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.
This post from Portrait of a Suppsed Scholar is similar to that I posted yesterday. People are beginning to write about the nuts and bolts of doing research.
This time in English. I wish I had time to write a post like this of my own…
Professor Idan Landau, a linguist from Ben Gurion Uni wrote a terrific post about what it means to be an academic. For those of you who read Hebrew, it really is worth a read. I’m sure I’ll read and reread his description of research often.
Yesterday I was only at school for an hour in the morning to start the week off in a routine manner, to let the kids see me and to meet with two parents about a fight which raged in grade 6 on Thursday afternoon. At nine o’clock I got in the car and drove to Tel Aviv. The trip was smooth and I only got stuck in a traffic jam at the very end, when I was very close to the Mofet Institute.
From the moment I entered the room I felt comfortable; there was no sense of something threatening. People were very welcoming and it really didn’t matter that I didn’t know anyone or that this was my first time attending these Interest Groups connected to qualitative research.
The first session was about action research and was run by Professor Michal Zellermayer. I have followed Professor Zellermayer’s work since the days of the whole language approach and since I was a leader of professional learning in the “Bezavta” program. I have read some of her work on action research and her presence leading the group was what first attracted me to join. Many of our research interests overlap and I believe we have many other similarities connected to our practice.
After an introductory hour where each participant (14) presented herself and her connection to action research, Professor Zellermayer lectured for an hour on the direction the meetings will take and based this on an example frm one of her studies. I sat in awe of the proceedings. I heard the ideas and the concepts I have been processing in my reading and in my conversations with Graham and Scott, in the same language, even though the session was held in Hebrew. These connections between my study interests and progress “over there” to my professional context “over here” are crucial for me at this point. Each time I come into contact with respected academics who are doing the kinds of work I feel comfotrable with, I am able to see clearly the possibility of moving to work in the Israeli academic field at some stage.
The emphasis in this group will be on the writing of action research and that is a theme that I have yet to study. At the moment I am writing my texts in an intuitive manner and leaning on the feedback from GP & SB. We were directed towards the work of McNiff, which I will indeed return to and engage with in the next month.
Professor Zellermayer made an interesting comment about publication. She suggested taking a section of a study and beginning to write and revise small sections of it for publication in smallish journals. She described the process where you receive feedback and publish and then expand and deepen the work on the theme in the form of another article. This continues until there is a fully cooked, expertly developed article which may be published in one of the top ranked journals. I hadn’t ever thought of returning to one of the pieces I have published but I’m sure that if I did now there would be obvious ways to continue from it and develop the ideas. I have changed so much since the writing of them that it shouldn’t be too hard to find loose ends to attach to.
I have to get ready to go to school now, changing back into my everyday role. The sessions yesterday breathed life into my desire to continue my research, to finish my PhD and to find a way to devote myself to those interests in a more intensive fashion. I am waiting in anticipation for the next meeting.
While negotiating the nature and content of my professional learning courses, I have recently come to understand that this study cannot remain apolitical, if it ever aspired to do so. Teacher education is involved in politics and as I have discovered through my readings (e.g. Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Kincheloe, 2003; McWilliam, 2004; Price-Dennis, 2010) teacher practitioner research is in essence a political practice, even if its participants didn’t intend it that way at the outset. Teachers who critically explore their professional environment and their practice, teachers who reach out to their peers and share experience in search of collaborative learning, are making a statement about who they are as professionals and how they wish to be seen by others.
This morning I read an article in preparation for the lecture by Professor Bar Shalom that I will hear tomorrow at Mofet. The authors, Bar Shalom and Krumer-Nevo, claim that all research is political in nature. This is indeed interesting, as it is a far broader way of relating to the political goals and influences of research. The authors explain:
“Research is a political act since it not only reflects existing reality, but also influences and creates reality, whether by supporting, affirming, and reinforcing existing reality, or by criticizing it and advocating change. The researcher’s position regarding reality influences their choice of subject and the questions they raise, as well as the selection of research procedures to be applied. The words the researcher chooses in order to describe their findings and conclusions structure the object/subject addressed by their research and the balance of power between these (Ife, 1997)” (p. 237).
It seems that if this is the case, then a distinction must be made between those researchers who acknowledge this political side to their work and those who do not. Researchers setting out to achieve social change are usually more open and explicit about the way they are hoping that their work will influence the lives of their participants and their communities. In my study I write explicitly about my intention to sound the voices of classroom teachers whose knowledge is often overlooked in the educational research arena. The political nature of my own study is a theme I need to explore more thoroughly in the coming year. .
