Cult Stud of Sci Educ (2012) 7:579–583 DOI 10.1007/s11422-012-9398-y FORUM
Misrecognition and science education reform Carol B. Brandt
Received: 3 January 2012 / Accepted: 7 January 2012 / Published online: 18 January 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract In this forum, I expand upon Teo and Osborne’s discussion of teacher agency and curriculum reform. I take up and build upon their analysis to further examine one teacher’s frustration in enacting an inquiry-based curriculum and his resulting accommodation of an AP curriculum. In this way I introduce the concept of misrecognition (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) to open up new ways of thinking about science inquiry and school reform. Keywords
Science inquiry Curriculum reform Misrecognition Practice theory
No surprise to teachers and administrators in schools, curriculum reform goes beyond merely making decisions surrounding content or pedagogy. As Teo and Osborne argue in their study of one teacher’s (Darren Daley) attempt to institute science inquiry, curriculum reform becomes a complicated and frustrating ‘‘sociopolitical and sociocultural project’’ despite the best intentions of everyone involved. Teo and Osborne examine one teacher’s sense making as he undertakes curricular change and attempts to institute an inquiry-based chemistry class. Using micro-analysis of social interactions, the authors also acknowledge the structural elements and external mandates that shaped the ways this teacher enacted and spoke about the curriculum as he sought to maintain his professional and social identity (through ‘‘face-work’’) as being a leader in science education. In this response to their article, I expand upon Teo and Osborne’s discussion of teacher agency and curriculum reform. First, I point to the ways that these researchers unpack the ‘‘roots of teacher agency as (un)conscious responses to external factors and conditions.’’ Next I take up and build upon their analysis to further examine Daley’s frustration in Review essay on T. W. Teo and M. Osborne, Using symbolic interactionism to analyze a specialized STEM high school teacher’s experience in curriculum reform. Cultural Studies of Science Education. doi:10.1007/s11422-011-9364-0. C. B. Brandt (&) Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Technology Education, Temple University, 1301 Cecil B. Moore Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19122-6005, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
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enacting an inquiry-based curriculum and his resulting accommodation of an AP curriculum. In this way I introduce the concept of misrecognition (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) to open up new ways of thinking about science inquiry and school reform. I argue here that Daley’s misrecognition of the symbolic function of AP exams at Innova Academy and the ways in which his own actions were misrecognized in the educational system served to undermine his efforts in curriculum reform. I use this opportunity to discuss the ways that power circulates and is enabled (or conversely—disabled) through reform efforts. I conclude by questioning the ways that schools look toward teachers to lead curricular reform.
Semiotics in symbolic interactionism Using an approach situated in symbolic interactionism, the authors view social interactions—which are ascribed with symbolic meaning—at the heart of understanding teacher agency. As they follow Daley into the sociopolitical and sociocultural contexts of the STEM classroom and school, the authors studied how Daley went about rationalizing his actions, as well as the ways he attributed meaning to enacting the new curriculum. Although some of his cultural practices and symbolic representations are shared among his colleagues and the administration at Innova Academy, the meaning of other cultural practices or ‘‘objects,’’ in fact, do not carry over across social fields. In their analysis, we see how Daley and other actors take away different interpretations from their interactions. In their analysis, Teo and Osborne note the importance of social objects that are implicated and referenced to foster mutual understanding or to communicate one another’s standpoint. In this study, the social objects of curriculum inquiry and social reform are used to examine how meanings are defined, negotiated, and modified by various power brokers. For a symbolic interaction to function one must be able to take up others’ standpoints. Among social actors there is a shared ‘‘lexicon’’ of behavior, action, and discourse. In fact, the act can be thought of in semiotic terms as a sign that carries with it both the signifier and the signified (Saussure 1966): a socially constructed and shared set of meanings connected to the interaction. Yet, as social standpoints and personal histories differ, each actor brings the possibility of other meanings to the interaction. Meanings are not ‘‘fixed,’’ but are arbitrary and culturally negotiated. With this arbitrariness comes the possibility of acts (or discourse) being misunderstood, or misrecognized as something else. Teo and Osborne broaden their scope of inquiry to examine both Daley’s unconscious performances as well as his intentional actions that they explain through his ‘‘face work.’’ Daley not only teaches in a high status school (which was vested with a mandate to deliver top quality STEM education), but also this chemistry teacher has acquired considerable social and cultural capital: extensive prior science teaching experience, advanced degrees in science, and recognition as being a leader in science teaching. As he rationalizes his shifting position on curriculum reform, his footing reveals the way he maintains positional authority.
