A challenge for practitioners seeking to understand student thinking and learning as developing phenomena within innovative instructional designs is being able to step back from what they think they know and expect or assume will happen. Similarly, a challenge for ethnographers seeking to uncover previously invisible knowledge and patterns of practice is to understand what members of a social group need to know, understand, predict and produce undertake culturally relevant actions and participate in socially appropriate ways (Heath, 1982; Heath & Street, 2008; Green, Skukauskiate, & Baker, 2012). These roles and challenges converge in this study examining challenges in transforming an undergraduate General Chemistry course from an algorithmic to guided inquiry instructional design from the perspective of one practitioner who also served in multiple roles: curricular designer, professional developer for a team of teachers, instructor in her own class with a background in researching innovative learning environments in higher education settings.
Transforming the Instructional Design through a Reflexive Process: An
Institutional Intervention
Transforming the instructional design was not a decision initiated by the institution or recommended as a
professional development or curricular intervention. Rather, Kalainoff, as a senior instructor in this course and
lead designer of the curriculum process, decided to develop and propose a process of guided inquiry to meet the
developing transformation and leadership goals within the military academy (Kalainoff & Clark, 2017). This
process involved identifying inquiry processes and practices that her experience as well as academic background
identified as critical. This led to a search of developing programs in inquiry-based learning at a national level to
identify promising resources. She identified the POGIL model
Given her background in ethnographic research, Kalainoff, elected to develop a reflexive process for
her design team to explore how and in what ways the guided inquiry process was being undertaken with
students. As lead designer of the curriculum process as well as chemistry practitioner, she formed an
internal/external interactional ethnography research team of internal ethnographers (Kalainoff & Fallot) as well
as external ethnographers (Green & Skukauskaite) with whom she had previously worked. The goals for this
internal - external Interactional Ethnographic research team are reflected in the following perspective on
ethnography as a logic-of-inquiry proposed by ethnographers in education, Shirley Brice Heath and Brian
Street, individually
Suspending known categories to construct understandings of local and situated categories and referential meanings of actions being developed by participants; Acknowledging differences between what they as ethnographers know and what the actor(s) in the context know; Constructing new ways of knowing that are grounded in local and situated ways of knowing, being and doing the processes and practices of everyday life within a social group or configuration of actors; Developing ways of representing what is known by local practitioners and what the ethnographers learn from the analysis at different levels of analytic scale. Study Context(s) In this program, reflexivity refers to both the interactional ethnographic research process that guided the study of the transformation from an algorithmic to a guided inquiry instructional approach, and to the inclusion of an internal-external research team to support the designer and instructors in exploring the developing program.
These principles of conduct constitute a chain of orienting principles and implicated actions that
ethnographers in education (and other social settings) draw on as they seek to gain emic (insider)
understandings of what constitutes members’ (insider) knowledge. These principles of conduct frame an
Interactional Ethnographic approach to the study of social, cultural and linguistic phenomena that shape, and are
shaped by
The inclusion of the insider-outsider (internal-external) Interactional Ethnographers
What actions and decisions were undertaken by the design leader (a practitioner-researcher/researcherpractitioner) to develop the planned inquiry-oriented instructional process that instructors were asked to undertake? How and in what ways did instructors (self and others) engage in a process of guiding students in developing conceptual knowledge of chemistry concepts, processes and practices as well as collaborative decision-making and thinking processes? The institutional context of the study: situating General Chemistry and its practitioners In this study, the institutional setting is the introductory General Chemistry course in first year of a 47-month developmental experience (folk/insider term) which constitutes the developmental program at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, NY, USA. One semester of General Chemistry is required as part of a 17-course core sequence and foundation of the academic program. Although classified as a liberal-arts undergraduate institution, USMA’s history is entrenched in science and engineering as the first engineering school in the United States. Therefore, regardless of intended major, all student/cadets take the same General Chemistry course intended for science and engineering majors. In this course, 1200 freshmen are assigned to classes of 18, and instructors (n=20) may lead up to four classes each semester. Instructors are both PhD civilians and active duty military professors (MA/PhD in the disciplinary fields of chemistry, life science, chemical engineering and other related disciplines. Given that most military faculty rotate through the Academy on a 3-year tour of duty, the department sees 20-25% faculty turnover every year, requiring a summer faculty development workshop for incoming faculty. Because students take the same major graded events, major administrative tasks are planned and conducted at the course level with a designated course director who also teaches two classes in the course. Major administrative features in-common to all classes in the course include: lesson outlines with learning objectives and homework for each lesson, materiel resources (textbooks), and laboratory experiments and resources. Course directors maintain and contribute to a common course digital resource called notes for instructors (or NFIs) (folk/insider term) that orients instructors to key concepts in the lesson, potential challenging concepts for the students, recommended key questions in the guided inquiry text and available material for in-class demonstrations.