I have been feeling a bit isolated recently and have noticed a lack of interaction surrounding my research since the intensive month I experienced in Australia. It’s not that I haven’t been working. Choosing to write a journal article as a means of getting myself going has proved useful. I am still waiting for feedback on the draft I submitted to International Journal X and I do indeed hope it will be accepted (after revisions… of course). Having a clear cut deadline to work towards gives me the kind of work-inducing pressure that I seem to need.
In the next two weeks I have three other urgent tasks – producing abstracts for two conferences to be held here in Israel this year (one national and the other international) and finalizing permission from the Chief Scientist’s Office so that I can begin my interviews ASAP.
I am excited that on Sunday I am travelling to Tel Aviv to participate in the Mofet Teacher Educator Interest Groups for qualitative researchers. I have never attended any of their sessions and this year I signed up for two different groups. I am looking forward to a whole day of stimulating discussion and thought provoking interaction. This, along with my ongoing doctoral writing group, will be another means of meeting people doing similar work to mine, here in Israel. I am interested to see how my work fits in to the academic puzzle here in this country.
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.
On opening the first pages I met a thoughtful and inspiring dedication:
“This book is dedicated to all the graduate students and academics who, by choosing to engage in non-standard research, have chosen a path that might generate uncertainty, vulnerability, tension and ambiguity as much as it might generate positive personal, academic and social change”.
At this stage of my academic journey I can certainly relate to the “uncertainty, vulnerability, tension and ambiguity” as I struggle with those feelings daily. I can report that I have already experienced personal change but I will have to wait and see whether I am able to have any kind of real academic or social influence. I certainly hope so!
I have been trying to acquaint myself with the work of Dorothy Smith for some time. Although GP suggested I read Smith’s work on several opportunities, I continually found that I couldn’t see the connection to my own work. I kept putting her articles aside for later on.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend a lecture on Institutional Ethnography and the work of Smith by Dr Orly Binyamin at the Bar – Ilan University.
Before the lecture I reread an article by Smith and arrived with one question in mind: How is Institutional Ethnography connected to my research? How is it relevant?
I learned from the session that Institutional Ethnography is a “methodological perspective”, that you don’t have to “do an Institutional Ethnography”, that you can let the ideas, the perspective color your research.
I was interested to learn that IE is a way of approaching interviews, of opening up the opportunities contained in interviews by concentrating on the social information they contain. Dr Binyamin stressed that often the context of the interview is far more important than the themes which emerge from the interview transcript.
IE aims to map the social environment in which interviewees act. It aims to explore the connections between these various contexts.
IE explores relations of control and places emphasis on public policy. It examines how these policies affect the interviewees.
IE contends that people in the field possess knowledge and can teach us from their experience. It is the researchers responsibility to take that knowledge one step further in order to promote change. The information possessed by the people in the field isn’t enough as they often don’t have the opportunity to understand the institutional framework which shapes their reality. This is an alternative to research which simply describes behaviour – this is research which promotes action.
Binyamin stressed that we are adding on to the knowledge of the interviewees and not questioning it. The everyday knowledge of the participant is relevant and real. The researcher takes this information and widens the viewpoint and examines it. We are all trapped in our own very specific worlds. Binyamin gave the example of an interview with a cleaner about his or her work. The researcher can hear all of his or her experience and knowledge about the job but will move on to ask others. There are other people, administrators, managers, etc who can shed light on the work of the cleaner through the examination of policies and texts (like contracts) which can shed different light on the professional reality of the cleaner.
Often we are partaking in relationships of control without being aware of it.
In Ethnography the researcher aims to arrive at the study in order to explore, in order to discover. The researcher begins with “I don’t know”.
The term “ruling relations” relates both to structural procedures and texts. Smith explains that often an individual believes that he or she is making their own decision without being aware that they are in fact conforming to the demands of social or institutional forces. Institutional policy enters our personal and professional lives and influences our actions. IE asks what we can learn about the social, the public aspects and not just the reality of the individual. Public refers to the context outside the home.
IE exmines the external contexts in addition to the internal world of the interviewee.
According to Smith the personal is political and the political is personal. In ethnology the political was often neglected.
Binyamin warns that IE is complicated and that she doesn’t allow her PhD students to try it.
What is important to hear in interviews?
Daily routines
how the everyday makes sense to the interviewee
What it means to belong to a certain group
IE suggests asking the interviewee what change is necessary? This is of course the connection to action…
Questions that need to be asked later:
who are various interests and ruling relations paying service to?
How are the implications of policy permeating the reality of participants?
How are decisions made?
What discourses are being used (medical, legal…)?
Often in IE the researcher decides who else to intervew after hearing the participant.
Binyamin explained that IE offers concepts which can be useful in other methodologies. The study must be feasible, she warned against getting “carried away” – there is always a wider circle ready to be approached and interviewed.
The lecture concluded with the words: “Overturn what you took for granted and thought you knew…”.
