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Newsletter Volume 3 |
Spring 1999 |
New ACEPT Evaluator Rides Into Town
Daiyo Sawada
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Arizona State University
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Newsletter Volume 3 |
Spring 1999 |
"Have Gun, Will Travel" conjures up the somewhat chilling but often times hopeful image of an outside "gun" coming in to render justice. Indeed, justice may be rendered, but that is about where this metaphor ends. In fact, I arrived from Edmonton, Canada, not with a Colt 45 but with a Plymouth Colt 1500. I drifted into town on a hot dusty Saturday afternoon just in time to unpack my Colt at "Lakeview at the Bay" and show up for work Monday October 05, 1998.
That afternoon I met my boss, ACEPT Project Director Susan Wyckoff, who welcomed me on board. As I write this note, I have now been on the scene for three weeks and it still is not clear to me what sort of justice might be rendered here. People tell me that three weeks is much too short a time to even begin to understand a project as comprehensive and complex as ACEPT. There are so many visions about what ACEPT is all about, so many participating institutions each with their special agendas, so many linkages and inter-relationships many emerging as I write, so many participants each participating differently, and several other institutions lurking in the background. And yet I feel comfortable here. Perhaps its because complexity theory is an interest of mine, or maybe it is because I enjoy reading books with titles like "Order Out of Chaos". Maybe it is because the theory of living systems makes me appreciate diversity, or maybe it is because I have been involved in mathematics teacher education for most of my life. More likely though, it is because the people in ACEPT are real people.
I understand that I am the second evaluator to arrive on the scene. A couple years ago another group was hired. Possibly they did not render justice;possibly they did. But whatever they did, they did it quickly they were not resident in ACEPT, they were visitors. I believe that there was wisdom in the decision of the ACEPT Evaluator selection Committee that brought me to Tempe; wisdom to know that excellence in a system as complex as ACEPT could never be justly revealed by administering a few questionnaires, conducting some focus interviews, administering pretests and post tests, gathering a few selected observations, and then claiming that "the data suggests . .". Having said this, I will likely engage in all of the above tasks, but they will be only some of the methods employed. Other methods, methods that are more sensitive to depth and to context will likely be used as well.
ACEPT is just into the fourth year of its five-year mandate. I hope to be in residence till the end (even though at the moment I only have a one-year contract - hint, hint). For the residence to make a difference I need to come to know everything about ACEPT that would be important to render justice. I have the good fortune of being able to work with a most competent internal evaluation team consisting of Michael Piburn (the ACEPT Internal Evaluator and ASU science education faculty member), Jeff Turley, an ongoing staff member of ACEPT and experienced middle school science teacher, and Kathleen Falconer, a doctoral graduate student in physics education with a masters degree in physics from Purdue University. While these insiders know a great deal about ACEPT, it is impossible for them to know everything. For the Evaluator residency to pay off big time, I need to count on you. If you have read this far, you are an interested party. Would you care to share that interest? I hope you will. I have written this note in a light-hearted manner, but I am dead serious in soliciting your comments.
Please feel free to contact me. I promise to return all calls. Try emailing: daiyo.sawada@asu.edu, or phoning: (602) 727 6799, or faxing: (602) 727 6019. Or if you happen to be in the Bateman Physical Sciences Center on the ASU campus in Tempe, try PSH 323 where I reside.
By the way, I no longer have the Colt. The U.S. Government Environmental Protection Agency determined that it didnt emit properly. I now have a 3.3 Litre "revolver" firing on all 6.
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