Métodos para resolver problemas de elasticidad mediante elemento finito

Tomorrow’s Schools changed the nature of the relationship between the Ministry of Education and school communities. The literature review showed that there were gaps in our knowledge about the ability of New Zealand stakeholders to successfully negotiate, resist, and contest school mergers and closures and how the communities in which they occur are affected.This thesis began as a single case study. When I began my research in 2007 I intended to focus on the Masterton District Network Review and then to use a contrastive analysis process to examine contestability issues in different network reviews throughout New Zealand. However, when the Makoura College closure crisis occurred in 2008, followed soon after by the Bush District Community Initiated Education Plan in 2009, a special opportunity presented itself to research to what extent the closure/merger dilemma is contestable in distinctly different case settings within a region. It was for these reasons that I changed focus and decided to approach the issue of contestability through researching and then comparing and contrasting school closures and mergers in three distinctively different Wairarapa case study contexts:

1 the Masterton District Network Review of primary schools in an urban setting, instigated by the Ministry of Education in 2003

2 the Makoura College closure crisis 2008 where the decision made by its Board of Trustees to close the college was later reversed after a groundswell of community opposition

3 the Bush District Community Initiated Education Plan 2009: an unsuccessful attempt by the Ministry of Education to implement a regional review of schools in the rural Tararua District using its newly developed Community Initiated Education Plan strategy.

In the same year as the Bush District CIEP Aorangi School in Christchurch challenged the Minister of Education’s decision to close the school in a Judicial Review. The review findings and their implications will be included in the penultimate chapter. As far as I know this comprehensive case study approach has not yet been attempted in the New Zealand literature on school closures and mergers and therefore has the potential to make a worthwhile contribution to educational research as well as assisting in the recording of regional history.

The next step was to decide on an appropriate methodology. Despite an apparently clear cut topic, the first research problem was where to start. I realised that I needed to differentiate between methodology and methods. Methodology might be described as the recipe for the research, the overview that produces the desired outcome. The methods or tools used in achieving the desired outcome are like the way the ingredients are combined in a research recipe. I soon discovered that there were many ingredients in the qualitative research I was undertaking.

Page 54

At the beginning it felt as if I was in the middle of a huge educational jigsaw puzzle where I had to find what the pieces were before I could determine how they fitted into the big picture. No one single body of literature or methodology seemed to form an adequate basis for research of this kind. Taylor and Bogdan1 explain that unlike a quantitative approach, one of the underlying assumptions of qualitative research is that there is no single construct of reality waiting to be observed and measured. I found this to be true. As the research proceeded I found that I needed to use a diverse range of methods to describe the perspective of the participants and how they experienced and understood the process.

I found valuable research information from scholarly research, opinion pieces, commissioned research reports, two judicial reviews and the media. As time progressed I discovered that the subject of school closures and mergers seems to cut across several bodies of literature: that on systemic change, school consolidation, one off historical or sociological studies and commissioned reports. As a result I used a variety of approaches to gain insight into the nature of the review process and the outcomes of school closures and mergers for schools and their communities. This escalation reflects the fact that school mergers cannot be divorced from the complexity of the social context in which they occur.

All research methods have advantages and limitations of one kind or another. Creswell and Plano Clark in Designing and Conducting Mixed Method Research2, provide a useful distinction between methodology, design and methods. They describe methodology as ‘the philosophical framework and the fundamental assumptions that relate to the entire process of research, research design as the plan of action that links the philosophical assumptions to specific methods and methods as the specific techniques of data collection and analysis used. The benefits of the mixed methods approach is the flexibility it offers in integrating qualitative and quantitative data. Their central premise is that “The use of quantitative and qualitative approaches in combination provides a better understanding of research problems than either approach alone.”3

Robert Bogden and Sari Knopp Biklen4 offer useful advice about the design issues that need to be considered in different forms of case study research. However, for the purposes of my study, which involved describing, analysing and interpreting what happened, it became increasingly clear that I required a methodology that was appropriate for the different research contexts and allowed for maximum flexibility. Joy Higgs5 pointed out that in qualitative research, the interpretative paradigm, (which includes hermeneutics, constructivism, phenomenology, grounded theory and ethnography) is grounded in humanistic philosophy. Annette Crosbie Walshe 6 referred to social science research as a mix of primary, secondary, qualitative and quantitative data and the need for valid, reliable, objective and credible research findings. Bogdan and Knopp Biklen7 referred to research that was “interdisciplinary” or “transdisciplinary” and alerted me to the feminist belief that feminist research should include multi-disciplinary links. However Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln’s description of the bricolage research method8

