Teachers Attitudes Case Study

Sleeters (2009) research helped to indentify and address some important issues within the realm of education, and specifically addressed the challenges and biases that these teachers hold when developing curriculum for the students. The purpose of this article review is to account for the arguments presented in the aforementioned article and develop some independent analysis that can be helpful in applying the data in more a practical and localized fashion. This essay will first describe the topic and then explain how this topic was scientifically explored through the positing of certain ideas and premises. The essay will then examine the procedures that the research undertook to realize the result. The conclusions will then be discussed to determine the results, validity and applicability of the work before offering a final summary relating the work to today's situation and how it may best applied in a real world situation.

The main thrust of this article is examining not what teachers are thinking but how teachers are thinking. This approach is useful because it examines a systematic pattern to model success and failure. The researcher was curious to examine how teachers think towards curriculum and what influences are present in their development. To accomplish this task a special case study was developed that followed and tracked the experiences of a young, novice teacher and her experiences with this topic.

The research is premised upon the idea that teachers are significant curriculum creator and this action plays an extremely important role in the overall quality of the education that is presented to the students. To find out the significance of this idea the research asked important questions: "How does teachers' thinking about curriculum develop in the context of teacher education coursework? How might an analysis of a novice teacher's learning to think more complexly inform teacher education pedagogy? " In other words, this article is evaluating the learning processes of teachers by investigating how they themselves are experiencing learning at the same time they are developing classroom curriculum.

The article aimed to eventually attempt to dispel notions that there is an objectively right, or universal method of teaching multicultural curriculum. This article attacked the idea that there is simple step-by-step method that can be applied generically that serves as a panacea. The research also attempted to assist teachers develop more sophisticated means of organizing knowledge and increasing their epistemological acumen.

To help prepare the reader for the ideas being discussed, the article presented some other assumptions and provided definitions to help guide the understanding of the presentation. Sleeter emphasized that recognizing the idea that different frames of reference and a relative understanding of the environment is key in developing and designing multicultural curriculum. What is missing in this definition, is a proper definition of the ideas of multiculturalism and how it is infused in society. The author simply assumed in this article that multiculturalism is in fact important and has a useful place within the classroom. This baseline assumption suggests that the author is arguing for multiculturalism as a necessary quality within the design and creation of classroom curriculum.

Procedures

To illuminate and prove the questions raised in this article, the researcher used the case study method to highlight her main points and to create a worthwhile argument that supports her premises. This case study was chosen amongst a larger group of evaluated students. The researcher chose a student named Ann because she was a novice teacher who satisfied the requirements of being a graduate student in multicultural design class and she had responsibilities in her classroom developing curriculum. The author wrote " I wanted to focus my attention on a beginning teacher, who was relatively new to multicultural education, open to learning and teaching in a diverse classroom."

Ann herself was a 2nd year teacher who was from a different part of the country that she was teaching in currently. Ann is a young white woman teaching 5th grade that serves a very diverse student population. This was a new experience to Ann but she was dedicated to learning about it, which made her an ideal selection for analysis. The research was gathered using data supplied by Ann's papers she completed during her coursework, a journal of observations, notes on two observations of Ann teaching the unit she designed after the course had ended, and a 40 minute tape recorded interview with Ann following the author's observations.

Method of Analysis

To help formalize and standardize Ann's experiences, the author created a rubric to established a heuristic tool that measured certain qualities of that were deemed pertinent to the research. The author wrote" in developing the rubric, I drew from research comparing teachers' thinking at novice, developing and expert level, which generally finds that expert teachers, compared to novice teacher make more distinctions among aspects of curriculum and instruction and bring to bear more elaborated thinking about their judgments." The rubric was also divided into four dimensions of epistemological beliefs that include; task definition, perspective taking, self reflexivity, and locus of decision making. In other words, this rubric attempted to measure the metaphysical movements of Ann using the aforementioned qualities as describers of action and behavior.

The methods of this research are unique in some ways because of the style of the research itself is unique. The research was self-participating in the development and education of Ann as she experienced her trials and tribulations adjusting to both her own studies and the classroom events that were documented in this article. This approach is unconventional in many ways, but these methods appear to be fulfilling the requirements of inductive reasoning by empirical experiment. This research reads much like a story, as opposed to a research document that is written in cold and dead language.

The author's emotions appear to shine through in this article, simultaneously strengthens it in some ways, but weakens it in other ways. This idea was fully expressed by the author when she wrote "my task, however, was not to simply offer her (Ann) strategies and ideas but to slow down her learning process so that she could reflect more deeply on her beliefs and assumptions. I used various strategies to do this: analyzing epistemological and ideological assumptions in documents, reading works that reflect multiple ideological perspectives, engaging in personal interactions that challenge thinking and engaging in reflective writing.

Major Conclusions

The articles conclusions were presented in a very subjective and qualitative manner that diminishes much of the hard work and effort that went into the following of Ann and her experiences throughout a school year. The case study format of this research does present the researcher with certain flexible options in describing and creating the specific types of data models that can be used to answer important research questions. This article however, despite its descriptive nature, falls short of any true scientific discovery.