The theoretical context of the study: situating Interactional Ethnography
In order to trace developing innovative programs over time, events, activity and configurations of practitioners,
we take up Interactional Ethnography as a logic-of-inquiry, not a method. Central to this orienting theory is that
we live socially-patterned lives by engaging in structuring (Mehan, 1978) activity (or processes). As these
processes occur over time in certain ways, for particular purposes, and with intended outcomes, they take on
particular meanings and develop into social practices that constitute part of a conceptual system of meanings.
Therefore, developing an understanding of the meanings of disciplinary process and practices made visible in
changes to patterns of activity over time constitutes “learning”. This argument builds on directions in
anthropology in which culture is understood to be a verb, not a fixed or existing phenomenon (Street, 1993;
Heath & Street, 2008), and culture as defined as a conceptual system
The instructional context of the study: situating Guided Inquiry
The Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning (POGIL) learning originated in General Chemistry the early
1990’s as a chemistry professor’s response to what he believed was an ineffective traditional lecture-based
instructional model. This instructional design is based in Karplus model of learning which was informed though
Piaget (Karplus & Thier, 1967; Piaget, 1964). Karplus drew on Piaget’s work that learners build their own
mental constructs (or reasoning patterns) for knowing science through experience with the physical world
In short, the process cycle phases are: exploration, concept invention, and application (Karplus, 1977).
As designed, the POGIL process begins with a guided exploration of, in this case of a general chemistry course,
a scientific (chemical) representation (e.g. diagram, table of scientific data) through orienting students to
particular aspects of the model through direct questioning (called Critical Thinking Questions or CTQs) in the
inquiry text (Moog & Farrell, 2015). These questions make visible the patterns in the data such that the
students may hypothesize the qualitative relationships (concepts). Then the student addresses questions that
require applying the concept and terms to complete the process cycle. This process itself models a scientific
methodology- an ideal feature of a learning environment for a science course. The process is intended to occur
in interactive learning teams of 3-4 students with an instructor-facilitator present
Challenges and Opportunities of Implementing a New Instructional Design In order to meet the challenges and opportunities of implementing a new instructional design, both practitioner as researcher and researcher as practitioner roles and relationships require stepping back from the known to make visible what is required for outsiders to understand what is happening from the insider perspective. This paper provides a basis for understanding a new form of collaboration between practitioner-researchers and external ethnographers as they seek a common understanding of what is entailed in transforming, not merely developing a sedimented (i.e. traditional) institutional model of teaching chemistry to one that meets both institution goals and national calls. Through tracing the multiple roles and relationships that Kalainoff undertook as designer to professional developer to classroom instructor, we seek to develop new understandings of who counts as practitioner for a new curriculum and how the movement across roles brings new challenges and relationships to those guiding the transformation. Additionally, given the goal of this section of ICLS, by making visible the interactional ethnographic frame, we demonstrate how the theoretical logic of inquiry informs both the research and the reflective practices of different practitioners in a developing guided inquiry curriculum. As will be demonstrated, this frames what constitutes the basis of a reflexive process at the intersection of theory, practice, and researchers, not supported by external.
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