Between 2001 and 2009, as Head of Faculty in English and subsequently of Religion and Values Education at the last college at which I taught, I took up the opportunities available for professional development, sought out curriculum and teaching experts, and decided to focus my research on teachers rather than students.
Before I had begun the physical work on my thesis ten years ago, I started to think through exactly what the focus of my questions were; what the aim of the project was; why it was important to pursue these questions; how it would affect educational practice; and what suggestions for improvements I could offer for twenty-first century education.
To find a respectful theory for twenty-first century education I needed to discover how teachers perceived the teaching of thinking skills in secondary schools. I identified three questions to guide my exploration:
• How could I harness the knowledge, experience and expertise of my own search of over 20 years, to form a foundation for academic research in this area?
• How could I hear precisely what other teachers were saying and, how could I respectfully find accurate evidence from the coalface – the classroom itself?
• How could I find out what educational theorists and expert
practitioners were thinking and doing?
I asked myself: ‘What are the crucial ontological, epistemological and technical elements that could be incorporated into the development of an effective philosophy and format for the teaching of thinking skills to enable secondary students to learn about, and engage with the concepts of virtues, values and ethics?’
• Ontological Questions: What significance can be assigned to the development of personal perspectives surrounding a teacher’s attitude to the teaching-learning process? How do teachers maintain the emphases needed to teach students for rich learning, rather than only the subject content?
• Epistemological Questions: How do teachers ensure that students learn all of the thinking skills relevant to educational knowledge and skills, so that applied thinking skills are recognised, identified, modelled, assessed and demonstrated, in all learning outcomes in all subject areas?
• Technical Questions: How do teachers understand and acquire a comprehensive list of thinking skills with which to model, teach and require of students that they use them in every educational sense: in career choice; in life decisions; and in both secular and religious dimensions and approaches to life’s eschatological speculations?
I wanted to develop a respectful theory constructed from a consciously historical perspective, with the reshaped emphases emerging inductively from the literature and from my own and other teachers’ experiences. This investigation relied on inductive reasoning for the construction of a picture of what twenty-first century education would include.
It was with relief that I found the latest work of Lincoln, Lynham and Guba, (2011) because chapter 6 sets out the boundaries, the overlaps, the breadth of important paradigms and the need to identify when writing in a research paradigm. As I developed my thesis, I found that learning about the boundaries and concepts underpinned different qualitative research disciplines. I tested early processes like Case Studies, Grounded Theory, and found that inductive paradigms often overlapped. This thesis therefore details the moves I made as I clarified the particular research methodologies and
emerged. The whole is founded on the teaching of thinking skills, and the application to as broad an arc of democratic practice as philosophy and logic would allow.
Learning the broad spectrum of philosophy
While studying with Wilson, I was introduced to the work of a wide range of philosophers; scholars from the analytical tradition as well as a number of other philosophical schools. Consequently, the history of education in Victoria, its changes and developmental steps, became central to my own questions. Having begun to learn through my studies to identify and understand philosophical perspectives, I began to make comparisons and to find parallels in the decades of change I observed and the educational philosophy behind each shift I discerned. It must be understood, though, that I was a teacher delving into philosophy, rather than a philosopher reaching into educational fields and so, many of the nuanced utterances for which philosophy is renowned may have inevitably escaped my untrained though eager mind. This earlier experiential learning provides the basis for the Literature Review associated with this study.
These considerations are central to the development of my theory for a reshaped twenty-first century Australian classroom, based on clear and historical educational concepts. General histories of philosophical thought traced by Richard Tarnas, Jaroslav Pelikan and Bertrand Russell over the last century appear to inform the values within Australian education. The historical sweep of these educational values is identified in the large bodies of work of significant authors (such as Beare, Hargreaves, Dewey and Bruner) informing the underlying construction of this investigation. The study’s conclusions feed into other more precise frameworks (such as Crowther, Hawkes, Ingber, Costa, Greenfield, H. Gardner, and Freakley & Burgh). Engagement with the broad spectrum of content by Wilson, Lipman and Vardy, and their large bodies of specialised work, allows depth and authenticity to develop as the investigation takes shape, and reliable
conclusions can then be made. In particular, the work of Laurance Splitter and of I. A. Snook rounds out the broad perspectives underlying my conclusions, which are supported by the works of the authors detailed in the Literature Review in Chapter 3.
Planning the research enterprise
I wanted to find out how teachers, especially teachers in secondary schools, addressed the concept of the teaching of thinking skills in their classroom practice. And I specifically wanted to know if the ‘science’ and ‘art’ of consciously using applied thinking skills from any or all subject areas and disciplines would advance levels of student understanding, thereby achieving for them a richer learning and a more enthusiastic engagement. If, by investigating which authors, educational experts and researchers had proposed innovations to twenty-first century pedagogical and professional learning, I could establish a foundation for my questions by administering my rigorously-designed Questionnaire. It would then be possible to develop richer and more beneficial learning experiences for twenty-first century Australian education scenarios. These two sources would be supported and synthesised through my own experiential and formal learnings and presented in an auto-ethnographical introspective. Inevitably though, I chose to take Newton’s approach and stand on the shoulders of giants (Newton, 1676).
Aims of the research for teacher practice
This project seeks knowledge that will enliven teachers’ practice with the aim of providing improved student outcomes (Heasly, 1995) that has been central to my work for over two decades. Students have deeply internalised the tenets and practices of individualism (Singer, 1993) and, simultaneously, the development of capitalism has resulted in the phenomenon of globalisation (Klein, 2007); (Aspin, 2003). Teachers must now contend with
consciousness of the connections to considerations of national and international pedagogical significance. A central question has emerged concerning how students should be taught the skills necessary for them to interpret their world, and thus how they can perceive and exercise both their freedoms and responsibilities as formulated (Lipman, 1993a; Splitter & Sharp, 1995) in Philosophy for Children terms; by Wilson (1963; 1987), in early moral education terms; (Singer, 1979) in terms of ethical choice. Students and their teachers will find ways to think carefully together about the students’ environment (Seligman, 1990; Anih, 1992; 1995). To inform such an educational aim, my research seeks to uncover the underlying thinking and practices which teachers employ during the teaching of thinking skills, in order to support the development of student skills and outcomes; a particularly important example of which is the gaining of self-knowledge (Pritchard, 1985). The analytical framework for this research is drawn from teaching and learning theory from a number of sources. (Bloom, 1956; Gagné & Briggs, 1974; Brown, 1980; Knowles, 1984; Cherednichenko, 2000).