| Although the insights from the "Composition Revolution" have been an extremely valuable asset to classroom teachers of most subjects and at all levels, there are limits to the improvement of instruction a teacher can achieve by employing composition research and/or discipline-oriented theory and practice One approach to becoming an effective teacher is to become a classroom researcher, using a wide range of research techniques. However, an analysis of the rhetoric of classroom inquiry reveals that cultural, disciplinary, and methodological factors often make some of the most fruitful approaches to classroom research difficult to discover and employ. This study attempts to help teachers discover satisfying approaches to classroom research by (1) analyzing the theoretical issues; (2) presenting four relatively recent research methods still not commonly used in educational research (heuristic inquiry, collaborative inquiry, systems thinking, and action science); and (3) illustrating my own development as a classroom researcher through the presentation of one of my classroom research projects. Chapter VII is a 70-page presentation of a study I conducted in the three freshman composition classes I taught at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in the Spring Semester, 1990. The context of the study, the methods used, and the results are described in detail, along with teaching and research techniques developed after the study in order to deal with some of the problems revealed by the study. Through the course of analyzing the rhetoric of classroom inquiry, I suggest that, although it is not necessary to classroom research, liberatory (or transformative) pedagogy, an approach to instruction originating with Paulo Freire, presents a fully developed model for teachers: a model which can be further enhanced by the use of the four research techniques explored. Another model, briefly evoked, is Waldorf education. |