, cited by Rob Watling and Veronica James9 came closest to describing what I noticed was happening as the research developed over time and named a methodology appropriate to my research task:

Denzin and Lincoln describe this collection of processes as bricolage – ‘a pieced together, close-knit set of representations that are fitted to the specifics of a complex situation.’ … and

Page 55

go on to look at some of the key skills of the bricoleur – the flexible, creative, intuitive qualitative researcher who seeks to produce an in depth understanding of complex social phenomena.”10

Denzin and Lincoln11 describe the bricoleur as:

… adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks, ranging from interviewing to observing, to interpreting personal and historical documents, to intensive self reflection and introspection. The bricoleur reads widely and is knowledgeable about the many paradigms that can be brought to any particular problem. The bricoleur understands that research is an interactive process shaped by his or her personal history, biography, gender, social class, race and ethnicity, and those of the people in the setting. The bricoleur knows that all research findings have political implications. The bricoleur also knows that researchers all tell stories about the worlds they have studied… The product of the bricoleur’s labour is a complex, quilt like bricolage…a reflexive collage or montage - a set of fluid, interconnected images and representation…connecting all parts to the whole.12

The combination of all these research ingredients enables the development of a research narrative which not only explores what happens but also how and why it happens. Exploring ‘What happens?’ can be a pathway to facts and information. Exploring ‘Why and how it happens?’ and ‘What does it mean?’ are question pathways that can lead to the generation of greater and/or new knowledge in the understanding of a very complex situation. Since bricolage is by its nature, a complex, multi layered methodology, it can accommodate this challenge. The result of my research resembles the ‘quilt like bricolage’ described by Denzin and Lincoln and Briggs and Coleman.13 I found that bricolage was a methodology that offered me the maximum flexibility I needed. Denzin and Lincoln14 also appreciate that the bricoleur must be adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks that might be used in a specific research context and the reality that the choice of which strategies might be used are not necessarily set in advance. They show an understanding of research as a dynamic process in which the researcher is not only collecting data that is context specific, but also interpreting its significance and reflecting upon how it connects with data already collected and where it leads. They describe bricolage as ‘a pieced together set of representations that are fitted to the specifics of a situation.’15

Although many texts on research offer helpful advice about a wide range of issues, most do not refer to bricolage specifically as a possible research method, for example, Bouma,16 Higgs,17 Bogdan and Knopp Biklen,18 Rugg and Petre.19 Previous research on school mergers and closures in my 1999 masterate thesis, already mentioned in Chapter 2, was very helpful in getting started, although the focus of this thesis is significantly different. A series of mergers of single sex secondary schools over a number of years in a national network of Catholic schools in different localities is quite different from a network review of a cluster of primary schools in the same locality or a CIEP in a rural region scheduled to be achieved within a very limited time frame against a background of shifting loyalties and changing proposals. Whereas the radical restructuring of Catholic secondary schooling in New Zealand was linked to the passing of the Conditional Integration Act 1975, this thesis examines mergers and closures occurring in a range of contexts, mostly state primary schools, after Tomorrows’ Schools 1989. A further difference was that primary schools have different resourcing needs and different practical issues to consider in comparison with secondary schools. Furthermore the influence of the media in this instance was much more significant in reporting and interpreting the process and shaping public opinion than was the role of the media in the 1970s and 1980s. However as the doctoral research proceeded I found that the Catholic secondary schools and the state primary schools had a number of things in

Page 56

common. In both cases stakeholders were convinced of the critical importance of a transparent and consultative process. In each case power and control issues created huge stress between the stakeholders and those in authority. This could be seen in working through issues such as ‘who decides why, when, how and where the merger shall occur and how the politics associated with thge choice of school site should be resolved. In both cases the stakeholders experienced deep cultural grief if their beloved school was closed.

There are issues of epistemology in this thesis that need to be addressed. My previous research experience in school closures and mergers raises the issue of subjectivity and the issue of ‘the researcher’s presence in the text.’ Most of the thesis is written in the third person narrative. On the occasions where I needed to use the first person singular I found the advice of Bogdan and Knopp Biklen20 very useful and have followed it:

In the last ten years there has been a shift in preference of pronouns authors use to refer to themselves when writing qualitative research reports…the use of “I” is more honest and direct… Using “the researcher” is thought in many circles to be pretentious...and connotes an objectivity that does not really exist.21

I have disclosed my educational background and my previous work on school mergers and closures in “Notes on the Researcher” at the beginning of the thesis in order to assist the reader to understand the range of educational experiences in my history which have contributed to my connection with the thesis topic and the regions in which the closures and mergers happened.