The symbolic capital of AP exams Even though the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum in chemistry was dictated by the administration in his previous school, at Innova Academy Daley was allowed the option of modifying the curriculum. Given this freedom, he instituted a new curriculum that he felt better reflected the mission of Innova—one that was inquiry-based. Yet, what seems to be a
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social space for having agency was deceiving. Social conventions, student and parent expectations, and administrative practices pressured Daley to reconsider his curricular changes. In the former context of his teaching, he understood how the public high school used the credentialing of AP scores as means for the school to maintain their elite status. Meanwhile, the shared understanding of AP scores between Daley and the administration at Innova remains ambiguous. Clearly Daley thought of the AP tests as a deficit model for the gifted students at Innova Academy. In this way, he misrecognizes the symbolic role that AP testing plays at a larger political scale in terms of admissions to colleges and universities. Instead Daley chooses to focus on Innova’s mission of promoting ‘‘metacognition’’ and what makes ‘‘Innova different.’’ Teo and Osborne point out the contradiction in Daley’s actions and dialogue in which he both promotes an inquiry-based chemistry curriculum and he also wants his students to achieve high scores on the AP exam. In fact, Daley seems to take pride that he is able to predict the kinds of questions that appear on the exam and he questions students closely to gauge the nature of each year’s exam. He spends considerable time in his class admonishing students to seriously study the content of the test prior to the AP test date. The symbolic power of the AP exams and Daley’s struggle to replace an AP curriculum with science inquiry reminds me of Nespor’s (1997) study of an urban elementary school and the social upheaval that ensued when the school principal decided to change the school’s grading system. Moving beyond a microanalysis of interaction in the classroom, Nespor followed the actors into the larger community to examine the social, political and economic contexts of schooling. Nespor argued that the ‘‘recognition’’ of particular ‘‘objects’’ as being part of institutional life were dependent on the observer’s standpoint and the interactions among participants in a social field. In his study, parents recognized grades as being a symbolic means to represent their children’s path through the educational system. In contrast, grades had very different symbolic meaning to teachers who were trying to perform for the school district administrators, and similarly, the school administrators viewed grades as means to compare and rank school progress. Nespor emphasized in his study the ways that social spaces in education were connected to networks of relations beyond the classroom walls, and how these networks were dependent upon one’s trajectory in the educational system. The social field, then, is constructed of people who belong to, and are moving through different social networks: students, parents, teachers, and administrators. One of Nespor’s contributions was mapping the circuits of these social networks and the ways they were ‘‘tangled up’’ around the economy and politics of the community in an organizational field. The complexity of these enmeshed social circuits meant there was ample opportunity for ‘‘misrecognition’’ to take place.
Misrecognition and doxa in science education reform What exactly do I mean by misrecognition? In a basic sense, misrecognition is when an object (in this case the new chemistry curriculum) is mistaken to be something that it is clearly not. When used in critical theory, identifying the nature of misrecognition enables us to speak about the ways that inequity is reproduced and the means by which internally contradictory positions can be maintained. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, p. xii) define misrecognition as ‘‘the process whereby power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are but in a form which renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder.’’ For example, Pajak and Green (2003) argue, schools foster a ‘‘misrecognition’’ that
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education is a means to facilitate upward mobility, when in fact, schools tend to leave established social and economic hierarchies intact. Misrecognition operates through a tacit acceptance of particular practices that are neither challenged, nor probed. In Daley’s case, he was frustrated that AP exams were not recognized for what they were: formulaic exercises that required no real understanding of science inquiry. Another occasion in the chemistry class at Innova Academy where misrecognition occurred was when Daley’s students were actively engaged in the ‘‘Air Bag Experiment.’’ Daley chose to view the students’ unprompted activity in testing their calculations as evidence of student teamwork and success of an inquiry-based lesson. Yet, I could also see how this incident could have another interpretation. Were the students motivated to jump into the activity to begin their trials in order to preserve their status as top students (in a sense—also a face-saving strategy)? Perhaps it wasn’t so much the nature of inquiry that motivated them to act, as the nature of competition. Daley, however, needed to believe that their involvement was evidence of how well his new curriculum had succeeded. This misrecognition allowed him to continue his advocacy of curriculum reform. Ultimately Daley’s discourse shifted when talking about ‘‘inquiry-based’’ reform. As he began to realize the difficulty of implementing a new curriculum, he began to speak about ‘‘laboratory-based’’ curricula, which allowed him to pursue both inquiry-based activities and AP curriculum. Not only did this allow Daley to save face in terms of charting success in curriculum reform, it also permitted him to maintain his social capital, that is, his standing among his colleagues and the Innova Academy administration, and to preserve his privileged status as a lead instructor at Innova. Daley’s actions were thoughtful and intentional, and yet at an unconscious level, dominant ideology around science inquiry and institutional norms of teacher practice at Innova also played a role in shaping his response. As Teo and Osborne noted, the administration at Innova Academy touted the teachers as ‘‘experts’’ and provided their staff the liberty of modifying the curriculum and experimenting new approaches to teaching and learning. Yet, teachers were also held to high standards of performance that extended beyond the classroom to other areas of institutional life. These tacit, but powerful norms shaped the ways that teacher agency was ‘‘misrecognized’’ in this institution. The illusion that teachers were able to choose the best curriculum was an idea that teachers wanted to believe about their role, yet this reality was held in check by an accountability system that placed all the risk on teachers’ shoulders. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, p. 65) note, ‘‘Ironically, the more liberal the organization appears to be in its policies and the more its teachers rely on personal charisma and planned improvisation in the classroom in place of traditional or institutional authority, the more difficult it becomes to detect the hidden function of schools, which is maintenance of the status quo.’’ Without a doubt, teachers and administrators have the best of intentions for students at stake when curriculum reform is being planned or implemented. Yet, this is exactly when power relations are masked and simultaneously become more potent. Likewise teachers and administrators whose embodied practices and discourses are aligned with the dominant rationale of schooling are complicit in the misrecognition. Bourdieu (1998) spoke about the ways that people rationalize as ‘‘doxa,’’ or sets of selfevident truths that explain and justify one’s active participation and involvement. For example, science inquiry is one doxa that most science educators and school administrators embrace. Yet, in order to really tease apart how misrecognition functioned in the case study of Daley and his efforts towards curriculum reform, we need to know more about the political and economic relationship of the school to the state. What precipitated the mandate from the State Assembly to grant Innova Academy with the charge of nurturing gifted math and
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science students? What was the economic context and what kinds of financial contributions established this relationship between the state and the school? Like Nespor’s ethnography, I suspect that if we follow one of these trajectories, it would lead us to a tangle of networks. We have in Teo and Osborne’s study a glimpse at a set of social interactions and tantalizing indications that the symbolic meaning of curriculum reform through science inquiry is much more complicated than what meets the eye. As I’ve argued elsewhere (Brandt et al. 2010), we require more studies in science education whose participants and contexts extend beyond the school walls into the community. Such studies are exceedingly rare, understandably complicated, and difficult to fund. Yet, as we prepare tens of thousands of young educators each year to teach science inquiry, we owe it to them and their students to understand the ways that curriculum reform is misrecognized in schools and the ways this misrecognition serves to maintain inequities in schooling. As we send teachers off to schools where accountability testing reigns supreme, they are told it is their mission to institute an inquiry-based approach whenever possible. Sadly, as Teo and Osborne have shown, curriculum reform is tremendously complicated, a task that a novice teacher can rarely take on, let alone a veteran teacher. Teo and Osborne have shown how a careful interactional analysis can make visible the tricky footwork that accompanies curriculum reform as teachers struggle for authority in educational institutions and beyond. Sharing this research with teachers can assist them in recognizing how their work in the classroom is always political and invariably contentious.
References Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason: On the theory of action. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. Beverly Hills: Sage. Brandt, C. B., Shumar, W., Hammond, L., Carlone, H., Kimmel, S., & Tschida, C. (2010). Habitus, social fields, and circuits in rural science education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 5, 477–493. Nespor, J. (1997). Tangled up in school: Politics, space, bodies, and signs in the educational process. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pajak, E., & Green, A. (2003). Loosely coupled organizations, misrecognition, and social reproduction. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 6, 393–413. Saussure, F. (1966). Course in general linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.
Author Biography Carol B. Brandt is an assistant professor of science education in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Technology Education at Temple University. Her research explores the sociocultural dimensions of learning science beyond the classroom and the ways that language structures participation as youth and adults move between home, community, and school.
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