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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 21, Issue 1, Article 1 (Dec., 2021) |
This study was conducted in a setting in the Mpumalanga Province. Mpumalanga is in the eastern part of South Africa. The participant teaches Physical Sciences (i.e. a subject taught in the South African public-school curriculum and constituting Chemistry and Physics). The study uses an interpretive qualitative case design. The design allows for an in-depth, holistic, and intensive analysis of an individual or organisation in their natural settings (Ponelis, 2015; Pickard, 2013). The teacher is the case, and the study was conducted in his natural teaching setting (Cresswell, 2012). The selection of the teacher (the case) was purposefully and followed a critical case sampling approach. With the critical case sampling approach (Farrugia, 2019), the researcher “selects cases that will produce critical information with maximum generalizability… to other cases” (p.70) where more cases are available or used. The population was made up of teachers from six public schools. The participant teacher’s school was located in an urban setting. These types of urban settings are generally referred to as townships, in South Africa.
Furthermore, Grade 11 was specifically selected as a component bound in this case because of its position within the Further Education and Training (FET) phase of the curriculum. This phase straddles two important grades (Grade 10 and 12). Grade 10 is the first in the FET phase, and Grade 12 the last and concludes the schooling curriculum. Hence, being a teacher with experience of teaching Physical Science in Grade 11 within the South African public school curriculum served as a criterion for participating in the study. Further, the Grade 11 teacher could be considered a valuable source to provide rich and critical data for information about the teaching context, the learning content, and the classroom enactment of the curriculum.
Data about this participant science teacher was generated and obtained from various sources. These sources were about the curriculum and from teaching activities in the teachers’ school settings. Three sources (i.e. analysis of learning material documents (AoDs); observation of the participant teacher’s teaching (OPT), and semi-structured interviews of the participant (SIP) generated data for the study. The empirical process followed four data collection and analysis steps. These steps were meant to ensure a precise, consistent and exhaustive process for the generated data (Nowell, et.al. 2017). Also, the timing and sequencing of the empirical steps were deliberate to enable information from each step to be informative for the next (i.e. enhance iterative processes). For example, lesson plans, as part of document analysis, contextualise and provide insights into the teachers’ beliefs, conceptions of science learning and their pedagogical practices. In fact, Wood et.al. (2020) posit that documents and/or their analysis are important in contextualising information about the particular realities of participants in a study.
Furthermore, data from the teacher’s documents (i.e. lesson plans and information from curriculum content material), provides insights from the teacher’s thought processes about his lesson preparations. In fact, Gorichanaz and Latham (2016), refer to the content in documents and the teachers’ thought processes for lesson preparation as “document experiences.” Their argument is that the purpose of analysis is to look at both the teacher (a person) and the document (object) (p.1118). Thus, the information from the AoDs was valuable for the researchers’ own thought processes and subsequent data collection and/or analytical steps. McEvoy et.al.’s (2019) study is an example of the potential of documentary evidence in enhancing other data collection strategies. Subsequent to the documentary evidence were classroom observations. Documentary evidence was important and useful for planning classroom observations. Observation of the participant’s teaching (OPT) generated most of the data. With this data, the researchers were able to discern and reflect the elements of active learning principles in the teachers’ conceptions and teaching practices.
Generally, in qualitative studies, research questions frame data analysis, findings and conclusions (Elo et.al. 2014; Scrheier, 2012). As a result, a study’s analysis processes must be a detailed reflection of the research question at hand. Hence, Elo et.al.’s (2014) three phases of data analysis were invoked. This was also partly a measure to ensure the trustworthiness of the processes. Already, the preparation phase has been described through data collection processes. The organisation phase was reviewed and presented (Polit & Beck, 2012) in the data collection section (see Appendix A). To formulate themes, categories and meaning units, aspects and/or important concepts (see Table 1) from the research question are used.
The themes, drawn from the research questions, express underlying meanings synthesised from a combination of categories. Categories were generated from meaning units that relate ‘through their content and/or context’ (Erlingsson & Brysiewicz, 2017). Furthermore, themes are used to express data at an interpretative level (p.94). For this purpose, both the manifest and latent content analysis approaches were used (Kleinheksel et.al. 2020). Equally important, in this interpretive qualitative case study, the within-case notion of data analysis is employed (Onwuegbuzie & Weinbaum, 2016).
To capture the purpose of analysis, the researchers used a matrix of themes and categories from the research questions (Schreider, 2012). Two themes were generated from the research questions, the ‘conceptions of active learning’ in teaching science (CAL) and ‘practices of active learning teaching’ (PAT). The CAL describes the teacher’s conceptions of active learning and related strategies. The PAT, on the other hand, describes the teacher’s enacted teaching practices. However, Raselimo and Wilmot (2013) posit that teachers do not necessarily always practice their teaching based on their conceptions.
Raselimo and Wilmot (2013) further add that teachers’ contexts contribute to and/or determine what they should teach. That is, situations often arise when their practice does not reflect or align with their conceptions. However, their practices may reflect their situated conceptions of or about active learning. As a result, Clément (1994) argues that we can only analyse an individual’s situated conceptions. In other words, the same teacher, in different contexts, may express different conceptions of active learning and/or facilitate learning differently from the same conceptions. As a matter of fact, Castéra and Clément (2014) indicate that one’s conception is a mobilisation of facets of several conceptions.
Analysis looked at the data collected from the three sources (i.e. AoDs, OPT and SIP). The matrix constitutes themes, categories and meaning units or codes (Appendix A; Table 2). The findings are generated through condensation and abstraction of information across different meaning units for both the ‘conceptions of active learning’ (CAL) and ‘practices of active learning teaching’ (PAT). The matrix provides for the analysis of the findings. The findings reflect the teacher’s everyday classroom understandings and the weaving of conceptions and practices in his environment and/or context. Also, in reporting the findings, some of the contents of the two themes are juxtaposed. This is to establish associative relationships between conceptions and practice, if any exist, according to the research question. For the purposes of this study, findings were aligned and reported according to an analysis matrix adapted from Thompson’s (1992) notion of a conception (Appendix A, Table, 2). The matrix captures specific aspects of a conception to answer the study’s two research questions. Findings from the study were themed to reflect the two research questions.
