Narratives that shape our field
What is physics education research (PER) supposed to do? What are the metrics of success? How should we conceptualize our joint mission? What epistemological commitments do we hold dear?
The stories we tell about ourselves – the narratives for our field – constitute the our answers to these central questions of field identity. There are, of course, many different narratives possible for education research. Some of them are overlapping and commensurate; others are opposed.
What is the Change-as-growth Narrative?
What if the thing that is valuable is change and experimentation? PER changes hearts and minds about what matters, and it engages faculty as scientists in their teaching practice.
Under change-as-growth, the thing that matters is that faculty keep trying new things. Stagnation is failure: we want new innovations to constantly be tried on. Sure, some of them might not work and some of them might work beautifully, but the thing to value in curriculum change is the act of changing itself. The curriculum changes constantly; the faculty grow in expertise. Over time, because faculty grow, the curriculum improves. To enable the faculty to grow, it is necessary that the curriculum change so that the faculty who enact it can learn new things.
To be really responsive to the students we have, who grow as individuals and shift as populations, we need to constantly update our teaching.
To cultivate responsivity and growth in our faculty, we need to support a culture where changes are expected. It’s not enough to find the One True Teaching Method and execute it faithfully over time; we need to make updates and changes to it as we learn more and as our students change.
A thing I like about this narrative is that is separates the people from the activity: the people (faculty) grow through change, and therefore increase their skills and abilities to make good changes in the structure of the activities (curriculum).
Faculty in change-as-growth
There are two fundamental assumptions about faculty in this narrative. First, they want to teach well within the constraints of the system they operate in. Some of the constraints of that system are about limited time or resources; some of those constraints are about reward structures for faculty and narratives of excellence. As faculty – as experts in our fields – we may disagree about what teaching well means, but that disagreement doesn’t negate our (sometimes opposed efforts) to excel.
Second, faculty changes to teaching are not random. Faculty are humans, and humans are born experimenters. When faculty plan changes to their teaching, they do so with a (perhaps implicit) set of epistemological commitments to what teaching well entails, coupled to a (perhaps informal) sense of how students will react. When they enact those changes – and see what happens – they learn valuable information which suggests what they might try differently next time.
These two fundamental assumptions stem from some of my epistemological commitments about faculty – they’re experts in their contexts, they want to improve their work, and they enjoy learning things – which are fundamentally asset-based and growth-oriented.
Under this narrative, the process of improving curricula can be noisy – experiments are not always successful – but the long arc of change is towards improvement because of faculty actions.
Open problems with this narrative
This narrative struggles to identify whether changes to curricula are actually good. Imagine that a course is going pretty well, and a change makes it less good. Under change-as-growth, is every change good as long as the faculty grow? How do we measure the faculty growth? Do we need to measure the long arc of change in order to subtract the noise? This narrative doesn’t really speak to these questions.
This narrative also doesn’t speak to the diversity in faculty beliefs about what teaching well entails. The desistance narrative defines a normative set: teaching well means using expertly-crafted and well-researched curricula with fidelity. There’s nothing inherently normative about change-as-growth; quite the opposite, because instructional contexts are necessarily varied, and faculty beliefs can be divergent. On the one hand, this is a strength. Because faculty are experts in their contexts, they can expertly choose among possible changes to try. On the other hand, without normative rules for what’s good, it’s harder to be judgy when faculty make choices that education researchers dislike. Researchers can’t prescriptively tell faculty what to do; they must first check that the goals for their curricula match the faculty’s goals (and contexts) for their courses.
A rescue: evidence-based decision-making?
Under change-as-growth, good changes are more likely to occur when faculty to use explicit evidence, coupled to explicit epistemological commitments (maybe even theories!), in order to make mindful changes to their practices. That’s not an accident: it turns out that generally humans make better decisions about hard problems when they do so deliberately and when informed by evidence. I’m going to call this model evidence-based decision-making. Using this model, the role of researchers is not to convince faculty to use research-based curricula with fidelity. The role of researchers is to support faculty to make deliberate decisions.
When we support faculty in that way, we center their agency to:
- make the goals;
- decide what kinds of evidence to gather;
- interpret the evidence in light of their goals;
- make the decisions about what to do next.
We can measure whether and how their decisions are deliberate by looking at how they make them: what are the problems they’re trying to solve? what evidence do they use to show improvement? how does their evidence include contextually rich information and causal mechanisms?