Category Archives: methodology

Wordle clouds as a way of looking at my freewriting

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Not all of the reflective freewriting is up to sharing on this blog – some of it is just intuitive rambling to start me thinking. This kind of writing indeed helps me identify my knowledge in a specific area and helps me generate the questions I need as I dive back into the literature.

I have been using the 750 words web site to give me motivation to write every day. It seems to be working and I may reflect in detail on the influence of that tool in the near future. Meanwhile, if I’m not posting some of what I am writing I will present the wordle cloud as a record of what I’ve been thinking about.

I often use Wordle clouds as a way of looking at a text from a different perspective – somehow breaking it up and jumbling the text like that and emphasizing terms and concepts which are high frequency gives me an additional way in to my thoughts.

Question of the day: Why qualitative research?

 

I’m Back! Grappling with Epistemology and Thinking about Language in my Research

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Last night while driving home and engaging in a family discussion on dreams, my children asked me: “Imma, in which language do you dream?” I answered immediately that I have no idea. I explained that I really can’t remember my dreams but that I do know that there are areas in which I think entirely in Hebrew (shopping, home life, pedagogy, literacy, school-life…) and areas in which I think exclusively in English (everything connected to research, methodology, theory, technical instructions…).

After 25 or so years living in Israel, my life takes place in two languages which are now fairly equal in terms of my competence. My PhD study is an interesting mix of the two, demonstrating that my hasty answer to my children, describing clear boundaries between the languages wasn’t exact.

In a discussion with Brenton Doecke at the beginning of my PhD journey, he urged me to emphasize the bilingual nature of my inquiry and not to leave language as a back drop in my research (as I did in my MEd thesis). At that time I did not fully understand this request and could only relate to having sections of text or even specific terms left in the Hebrew original alongside translation. Today I can see how language is a central element in my professional context, permeating all my actions and understandings. My language is heavily soaked with cultural significance.

Yesterday, in a Skype meeting with Graham Parr, my supervisor, we talked about the transcription and the translation of my interview tapes. We agreed that while translating sections of the conversations, I will have a wonderful opportunity to zoom in on the responses from my participants (and my own) and should be able to reach rich understandings of both content and context. We spoke about the importance of being sensitive to the place of my two languages in this study – how I translate my data, how I tell my own narratives of my practice and how important cultural or institutional concepts (whether they are translatable or not) are presented in my writing.

There are many cultural messages playing in my ears as I make decisions about which references to read and their status in the academic world. One of the questions I will need to explore is the place of Israeli researchers in my work.

This morning, I decided to try to clarify my thoughts on the epistemology of my research by rereading a book written in Hebrew:

Tuval-Mashiach, R., & Spector-Mersel, G. (Eds.). (2010). Narrative research: Theory, creation and interpretation. Jerusalem: Mofet and Magnes Press.

I decided to start with this reference as I have heard Gabriella Spector-Mersel explain the theories in many different forums and found them to be clear and accessible.  I must be honest in saying that although I have no trouble reading academic texts in Hebrew, I usually do it only when I have to. I read in Hebrew as a member of my doctoral writing group and read articles and book chapters as preparation for the sessions of the Qualitative research interest group meetings at the Mofet institute. Other than those occasions, I will usually choose English references. I am now becoming aware that this is not only because reading academic texts is still easier and quicker, it is also because of the cultural messages prominent in the academic world (and indeed in Israel as well), that Hebrew references are less important and influential than those written in English.

Embarking on the task, I was hoping that reading what I have heard Gabriella explain and translating the material slowly from Hebrew into English would help me understand more. I expected this exercise would give me ideas for entry points into writing about my own understandings of epistemology. As a result of this reading I found translation to be an interesting way of approaching a text. It slows down my reading and forces me to grapple with the dense carpet of terms involved. I cannot write a sentence until I reach some degree of understanding. Hearing things said (as familiar as they may be) in a different language, does indeed shed light on the ideas expressed. I remember I wrote about this here when I heard a lecture about the ideas of Dorothy Smith on Institutional Ethnography at Bar Ilan University and here after I first joined the interest groups on Action research and Narrative Inquiry at the Mofet Institute.  

Maybe I haven’t dealt much with epistemology but I have spent the morning thinking about language… and then again, much of what I have written is indeed connected to the nature of knowledge and its expression.

Changing directions in methodology

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This morning I read chapter 7 in the book I mentioned yesterday:

Kouritzin, S. G., Piquemal, N. A., & Norman, R. (Eds.). (2008). Qualitative research challenging the orthodoxies in standard academic discourse(s). New York: Routledge.

The author, Suhanthie Motha, describes her research journey. Originally intending to base her study of beginning teachers on classroom observations and teacher interviews, Motha was encouraged to change her methodology when her participants felt the need for some kind of group interaction.

I was particularly interested in the way the author describes her role as “connected” researcher and deals with the dilemmas which arose when the way she saw classroom incidents differed from the way  teachers related them in her story.

The author  relates to her teacher partners (as she calls them and not participants) in a respectful and open relational manner. They really are partners in the generation of knowledge in this study. Motha describes her methodology as disturbing the traditional researcher heirarchy. She quotes Motha and Wong (2005) explaining that this blurring of roles enables  “inquiry that is truly dialogic, in which learning is a two-way street”. Sensitivity to issues connected to power and the nature of knowledge are central to this chapter.

In this chapter I was introduced to the work of Michelle Fine (1992) who presents three different stances that researchers can adopt in their writing: ventriloquy, voice, and activism. This is indeed an interesting way of analysing how the researcher is relating to the participant and his or her story. Motha is attempting to follow an approach of activism which she explains with a quote from Fine (p. 41): as a “deep responsibility to assess critically and continually our own, as well as informants’, changing opinions” .

I will certainly return to these definitions when I try to describe my methodology.

I admire Motha’s honesty when she admits:

“What I’m learning to accept is that this work is still me telling someone else’s story” (p. 116).

Despite the dialogic nature of this study, despite the concious effort to present the stories she heard around her kitchen table as they were intended and told, and despite the significant disturbance of the traditional researcher-teacher heirarchy, the author acknowledges the limitations in her study as it is written.

Motha, S. (2008). Afternoon tea at Su’s: Participant voice and community in critical feminist ethnography In S. G. Kouritzin, N. A. Piquemal & R. Norman (Eds.), Qualitative research: Challenging the orthodoxies in standard academic discourse(s). New York: Routledge.