Abstract
This article reports on a focus group study of newly qualified early childhood teachers’ experiences during their first year of teaching. It argues that focus groups have the potential to invite dialogical engagement in ways that support teachers’ exploration of their own identities, and it emphasises the significant role group context plays in their professional support and development. A feature of the study was the way in which participants interacted with one another, with the researchers and with imagined others, resulting in a production of unique narratives that revealed both affiliation and difference. With a focus on the associational and interactional elements of the teachers’ responses, rather than the content of their responses, this article examines the use of focus groups as a method for exploring social interactions and group processes. In this study, focus groups are seen as temporal ecosystems, engendering new understandings from existing and ongoing encounters within the group. The authors argue that the resonance and cohesion of the interactions within the group are productive in responding to new teachers’ feelings of isolation, and that there is a need for more attention to the vitality of group processes in the lives of early childhood teachers.
Introduction
Focus groups have been acknowledged as avenues for engagement and community – notably in their ability to facilitate deliberation and reflection. They foster interactions and connectedness among participants and researchers, and position the purposefulness of the topic (the focus) alongside the importance of the community (the group). The focus group method explicitly uses group interactions to produce insights that would be less accessible without the interaction found in groups (Freeman, 2006; Halkier, 2010). This article discusses a recent study in urban Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, which used focus groups to examine experiences of newly qualified early childhood teachers. A complex temporal semiotics emerged as unique accounts developed into group narratives, revealing the teachers’ nuanced understanding of their experiences through their interactions within the group. This suggested to us that focus groups might act as temporal ecosystems (Farquhar and Tesar, 2016), with a productive role in teacher support and development. The focus groups in this study became important communicative spaces for our newly qualified teachers, moving beyond the instrumentalist application of a research method, and allowing both the researchers and the teachers to translate insights into their own practice and research contexts. Furthermore, the groups provided both the participants and the researchers with a professional space otherwise ‘missing’, in which to explore their emerging practices.
We saw the problem before us as hermeneutical – that is, as a challenge to reinterpret and more fully understand the complexity of teacher experience in early education and care. It was also an opportunity to engage in mutually constitutive and reciprocal ways within institutional frameworks to engender a community praxis (Freeman, 2006). Given the experiential nature of the study, we adopted a narrative research design utilising focus groups and individual conversations. One aspect that became overwhelmingly clear throughout the study was the significance of group interaction. Puig and Recchia (2008) also found focus groups to be highly relevant in their study, suggesting that newly qualified teachers see focus groups as a place for intellectual discussions and thinking together about ideas on a deeper level. They recognised that newly qualified teachers ‘desperately need to talk, but too often they do not have anyone to talk to’ (Puig and Recchia, 2008: 341).
Theorising focus groups
This article focuses more strongly on interactions among group members rather than the content of their responses, although they clearly mirror each other when the group is discussing its own process. Complex semiotics provide rich insights into both teacher thinking and the group process. This part of the article provides a theoretical examination of group function to inform the following analyses of participant dialogues.
A group comprises an assemblage of people who share something in common – perhaps a common goal, similarities or interdependency among members, or proximity of location. There are innumerable types of groups: families, gangs, work crews, expedition members, sports teams, audiences and crowds, to name a few. Work groups are often involved in complex situations, making choices and decisions, negotiating problems and resolving issues (Forsyth, 2010). Group theory is a topic of study that crosses a number of fields, including psychology, sociology and anthropology. It refers to the ‘influential actions, processes and changes that occur within and between groups over time; also the scientific study of those processes’ (Forsyth, 2010: 2). It has its origins in the work of scholars from the 1900s to the 1960s, including Le Bon (1960), Freud (1921), Wundt (1916), Allport (1975), Lewin (1943, 1948, 1951) and Bion (1961). Lewin’s (1943, 1948, 1951) seminal study of group dynamics is now regarded as instrumental in education in regard to group function, experiential learning and action research.
The significance of the word ‘group’ in focus group prioritises participants’ language, ideas and understandings of the world, in which participants provide an audience for one other, encouraging a variety of communication that is not always evident in other methods of data collection. Intentionally social, focus groups tap into ordinary social processes through everyday exchanges, in which participants deliberate and reflect on a topic selected by the research team – at least to some degree. Social engagement is an explicit feature of this method (Wilkinson, 1998), with the capability to reveal what Caillaud and Kalampalikis (2013) see as dynamic negotiations of meaning and representations of ecological practices. Group dynamics and influencing processes, they suggest, are no longer considered biases, but are useful to understand the way ‘social representations are constructed’ (Caillaud and Kalampalikis, 2013: 385). Rothwell et al. (2015: 5) argue for a deliberative discussion approach that promotes learning and questioning within focus groups, in order to ‘significantly enhance participant understanding and increase the utility of focus group data’. Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2013) suggest three primary functions of focus group work:
The pedagogical – related to the dialogical nature of focus groups
The political – responding to the collective support that focus groups may provide
The empirical – epistemological association around the research act, including complex negotiations between self and other in the inquiry
Focus groups provide a mechanism to explore, sustain and extend understandings, and are capable of decentring research, often blurring the distinctions among research, pedagogy and activism. Fine suggests that focus groups should engage in conversations that challenge hegemonic perspectives, rather than conduct research that reproduces dominant ideologies: research should be carving out cross-generational analytic spaces – what Kurt Lewin and Mort Deutsch called ‘work groups’ – to cultivate the theoretical surprises that can be unearthed in the empirical material once the fog of unacknowledged subjectivities is cleared. This involves creating collaborative contexts for and with students and colleagues, in which we critically think through theory, design, interpretation and use; where we engage in rigorous, collective self-reflection, critical distance, and ongoing social analysis and conversation about our lens. (Fine, 2006: 91–92)
Recognising the hermeneutical and ontological capacity of focus groups to reveal unique understandings of practices and engagements with others, Freeman (2006: 86) argues that it is through ‘being in dialogue with the world and others that I recognize and come to know myself’. She suggests that it is within the interactions themselves that meaning is co-constructed. Likewise, Halkier (2010) regards focus groups as social enactments, emphasising the importance of the interactions in analysing focus group data. Over 20 years ago, perhaps in the most comprehensive study of focus groups to date, Kitzinger (1994: 104) argued that group work had not been systematically developed as a research technique within social science, and was rarely acknowledged as part of the process: ‘Reading some such reports it is hard to believe that there was ever more than one person in the room at the same time’. Her review of more than 40 focus group studies showed that none concentrated on the conversation among participants.
A group effect enables participants to engage in constructing and reconstructing stories that are contingent, drawing on various topics that may not have been otherwise considered in other types of data-gathering. Lindlof and Taylor (2002: 182) argue that the focus group performs ‘a kind of “chaining” or “cascading” effect; talk links to, or tumbles out of, the topics and expressions preceding it’. Group work is characterised by teasing, joking and the kind of ‘acting out’ that goes on among peers (Kitzinger, 1994). Group interactions, then, involve conversations that stray off-topic and include jokes and asides. In this way, the social nature of focus groups yields quite messy data.
Freeman’s (2006: 85) theorising of focus groups within a practical hermeneutics portrays focus groups as a ‘living engagement … essential for creating new and more complex understandings of situations, programs and others and for nurturing the reflective and critical capacities of citizens’. Kitzinger suggests two themes integral to groups: (1) complementary interactions, highlighting the importance of the shared culture, and (2) argumentative interactions, highlighting the importance of difference. She argues that participants do not just agree with one other; they also ‘misunderstand one another, question one another, try to persuade each other of the justice of their own point of view and sometimes they vehemently disagree’ (Kitzinger, 1994: 113) – ideas that fit well with our notion of the focus group as a temporal ecosystem.
Hollander (2004) identifies four types of social context that influence the way focus groups operate and the outcomes they generate: (1) the associational context – the circumstances that bring people together, the characteristics of the participants themselves, and sometimes the physical surroundings; (2) the status context – demographic characteristics such as gender, class, age or occupational profile (higher-status members typically talk more and offer leadership within the group; conversations in all-female groups tend to be quite different); (3) the conversational context – what is discussed and who sets the tone (the first speakers often influence the rest of the session by establishing the agenda and the direction for subsequent discussion); and (4) the relational context – the intimacy of the participants (people say different things depending on how well they know, or think they know, others in the group). Hollander’s and Kitzinger’s frameworks provide useful tools for analysing ethnographic storytelling styles, comparing strategies within focus groups, and shaping our understanding of the temporality of the focus group for newly qualified teachers. This, together with the interactional nature of the focus groups, allowed the researchers to analyse the data in the two broad categories as we discuss below.
The study design
Information about the research and invitations to participate were sent to recent graduates of two early childhood education programmes, where each programme consisted of two cohorts – on-campus and flexible learning – thus, four cohorts altogether. The material sent to the potential participants set out the aim of the research – to gain a better understanding of newly qualified teachers’ experience of their first years as qualified teachers. The first 12 participants to respond affirmatively to the invitation were selected to participate. As it turned out, each cohort was represented, although this was not a requirement. All of the participants were female, with a diversity of age, ethnicity and work-life experience. All had been taught by either or both of the researchers at some stage during their teacher education studies. It was explained to the participants that there would be three focus groups across a nine-month period followed by individual interviews, and that their participation in all three focus groups would be beneficial but not essential for the research. They were also informed that they could withdraw from the study after the focus groups if they did not want to continue with the interviews. Eleven attended the first focus group, nine of whom continued in the following two groups – one being too ill to attend and the other having emigrated. Ten participated in the interviews. The participants were provided with NZ$50 vouchers as a contribution towards travel costs.
The focus groups were three months apart. Before the first one, refreshments were provided, in order to provide sustenance after a day’s teaching, to allow for delays in teachers getting from work to the university and, most importantly, to establish a convivial social space. Immediately it became apparent that this was not just a polite ‘meet-and-greet’ experience – these teachers were eager to engage in deep, meaningful discussion. It was helpful that some of the participants knew each other (and/or knew of each other) and that all of them knew one or both of the researchers (through the prior lecturer–student relationship). The convivial discussions over refreshments flowed easily into the focus group, interrupted only when we formally outlined the nature of the research and the rights of withdrawal and so forth. Within 10 minutes, a relaxed group discussion was underway, with the teachers maintaining a high level of control over the discussion process. A similar sense of familiarity, affiliation and group ownership remained throughout the later focus groups, with many of the teachers reporting that they enjoyed sharing their experiences. The non-hierarchical, egalitarian character of the focus groups clearly promoted increased interaction between the participants. Wilkinson (1998) argues that interaction of this kind also yields high-quality data.
In the groups, the teachers spoke within a space of commonalities and familiarity, sharing and listening to each other’s encounters, and unfolding and forming their own identities. At times, we felt like conductors of a musical ensemble, where the musicians (teachers) knew exactly what to do and had little need for us. The first focus group developed its own meaning, as we carefully avoided disrupting with too many questions and directions, sensing that the process of the teachers building on each other’s stories was significant for them. Furthermore, we found that there was something about the sociality and interactions within the group that was unique. This led the research team to discuss the spatial and temporal nature of the group, where we began to develop an understanding of this fragile space as a temporal ecosystem. Our initial conception of the focus groups as a means to gather themes for development in later interviews began to change, as the groups themselves became an important element of the research findings.
Recognising the emphasis on relationships and group learning in early childhood education, we found that the focus groups were responsive to the complex challenges of the pedagogy and practice of early childhood educators. Such observation is supported by the literature. Urban and Dalli, for example, argue that a ground-up critical ecological approach attends to interactive relationships among individuals, and values interdependency and reciprocity. It captures the ‘emerging, surprising and sometimes uncertain outcomes of the complex interactions that characterise early childhood professional practice’, encouraging ‘collective learning, meaning-making and knowledge creation’ (Urban and Dalli, 2012: 165). Our concept of the temporal ecosystem grows out of this ground-up critical ecological approach. With temporal, narrative and spatial elements, the focus groups provided close-to-ethnographic experiences that enabled us to produce translations of the contexts and personal narratives. We were surprised by the intensive flow of power and the breadth and depth of the topics discussed.
While the focus of this article is on the relational ecosystem of the focus groups, the data collected – in the form of the translated narratives – was analysed both through the researchers’ openness to the multiple interpretations and through developing a deconstructive research analysis of reading with/against each other. These ways allowed the researchers to work with each other’s method and interpretation of the data, permitting different subjectivities to work with the inclusion and exclusion of data, themes and constructs, while in particular drawing on the work of Lenz Taguchi (2010) and Koro-Ljungberg et al. (2015), which enables philosophy as a method to work with meaning-making. Interpretations of the collaborative data analysis then allowed the researchers to theorise the narratives with the complexities and performances of diverse identities. This supports both the associational and the interactional nature of focus groups to come up front in the process of analysis, as we argue in the ‘Focus group interactions’ section below. This research, guided by the approval of the university’s research ethics committee, upheld the rights of the participants to participate and for them to become partners in the research, and protected them from any potential psychological or emotional harm. The participants could withdraw from the study at any stage of the project up to the analysis. To preserve participants’ privacy and confidentiality pseudonyms have been used.
Limitations of the study
A limitation of the study is the effect of the group on individual participation. The group can have a positive influence, stimulating ideas and providing support and encouragement for participants as they learn from one another and inform one another’s storytelling. But groups have their downside as well – not all voices can be heard at all times and, occasionally in the group, one participant would counternarrate in such a way that seemed to drown out another’s perspective. Furthermore, the flow of a story/discussion meant that, at times, some participants were peripheral to the conversation. Some dominated at times, although there was a genuine desire to engage with one another, and a number of the participants sought the ideas of quieter members of the group. The group members were facilitative, frequently drawing one another into the dialogue with inquiry questions and building on ideas put forward by another group member. Only occasionally did a member of the research team intervene to move the conversation forwards.
As researchers, we clearly value critical and reflective discussion. But because each group decided the direction and content of its own conversations, discussions seemed sometimes to be not focused. At times, we would have liked to have developed particular directions or explored ideas further, but refrained from doing so, as it may have closed down the conversation, interrupting the relational flow of the group. Instead, we made a note to follow up in a later group or at an individual interview.
A limitation in any research project is the inevitable power imbalance between researcher and participants. Because we had previously taught these teachers and had established the parameters for the whole research project, the power relation between us as researchers and the participants was clearly skewed in our favour. In deciding on focus groups as a research method, one aspect of our considerations was a deliberate attempt to address the power imbalance by downplaying our involvement in the direction and the content of discussions (Steinberg and Cannella, 2012). From our perspective, there appeared to be an easy conversation flow, and we note that our researcher voices appear infrequently in the transcripts. The participants generated the conversation and the problems, and asked the questions of each other. There was generally a high level of trust among the group members, as they actively included less voluble members. As researchers, we were mainly observers – at times somewhat speechless at the unruly conversations and themes that emerged. Although those with more status and power in a conversation tend to have their topics taken up by others in the conversation, this notion seemed to be disrupted in the temporal practice. In terms of power relations, however, we cannot know the inner experience of each participant or what potential contributions were held back.
Focus group interactions
Two broad categories were particularly helpful in analysing the interactions and processes of the focus groups: the associational and the interactional. The associational category considers factors that brought the participants together – the environment, the relationality among the participants, and the conversational tone. The interactional explores complementary and argumentative interactions seen in the language used and linguistic features of the conversations, demonstrating shared understandings and differences in how the participants collaboratively developed stories, provided an audience and supportively challenged each other. Both of these categories (the associational and the interactional) provide a foundation for exploring the temporal ecosystem of the focus groups.
Associational analysis
Discussion prior to and at the beginning of the focus groups included the participants identifying with one another by way of existing friendships and their university cohort or programme affiliations. Typical associations were made: ‘Hi, I’m Susan. I was in the cohort with Carla and Anna’. There was a sense of reunion, even with the participants who had not known each other. They were very quickly sharing experiences and identifying with one another’s stories of survival – ‘I’m just doing day to day, just getting through’ (Susan) and of dissatisfaction – frequently talking about needing more of a challenge: ‘I’m just feeling like I’m a bit complacent and so are they and I’d just like a bit more challenge’ (Diana). The participants quickly agreed with Monica’s comment: ‘I guess being here amongst you guys, it’s really nice to be able to feel like I’m giving back to the profession, to support beginning teachers’.
During the introductions to the first focus group, there was a sense of relief in being together, amidst expressions of being overwhelmed or frustrated, typified in Emily’s remarks: God, this is so different from what I thought. So, for me, this is like you say. It’s an opportunity to give back and I think there’s things that, yeah … when we’re on that journey, learning journey, there’s things that I personally was going … Nobody tells you this and, you know, you get out there into the real world as such … and it’s a bit of a slap in the face sometimes and it’s really frustrating, so I think to be able to sort of share that with others, so that they’ve got an idea, that it’s, you know … what you learn in here is one thing, but trying to be an advocate and change, there is an opportunity. It’s just about knowing how to do that and I feel really lucky or fortunate that I’m in a position where I can do that, and so I’m trying to pass that on to my team of teachers, back to the role in the centre where I am.
Emily corroborates and validates the experiences of others in the focus group. Her journey metaphor suggests the temporal nature of the group’s shared experiences through her links to the real world and relational spaces. These links draw on group consensus-making, seen in phrases such as ‘like you say’ and ‘yeah’.
At the second focus group, there was an immediate reconnection and rapport, and the discussion took a more intimate turn. In the following conversation, the teachers share their frustration and hurt about a lack of intellectual stimulation and feedback from within their workplaces. In this shared story, the teachers relate different accounts, building a collaborative narrative:
Yes, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Sometimes you are really hungry for it and there’s often not time, and if there is time, there is maybe a lack of interest.
Or it’s the wrong time.
Or they studied years and years and years ago, and they don’t, um, yeah, sometimes they sort of say, ‘Oh, you are so, you’re so fresh out of your studies aren’t you? You’re so’, um …
Like that’s a bad thing.
Oh, when I first finished my studies, I was really passionate about doing this and that too, but now … [parodying an experienced teacher].
It’s a little bit old school.
It is. I am really surprised.
It is, yeah. Someone said that maybe it’s time to move on or have some more PD [professional development].
I’m really surprised. Yeah.
Throughout this highly expressive exchange, there was a palpable excitement as the four participants began to build a joint narrative about old and new teachers.
At the end of the first focus group, a number of the teachers commented to us that it was nice to be back; we interpreted ‘back’ in the spatial sense of the classroom, as the focus groups took place on their old university campus. We sensed the teachers not wanting to let go of the group bond, as one teacher asked: ‘Is it worth setting up a MOODLE site just for [all laughing]’. MOODLE was a place where, as students, they had been encouraged to collaborate online; we interpreted a nuanced understanding of this experience of online learning at the university. The laughing we interpreted in light of the shared community and language of the university – their Alma Mater.
Interactional analysis
The focus groups included many examples of complementary linguistic interactions demonstrating a shared educational history, seen in the ways in which the participants built stories about their experiences. In the following exchanges, the teachers developed a narrative about the need for experienced or ‘strong’ teachers. Here, various interactional features were present, including confirming, extending and completing each other’s sentences:
I just feel we need strong teachers …
In the right places.
In the right places.
… in the right places and I feel sometimes there’s, there are teachers that maybe are going out that are not particularly the best of teachers to be there. Not putting down, I’m not putting down at all, but we need strong teachers …
And leadership.
And leadership.
… and leadership to support the other teachers. Maybe there’s too many younger ones that really haven’t been through or understand.
There were also many instances of the participants anticipating where the speaker was going:
I find it very challenging … so there’s no strong …
Pedagogy.
They also uttered empathetically:
I’m a bit disappointed with the lack of collegial critique that goes on.
Mmm.
Mmm.
What is the saying, ‘Nice ladies that love children’?
The teachers teased and joked with each other. When there was disagreement in the group about the practice–theory balance in their qualifications, Carla suggested against the grain of the conversation that she would have liked more theory:
Maybe a bit more neuroscience as well.
That’s just cos your geeky.
That’s cos I’m geeky and I enjoy that kind of thing.
In the following conversation, Susan, Sharon and Diana affirmed each other, extended their ideas and sought buy-in from their audience (the other participants), using questioning as they began to shape a story together:
And I just think it’s a numbers game. Why? Why should it be a numbers game? These children are people … they are not money.
They are not numbers.
They are not numbers and money.
It’s soul-destroying too, isn’t it?
It is, it is.
When you come from your university experience and you graduate and you come out into a job and to feel like you are just, you know, just shuffling children.
You’re a cog in the machine.
Yeah, a cog in the machine. Yeah, that’s really soul-destroying.
A little more difficult to render and represent were the shared understandings represented in silences and elliptic fragments:
And with the demands of documentation.
Yeah …
Oh …
Trying to keep it authentic when you’ve got, you know, your list that you’ve got to write stories for.
But then becomes a bit dangerous, aye, when you are trying to think about the numbers and stories.
Yeah, hard to keep it meaningful and enjoyable.
Meaningful …
While there was also a strong sense of listening, turn-taking and questioning, there were also times when the participants did not always agree and challenges were made:
Gosh! This is what it’s supposed to be like and it’s having that feeling …
But it’s not always that simple though, is it?
And when Judy suggested that kindergarten is freer than childcare, she was challenged:
I think they’ve got more freedom, the children have got more freedom.
I think that probably depends on the centre, actually.
The conversation among Diana, Emily and Judy went back and forth for some time. The initial challenge moved into a quest to understand each other.
Like you say, it depends …
Yeah, it depends on the centre.
… on the centre that you’re in, and probably the teachers, yeah.
In the following exchange, Diana challenged Alice, but carefully included her, extending the conversation; then Judy continued the conversation. This exchange also points out a common theme that came out of the focus groups around the importance of teamwork and team dynamics:
I mean, that’s a really extreme example, isn’t it? But I like the way that you said there are so many people to please and I think that’s really true … It’s quite exhausting to figure that out and then to negotiate between them all, and I think that’s a really difficult but quite central part of our jobs, isn’t it? It’s draining, yeah.
It’s draining physically and emotionally because you don’t know when you’re doing right and when you’re doing wrong by different teachers.
Yeah, and we’re used to … yeah.
Sometimes that’s how important our collaboration, like we were talking about before, how important it is as a team that you do talk to one another about what’s happening. I mean, they should be sticking up for you and they’re not, so I find that really hard. So maybe, yeah.
The support, the sharing of experiences, the disagreements, the careful navigating of conversations, the personal growth, the building of community and the transferences of teachers’ narratives were all part of the temporal ecosystem of the teachers’ focus group. Perhaps, as Puig and Recchia (2008) note, early childhood teachers work collectively and participate in communities daily, so it is possible that we were perceiving a level of trust commensurate with the level of familiarity and comfort that the participants felt in working in group settings. This level of trust carried through into the group.
Ecosystems for professional support and development
We now discuss the significance of the social context and interactions across the three focus groups in our research. In early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand, there is a generally assumed high level of group process, interdependency and influence (May, 2009). Teachers and children coexist in groups, sharing spaces and resources not often seen in traditional school classrooms. There may be a wide variation in member differences within these groups, although the selection of members (whether adult or child) is not random – they are, in a sense, selected individuals who perform roles and responsibilities providing the need for group cohesion and identity. Group function and group process in early childhood education are strongly emphasised in the pedagogical focus on sociocultural theory and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). The emphasis on communities of practice constructs strong links between identity and practice through negotiated experiences with others, shared goals and consensus within localised spaces. Each member’s actions are influenced by group norms and consensual standards that define behaviour. These group dispositions featured strongly in our focus groups, partly because of their above-mentioned common histories, but also through communities of practice. Our focus groups became both the research method and a mode of personal/professional reflection for our group of teachers, in terms of process and interaction.
Focus groups involve the explicit use of group interactions and their effects as research data. Crucially, focus groups involve the interaction of group participants with one another, as well as with the researcher, and group interactions involve dialogue in which participants both challenge and support one other. It is in these interactions that a temporal ecosystem operates from the ground up, where typical power relationships between researchers and participants are disrupted, where questions are asked by all, regardless of their position within the group, and where the focus is on the speaker rather than the researcher. As if in some unwritten social contract, narratives and voices perform a temporal engagement that is powerful, respectful and ethical. The production of this ecosystem by participants and researchers alike is based on listening to others’ experiences and stimulating memories and experiences in the other participants. The social nature of the group is what distinguishes the collection of interactive data of the focus group from the one-to-one interview.
Freeman (2006) suggests that focus groups provide a way to nurture participants individually and collectively through dialogue. In our groups, discussion of past experiences, present worries and joys, and future wishes and dreams was fostered, negotiated and shaped with and by others within the group. Recognition of the group process became an important aspect of our focus groups. For early childhood teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand, group work is a constant daily reality, and academic discourse suggests that the importance of working within groups and communities is vital to their work (Ministry of Education, 1996). A collaborative and supportive approach between teachers and group conversation, then, were clearly a priority for the teachers in our study. Within the focus groups, there was a clear camaraderie: the participants shared a vocabulary and a common jargon, used metaphor and story in nuanced ways, and collaboratively built stories around their experiences. They developed a comfort zone, teasing, joking and completing each other’s sentences. This was evident in their keen awareness of the importance of communication, developing relationships and working in teams at both content and relational levels. Hollander (2004) and Grant (2011) emphasise the social storytelling context within focus groups as a privileged place where participants can learn from one other, think critically and transform their understandings. Seen in this way, focus groups do not produce data from individuals; rather, they generate meaning shaped by the dynamic interactions among group members. This explains our keen interest in interactions within the groups, rather than just the content of the conversations.
We witnessed the teachers drawing on their collective experience and knowledge within a supportive and shared temporal community of practice (Buysse et al., 2003; Lave and Wenger, 1991). There was not much opportunity for any sole performance of individual narratives. Instead, shared experiences and contradictory opinions created a collaborative approach to generating and exploring meanings. There were times when the participants developed small stories together. There was also a more continuous development of themes over the course of the three focus groups, where the teachers performed their pedagogical understandings of community. One of these themes developed out of the ‘cog in the machine’ conversation between Susan, Diana and Sharon (in the first focus group), which was then enacted at the end of the third focus group by the teachers talking and performing themselves as robots in response to a line of conversation about managerial pressures within early childhood centres. Ortlipp et al. (2011) argue that how teachers see themselves and their professional identity and how their profession is seen are major determinants in how they teach, and that this impacts on intentions to leave the profession.
Puig and Recchia’s (2008) study of novice early childhood teachers in the USA looked for ways to address the professional challenges of new early childhood educators and for ways to enhance their own practice as teacher educators. New teachers often felt disconnected from the support and nurturing provided during their teacher education programme, suggesting that narratives of isolation and self-sufficiency within the profession contribute to new teachers’ feelings of disillusionment and inadequacy, and make the act of reaching out for help even more challenging. Their study situated new teachers in survival mode, exacerbated by a ‘culture of teaching that values an individualistic approach [and] applies an implicit pressure for teachers to withdraw from colleagues’ (Puig and Recchia, 2008: 341). As one study observed: ‘Beginning teachers are frequently too busy running to know precisely where they are going; the aim is just to keep moving’ (Bullough, 1989: 141).
