Towards a pedagogy of critical happiness: Implications for teaching and learning.

摘要

During my experiences as a student, teacher, and math/science professional staff developer, I noticed that there was a lot of sadness, sorrow, frustration, and anger in the institutions where I worked. I wanted to understand what makes people happy in education. This qualitative research study utilized narrative inquiry and narrative analysis to ask 9 participants to tell stories about what made or makes them happy in schools. The participants included 4 students, 4 teachers, and 1 administrator. The data consisted of more than 35 hours of interviews, 383 pages of single spaced transcriptions, 10 hours of member checks and corrections, 45 hours of first layer item analysis, 60 hours of second layer item analysis, 60 hours of coding, extensive field notes, and daily researcher reflection through journaling, which included poetry and creative photography. After a thorough analysis of the data using various modified qualitative methods, the items of analysis from 523 different stories were coded into factors that influence happiness in teaching and learning. The three main categories which emerged were (1) factors which create general happiness, (2) factors which create more happiness, and (3) factors which create less happiness. The stories in the first category did not necessarily take place in schools, and did not require the presence of a supervising adult. This category included stories about happiness from self-teaching and learning, and group teaching and learning. Opportunities for exploring nature, to be with friends, and playing were critical to creating more general happiness. In the second category, the majority of stories were told about good teacher qualities, which include caring, competent, challenging, thought-full, loving, encouraging, enthusiastic, in touch, and entertaining. In the third category, considerably more stories were told about teachers who create less happiness through bad teacher qualities, which include socially unjust, abusive, incompetent, ineffective, punitive, out of touch, frustrating, boring, and discouraging. Also critical to creating less happiness in schools were bad administration, bad assessment and bad home situations. More happiness is created in teaching and learning by doing more of what makes people happy in schools and less of what does not.