In 2007, using key words such as mergers, closures and EDIs, I accessed 182 internet sites which had material on school closures, school mergers, and education development initiatives. For analysis purposes I selected those which were relevant to the focus of this thesis.In September 2008 I discovered another 452 sites when I used consolidation as the key search word. This illustrates the diversity and continually expanding range of available web based material on this topic and also the need to be aware that different countries and different researchers use different terms for the same process. Electronic data sources provide a valuable source of information because not only do they allow access to contemporary research on the subject, but also they allow the reader an opportunity to connect with how school communities experience and respond to school closures and mergers in a range of different international settings.

Surveys allow access to similar sets of information in local settings so I constructed a survey related to the Masterton District Network Review 2003 to record and analyse how a range of key stakeholders, had experienced interpreted and understood the process and the outcomes. I offered the survey to a representative group of forty-five stakeholders from the different schools involved in the network review. After having read their responses and discerned the emerging patterns in the answers received, I contacted a number of respondents who agreed to participate in semi-structured interviews based on answers they gave that were of particular interest. Copies of the survey and the letters of disclosure and consent are included in the Appendix. While this thesis is not dependent on the survey, the responses of the respondents in retrospect add to the body of knowledge about what happened through recording how trustees, principals, staff and parents experienced, interpreted and responded to what happened. In order to assess the depth and breadth of opinion in the community I contacted chairpersons of boards of trustees,

Page 57

trustees, principals, teachers, office staff, caretakers, teacher aides and parents. Respondents were contacted by phone to talk about the thesis before the surveys were sent out. This provided them with an opportunity to discuss how the survey fitted into the research and to ask any questions they wished before they agreed to participate. With the exception of two people, those approached were very willing to contribute to the study and often gave the name of another person who might be interested in participating. In an interview with Wairarapa News I invited any member of the community who would like to answer the survey or share their experience of the network review to contact me. While only three people did so, this opportunity to respond provided through the media was an attempt on my part to provide a pathway to inclusion for any stakeholder who might have something that they particularly wanted to say.

To address any issues in the survey that might arise in relation to Treaty of Waitangi I took the survey to Jim Rimene, respected Kaumatua of Rangitane o Wairarapa. Mr Rimene has spent many years researching the land claims of his iwi and was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2007 New Zealand Honours List for his services to the community. He took the survey to a leading kaumatua of Ngati Kahungunu, the other tangata whenua iwi of the Wairarapa. Neither kaumatua identified any issues with the survey. Once I had finalised the survey and interview proposal documents I was required to make a ‘Low Risk Notification’ application to the Massey University Human Ethics Committee. Permission to proceed with the survey was received on January 14, 2009. The committee gave permission for a survey that was designed to apply to the 2003 Masterton District network review of primary schools. Makoura College was a secondary school. Its closure crisis did not happen until 2008. The Bush District CIEP did not happen until 2009. The context and the process for each was different and therefore the survey was not applicable in these cases.

A researcher has to accept that survey responses are what the respondents have chosen to say and certainly not all that might have been said. Surveys are nevertheless a valuable source of information because they allow us an opportunity to reflect on how people remember their experience of school closures and reviews. Surveys also assist researchers to monitor their own research behaviour. Since I have personally experienced a school closure and merger both as a parent and as a teacher and researched the group of Catholic closures and mergers in the secondary sector, previously described, I had the benefit of added knowledge, insights and empathy to bring to the construction of the survey. Such factors are very useful in conducting qualitative research. The survey answers became an important tool in testing and/or confirming my assumptions and, given that I am a secondary school teacher, keeping me grounded in the primary school context. The survey answers allowed me to build up a more comprehensive picture about how school closures and mergers affect school communities and the wider community. The answers often confirmed previous research so they could be used later for contrastive analysis purposes and they also allowed the opportunity to test for possible congruency with the other case studies in this thesis. Initially I sorted the answers into categories by question number and stakeholder type, such as board chairs, trustees, principals, teachers and ancillary staff for analysis purposes. Distinct patterns of agreement and disagreement emerged as the responses to each question were collated and reviewed. I discussed my findings with my supervisors. The collected data were refined as themes connected with the purpose of the

Page 58

research. Responses that were particularly useful for illustrating some of the issues involved were integrated in the thesis research. I was only able to use a few of the many valuable responses I received. For some questions I have provided a number of responses. I agree with Bill Gillam22 _that:

Sometimes you would want to convey the force of people’s feelings by giving several quotations that do say essentially the same thing: it drives the point home.23

The answers of the respondents to the survey questions provided me with the opportunity to ask them further questions at greater depth in semi-structured interviews at a later time based on their survey answers. As Gillam also points out: