acknowledge that my study was focused on only one college. But I see this study as exploratory research into mathematics teacher education in Malaysia. Informed by the findings from this study, large scale surveys could be conducted in the future, if appropriate. Frankenberg (1982) had exactly the same view when he said that "it is always possible to check hypotheses formulated in participant observation studies by a large- scale survey" (p. 51).
Could my presence change the situation I was studying? I doubted it. The participants in the study might be on their 'best behaviour' but I doubted that they would maintain it for long.
Moreover, it was not very likely that one single participant observer, over a period of four months, could affect behaviours that had been acquired through more than a decade of classroom experiences. If I did produce changes, I needed to be alert to their nature and derivation. Frankenberg (ibid.) suggested that if changes did occur, the presence of the participant observer "may prove a catalyst for changes that are already taking place" (p. 51).
Though participant observers might be able to bring about changes, I did not see myself in that position because the pre-service teachers knew that I could not affect them in any way, either in terms of grades or their standing with the lecturers for I had explained to them that my position in the college was to observe and to find out what was going on. As such my 'low status' in the college was unlikely to have the effect, catalytic or otherwise, of bringing about changes.
Participant observation was both time-consuming and expensive. In this study in addition to college-based observation, I visited sixteen different schools, fourteen of them three times, distributed over an area of 60 kilometres.
5.3.3. Interpretivist Assumptions
Central to interpretivism is the idea that all human activity is
fundamentally a social and meaning-making experience ... (Eisenhart, 1988, p. 102).
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As a researcher I was concerned with my many roles. As a researcher, who is also a teacher, I made meanings through my interpretations of the lecturers' and pre-service teachers'
descriptions of their experiences in the interviews together with their behaviours in TTC and school (see Chapters Ten and Twelve). Davies pointed out that researchers who were of the same sex as the participants
may aid in familiarity and confidences .... however, I might have lost out on the 'cultural stranger' role which is able to explore seemingly 'commonsense' explanations of the world, and which benefits from seeing unremarkable events as phenomena to be unpacked. (1985, p.
85)
What concerned me was the impact of my own experiences as a teacher on my interpretations of the pre-service teachers' experiences and actions. My concern here was echoed by Cicourel:
When the observer seeks to describe the interaction of two
participants the environment within his reach is congruent with that of the actors, and he is able to observe the face-to-face encounter, but he cannot presume that his experiences are identical to the actors ... It is difficult for the observer 'to verify his interpretation of the others' experiences by checking them against the others' own subjective
interpretations' ... The observer is likely to draw on his own experiences as a common-sense actor and scientific researcher to decide the character of the action scene (cited in Jaworski, 1994, p.
67).
As an observer I "cannot avoid the use of interpretive procedures in research" (Jaworski, p. 67) for I relied upon their properties to carry out my research.
As a meaning-making individual and as a researcher studying the beliefs held by Malaysian mathematics lecturers and pre-service teachers, I wanted to ensure that the accounts of different groups were unpacked and interpreted in the light of their social contexts. This was because I perceived the participants of my study as functioning in different social groups, namely discretely (i) the mathematics lecturers, (ii) pre-service teachers and jointly (iii) the
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mathematics lecturers and the pre-service teachers together. Each of these groups, I believed, constructed their own intra- and inter group idiosyncratic meanings, known only to their members. Therefore, in my view, certain activities held particular meanings for lecturers and hence influenced whether they chose to engage the pre-service teachers in these activities.
Similarly, whether pre-service teachers participated in certain activities presented by the lecturers depended on the meanings they held for them. Pre-service teachers could choose to conform to certain demands or participate in certain activities presented by lecturers but reject others because these activities provoked shared meanings for both themselves and the lecturers.
For example lecturers wanted pre-service teachers to engage in more micro-teaching sessions so as to improve their teaching skills, which pre-service teachers agreed. However pre-service teachers rejected the critiquing part of the micro-teaching sessions because they rejected putting their friends in an embarrassing situation. Their meanings could be interpreted
differently by me. Denzin (1978, cited in Eisenhart, 1988) described the major component of an interpretivist view
The social world of human beings is not made up of objects that have intrinsic meaning. The meaning of objects lies in the actions that human beings take toward them ... Social reality as it is sensed, known, and understood is a social production. Interacting individuals produce and define their own definitions of situations [and] the process of defining situations is everchanging ... humans are
...capable of ... shaping and guiding their own behaviour and that of others [intentionally or unintentionally, and] humans learn ... the definitions they attach to social objects through interactions with others (p. 102-103).
According to Carr and Kemmis (1986) "social reality can only be understood by understanding the subjective meanings of individuals" (p. 86). They emphasised that human behaviour consists of actions and these actions "are meaningful to those who perform them and become
intelligible to others only by reference to the meaning that the individual actor attaches to them" (p. 88). Mathematics teachers and their pupils behave in a certain manner in their
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mathematics classrooms because their actions are only meaningful to them within the context of the mathematics classroom and with mathematics as the content. I believe that the behaviour of the mathematics teachers and their pupils could be seen as tacitly agreed upon. Therefore, as Eisenhart (1988) wrote,
From this perspective meanings and actions, context and situation are inextricably linked and make no sense in isolation from one another.
The "facts" of human activity are social constructions; they exist only by social agreement or consensus among participants in a context and situation (p. 103, my emphasis).
This implies that teachers and pupils have a tacit understanding about behaviour appropriate to mathematics classes. Therefore, as Eisenhart (1988) pointed out, "it makes no sense for the interpretivist to do things like catalogue beliefs about mathematics without also considering the contexts in which these ideas are important" (p. 103). According to Eisenhart (1988) these meanings were not verbally expressed nor subjective meanings "but rather intersubjective meanings which are constitutive of the social matrix in which individuals find themselves and act" (p. 103).
Therefore I believe that I must make a "studied commitment to actively enter into the worlds of interacting individuals" (Denzin, 1978, cited in Eisenhart, 1988, P. 103) to study the beliefs of the participants of my study because, as Eisenhart (1988) said, these "intersubjective meanings are implicit, the ways in which beliefs and actions make sense may only be accessible to insiders" (p.103). Blumer (cited in Eisenhart, 1988) said
We ... must... look upon human life as chiefly a vast interpretative process in which people, singly and collectively, guide themselves by defining the objects, events, and situations which they encounter ...
Any scheme designed to analyse human group life in its general character has to fit this process of interpretation (p.103).
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