Gestión de Riesgos

By March 2011, despite many attempts over six months, using all of my extensive contacts and networks throughout the music education community in New Zealand, I had had no luck engaging participants in the main study.

I reflected upon the pilot study data and findings. Sarah said she felt irritated and anxious about being accountable to NZQA moderators and her school management for her NCEA assessment judgments and that NCEA assessment procedures were time-consuming and challenging. Why would a busy secondary school music teacher invite me to observe him or her trying something both new and complex, while at the same time being publically accountable to students, parents, school management and NZQA for NCEA internal assessment? I could think of no reason.

3.5.1 Research subjectivity and validity

In my PhD research proposal, I acknowledged some subjectivities or threats to internal research validity (Merriam, 1998). I stated that I viewed the summative assessment of group composing as potentially problematic for both teachers and group composers. I also stated that I believed there was a risk that if I conducted research with teachers with whom I had already worked as an adviser, then we might revert to previous ways of working together. Furthermore, my role as an adviser was also that of advocate, teacher-educator and critical friend to secondary school music teachers, and the teachers might still see me in that role when in fact this was not the case. There were also ethical risks when it came to reporting the findings.

I reflected on these issues, asking myself, “Is having an opinion about the assessment of group composing a threat to research validity? This is one of the valid consequences of my learning about this complex process. How might this (potentially) subjective view be accounted for in the research? What would happen if I discussed my opinions and ideas with a teacher who planned to assess group composing for the first time? Generating new learning is the point of research, and collaboration might lead us to that. What if we tried these ideas out together?” Could collaborative research within an established professional relationship, where I was already welcome in the classroom, be a valid research inquiry into group composing and its assessment? How might the identified potential threats to theoretical and methodological validity be managed or accounted for?

The literature review has revealed that a multiplicity of contextual factors need to be accounted for when group composing is assessed for qualification and some of these cannot be externally perceived. Teachers and their students in this study are actors within a highly complex situation, subject to external conditions such as NCEA structures, NZQA requirements and procedures, school and community cultures, timetabling, and resourcing. Assessment is integral to teaching and learning, and is highly sensitive to the context, and the life experience, identity and practice of those involved. The pilot study findings indicated that if I was to learn more about group composing and its assessment for the NCEA, then I needed to participate. This decision aligns with practitioner research literature where it is asserted that non- participant observation removes the researcher from the complexities of practice (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Lincoln, 1995; Whitehead & McNiff, 2006).

3.5.2 Educational action research

Educational action research is appropriate to use when a particular problem involving people, tasks and procedures needs a solution, or where some change could lead to better outcomes (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2007). In the present study, the “problem” is that the assessment of group composing for the NCEA was new, little was known about the assessment of individuals in creative groups, and that teachers might be unsure about how to go about doing it.

This kind of research combines diagnosis, action and reflection, focusing on a practical problem that has been identified as such by the actors (Elliot, 1991). It has to do with action (improving practice) and research (creating knowledge about practice) in a real-life setting, where practice is that of the researcher and other participants (McNiff & Whitehead, 2010). If this study was to be practitioner research, then it needed to be an investigation of practice, namely, composing, teaching, and

assessment.

Educational practitioner research is often collaborative and involves systematic procedures carried out in the classroom by teachers or other educational professionals (Cresswell, 2009). It addresses local problems of practice within specific educational contexts (Mills, 2007). On this basis I redesigned the main study as practitioner research, in collaboration with secondary school music teachers.

3.5.3.1 Positioning myself in the research

Unlike other forms of qualitative research, where the researcher usually adopts an outsider or spectator role, an action researcher is part of the action. Caution is needed when an outside researcher collaborates with an insider-practitioner because unequal power relationships can lead to research being done to, rather than done with the teacher (Cresswell, 2009). Theory and practice are situated within the action and so cannot be carried out by someone who is not part of the institution or environment in which the action takes place (McNiff & Whitehead, 2010).

I reflected that, although I am not a school teacher any more, I am a tertiary educator concerned with secondary music education in New Zealand. If, as an educator, I wanted to know more about teaching and assessing NCEA group composing, and the teachers I worked with did too, then, perhaps, I could be inside the action (Elliott, 1994). Nevertheless, if I conducted practitioner research in a secondary school it would need to be as a practitioner, working in collaboration with other practitioners on a problem both of us wanted to solve.

3.5.3.2 Research models

While there are many kinds of action research (practical/practitioner, participatory, emancipatory, critical, for example), they all involve rigorous, responsive data collection and a high level of reflexivity (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2007; Somekh, 1995). Whether or not this study is practical action research or

qualitative collaborative practitioner research remains contestable because both terms

are used in a variety of ways in the literature (see McNiff & Whitehead (2010) and Rusinek (2012) for example). All emphasise rigorous reflexivity however, along with a consistent intention to effect practice change, and an explicit awareness of roles and power relationships.

The main study was a series of dialectic action research spirals (Mills, 2007), derived from Lewin’s (1947) cyclical process of planning, execution and reconnaissance and Zuber-Skerrit’s (1996) cycle of observing, planning, acting and

reflecting. These are not discrete stages but are a representation of a complex, dynamic

Figure 3.2. Dialectical cycle (Mills, 2007, p.20)

The similarities between this cycle and the models of the creative process examined in Chapter 2 are striking. Both involve cycles of exploration, generation, refinement and synthesis, moving reflexively between the known and the unknown. This idea is reflected upon in Chapter 9.