Yuli Rahmawati

Moments of critical realisation and appreciation: a transformative chemistry teacher reflects

Motivated by Parker Palmer’s call for teachers to understand the self who teaches, I recently completed a transformative research journey of understanding my past chemistry teaching experiences. I am a university chemistry teacher educator from Indonesia, and recently participated in a three-year longitudinal co-teaching project in lower secondary schools in Western Australia. Conducting co-teaching and narrative research stimulated me to think deeply about, and reflect critically on, my past teaching experiences. As the research involved critical reflection on my professional praxis, I adopted a multi-paradigmatic research approach with three focus paradigms – interpretivism, criticalism, and postmodernism – and designed a critical auto/ethnography as my research methodology. I applied multiple genres within arts-based research, including poetic reflections (poems), stories, dialogues within narrative, and metaphors. This journey revealed how I struggled as an unmotivated teacher to become a highly motivated and passionate teacher. I used Habermas’ three interests and Schubert’s curriculum images to interrogate my chemistry teaching. This journey ultimately opened up the somewhat closed box of my personal and professional practices as a teacher.

STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS FOR THE CHEMISTRY LABORATORY ENVIRONMENT IMPROVEMENT

Abstract Chemistrystudents’ perceptions of the chemistry laboratory learning environment were investigated in Jakarta State University. An already existing instrument Chemistry Laboratory Environment Inventory (CLEI) questionnaire was translated into Bahasa Indonesia and administered to 410 university students in three different years of chemistry study. Data analyses supported the validity and reliability of the instrument when used in this context and there were no statistically significant differences in mean scores for gender and programme of study. However, the mean differencesin students’ perceptions of their laboratory environment were statistically significant by year level. These differences were further validated by the interview data. Qualitative data were obtained from laboratory observations and interviews with the students. Furthermore, both quantitative and qualitative data confirmed that students wished for an improved laboratory learning environment in terms of more opportunities to explore their own interests and to work with better laboratory equipment. The chemistry department staff could use the information from this study to guide them in making changes for improving the learning process in the laboratory.