Osgood (2006) suggests the need for a stronger dialogical space where early childhood teachers can embrace a deeper reflective and reflexive practice, enabling them to become agents of change. Conversation is a powerful resource for teachers and an important aspect of the complex cultural communities of Aotearoa New Zealand. According to one review of successful case studies of new teachers’ induction processes, the overwhelming feature of effectiveness for new teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand was establishing a ‘family of support’ in which connectedness is highly valued (Piggot-Irvine et al. 2009: 176). One of the most significant success factors was the overall culture of support derived from both systems and personnel within the organisation.
Daniel et al. (2013: 160) highlight the importance of ‘critical transformative dialogue’ in pre-service teacher education, as part of the rigour that allows members of that community to ‘constantly reconsider, challenge and renew the quality of practice in their field’. They argue that teacher education courses should not only prepare pre-service teachers for reflective practice, but also construct a context in which they can develop the skills of critical dialogue as part of their ongoing professional practice.
Current models of professional learning for newly qualified teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand include individual programmes of advice and guidance towards teacher registration (Education Council, 2016). This is an important initiative that focuses on a new teacher’s practice and can provide unique opportunities for reflection and professional growth. However, in our study, the overwhelming finding was the importance of group support – new teachers frequently feel isolated. There is a clear need to develop independent and safe groups for new teachers, so they can continue critical dialogues begun in their undergraduate programmes. Focus groups provide a powerful professional development model for early career teachers, and reveal the experiential nature of teaching and learning.
One easy, cost-effective recommendation, then, is that new teachers, independently of the centre in which they work, meet together to form supportive groups in order to provide opportunities to engage in critical dialogue as part of their professional practice. Another recommendation is for stronger partnerships between centres and the academy, in which practice-based research can address problems of practice and professional learning for all teachers. Drawing on Dalli’s (2010: 70) critical ecology of the profession, we argue that the focus group is where different narratives can safely emerge, within an ‘ethos of inquiry’ and ‘alertness to the challenges’ in order to ‘make the present better’, allowing teachers to share experiences while further informing their ongoing practice. In this way, the formation of local, temporal ecosystems for newly qualified teachers increases the possibility that a teacher’s understanding of his/her own narrative may, over time, open up the rich narratives of the children, parents and adults with whom the teachers work.
Concluding comments
The focus groups, conceived initially as a small part of the study, became an important forum for the teachers. The process of the teachers getting together, their interactions and patterns of communication, their sharing and elaborating on each other’s stories, and the way they completed each other’s sentences demonstrated a keen understanding of democracy in practice. This understanding was even more evident in the way they teased, challenged and supported each other, even during disagreements. Analysis of the interactions highlights the teachers’ strong sense of community and engagement, echoing the importance of a hermeneutical ‘ground-up’ approach of critical ecological models, as suggested by Urban and Dalli (2012). Focus groups involve multidimensional social contexts where participants interact with one other, with the researchers and with ‘others who are not present but whose imagined presence affects the participant’ (Hollander, 2004: 613). The retelling and creation of stories in this research was seen as a dynamic way of processing experiences. We suggest that the insights gained in our study with early childhood teachers would have been less accessible without group interaction, and argue that interaction itself is the important feature of the study – perhaps more so than the content of the conversations.
Supportive groups that enable new teachers to share and process their experiences have been acknowledged as avenues for stories of engagement and community, for facilitating deliberation and for reflection (Grant, 2011). Collaboration and engagement through focus groups is a way to explore teacher identities and the significant role that social context plays in identity development. As teacher educators, our own programmes of study could develop further understanding of group theory and teamwork in order to support and nurture new early childhood teachers in overcoming challenges and feelings of disconnectedness. As Puig and Recchia (2008) point out, university-based networks of support can build on already existing relationships to neutralise teachers’ feelings of isolation. In our theorising and analysis of the study, we found ourselves thinking in more nuanced ways about the issues that the participant teachers raised in their conversations, and how we might extend the use of focus groups as temporal ecosystems to nurture learning that supports teachers’ connections to their profession.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.