thesisthoughts

Today I reread the first chapter of Doecke and Parr and was surprised that the notes I had made previously didn’t make the blog or the methodology chapter.

Points I will add are:

• Through writing teachers can explore their professional lives and “refine their understandings of the complexities of teaching and learning” (p. 9).
• “This is obviously of benefit to the students in their classes, although those benefits do not necessarily translate into tangible outcomes that can be easily measured” (p. 9).
• “… qualities that teachers value most in their students’ learning-intellectual curiosity, a willingness to engage in exploratory talk, imagination, a preparedness to collaborate while also accepting a degree of autonomy, a capacity to engage in metacognition and reflexivity-are the very same qualities that characterize their own professional learning. Teachers who engage in practitioner inquiry are much more likely to be able to generate a ‘culture of inquiry’ in their own classrooms” (Reid 2004, p. 12 as cited here p. 12).
•  writing 3 fold: writing as artefact, writing as process, writing as medium – see p. 13. I can link the writing in my thesis to these concepts.

Doecke, B., & Parr, G. (2005). Writing: A common project. In B. Doecke, & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing = Learning (pp. 1-16). South Australia: Wakefield Press.

It is amazing that you can read a text and not really understand much of it and then reread it a month or so later and find that it is totally comprehensible. This is exactly what happened to me now with Smith’s article. I had no idea why my supervisor had recommended it to me – I just couldn’t see the link to my work and today it’s perfectly clear.

Smiths comparison between the state-of-mind which embraces us in our home life as women and the state-of-mind in the context of university.

Home – local, connected to a particular place and time, particular familiar people

Uni – impersonal, people are known through “printed names on texts”, classed

Institutional ethnography… begins with the issues and problems of people’s lives and develops inquiry from the standpoint of their experience in and of the actualities of their everyday living… It conceives of the social as actually happening among people who are situated in particular places at particular times and not as ‘meaning’ or ‘norms’ ” (p. 18-19).

Practitioners are seen as knowing best how to describe their experiences, they understand their own practice. It is the researchers role to investigate how this local knowledge joins knowledge created in other contexts.

Institutional ethnography is grounded in the understanding that each individual experiences events in a unique way.

People are always acting in a particular context – place and time.

“In Institutional ethnography, the researcher is permitted to learn, perhaps must learn, from each interview what may inform and change the subsequent.”

“But institutional ethnographers are actively seeking to be changed, to discover not only what they did not know but also, as they go about their work, how to think differently about what they are learning” (p. 28).

Smith, D.  E. (2002). Institutional ethnography. In T. May (Ed.) Qualitative research in action (pp. 17-52). London: Sage.

image: http://www.rcs.k12.va.us/gifted/gifted/Graphics/insight.jpg

Lather wrote this article in an attempt to understand the US government push for “evidence-based” scientific research in education. In this move, “the reductionisms of positivism, empiricism, and objectivism are assumed” (p. 16).

The author sees the return to the mandate of scientific research to be a reaction to the growth of alternative research methods and their use by women and political and cultural minorities.

Lather  explains that this is not the first time that scientific method as a solitary research path has been critiqued. She admits that she believed that there was a chance for policy to be shaped by non-traditional research.

Addressing this restricting connection between government policy and scientific research , Cochran-Smith (2002) wrote that in order to be financially supported “educational research must be evaluated “using experimental or quasi-experimental designs… with a preference for random-assignment experiments (Cochran-Smith , 2002, as cited in Lather, 2004, p. 18).

Lather reminds us that “The shift to qualitative methods in the 1970s was related to the difficulties of measuring what is educationally significant and th limits of causal models given the preponderance of interaction effects” (p. 20).

Which organizations are running after research money?

Which studies are encouraged and for what purposes?

Who pays for research grants and why?

Lather calls for educational researchers to refrain from following the natural sciences. She encourages researchers to ask complex questions, those that do not have single dimensional answers and in doing so, to “foster understanding, reflection, and action instead of a narrow translation of research into practice” (p. 23).

Lather sets out to disrupt the dominance of the white, male, academic voice in the production of educational knowledge.

Lather argues that although non-traditional research cannot be judged on “objectivity and systematicity” (p. 24), it is no less capable of valid knowledge production.

Lather optimistically remarks that “A rich production of counter-narratives is alive and kicking” (p. 26).

I believe I am part of this movement, making an effort to make other, more diverse voices heard in the production of educational knowledge.

Lather explains “… there is virtually no agreement … as to what constitutes science except, increasingly, the view that science is, like all human endeavor, a cultural practice and practice of culture” (p. 28).

Lather, P. (2004). This IS your father’s paradigm: Government intrusion and the case of qualitative research in education. Qualitative Inquiry,10(1), 15-34. doi:10:10.1177/1077800403256154