I don’t pride myself as a writer and writing research papers
scare me… This is why I went into math, to avoid writing. However, I am going to do the very best I
can!
I was lucky enough to meet with my mentor Joe on Martin
Luther King Day to talk about my Plan B and assignment checklist. From this meeting, I feel like I have a much
better understanding of what I need to do.
I am conducting a self-study
My research question is currently:
“How does a new teacher organize and integrate a service
learning field trip into their curriculum?”
Currently I am still working on finalizing details of the
field trip and working on hopefully getting free busses. I am working with Yumi Miyata to try to
seamlessly integrate some form of mathematics and data collection for our
students to complete at the sites. Yumi
has been in contact with the Pacific Wildfire Exchange to get some ideas for us
of activities that our students can do.
Currently we have at most 550 students and 9 teachers going
on the field trip (not including other teachers as chaperones at this
point). The majority of the students
(380) are in Algebra I with 3 other Algebra II classes and I probability and
statistics class. Also 2 fully
self-contained classes of upperclassmen whom are going to have an
Aquaponics/hydroponics Integrated Project in 4th quarter.
I have been writing in a journal at least once a week for
evidence in my self-study. Which is
basically as case study of myself. I
really liked the definition of a case study in the Creswell reading:
“Case studies are a strategy of inquiry in which the
researcher explores in depth a program, event, activity, process, or one or
more individuals. Cases are bounded by
time and activity, and researchers collect detailed information using a variety
of data collection procedures over a sustained period of time (Stake, 1995)”
When Tara first suggested that I do a self-study I had to do
some research to completely understand what that meant. I had also looked at some self-studies that
have been done before.
As described in the Creswell reading, I believe that a self-study
is qualitative research.
His explanation here gave me the best understanding of what
exactly qualitative research is.
“Qualitative research is a means for exploring and understanding
the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem. The process of research involves emerging
questions and procedures, data typically collected in the participant’s
setting, data analysis inductively building from particulars to general themes,
and the researcher making interpretations of the meaning of the data. (adapted
from Creswell, 2007).”
One thing from Creswell’s reading that I found really
interesting was biases because Joe had brought this up in our meeting and it
was something that I really had not thought about.
“Being objective is an essential aspect of competent
inquiry; researchers must examine methods and conclusions for bias.”
The main reason why I wanted to take students from Campbell
High School on a service learning experience was because I have had so many
great experiences with service learning through the Ethonomathematics and STEM
Institute and through this STEMS^2 cohort.
I do understand that the students that participate in this service
learning field trip will have a very different experience than any that I have
had because they are in a much different time of their lives than I was when I
participated in service learning field trips. Also I understand that each one of their sense of places are unique to them and entirely different than mine. The enduring understand I hope for them to walk way from this field trip is that of where their water comes from and a better understanding of what a watershed is and their importance.
