Tonight you spent the first part of class workshopping your ideas for your concept papers (the workshop prompts are posted to the right). The concept paper is a short, exploratory document that can serve as your basis for talking to your (possible) research advisor. The purpose of the workshop was for you to use talk with classmates as a way to focus ideas and to some more or less coherent brainstormy possibilities that you and your advisor can use to develop your proposal. Your concept paper should include any questions you need to resolve.
The remainder of class focused on the three readings as discussed by the Nic, Kena, and Angela. The plan to spend some time taking ethnographic fieldnotes was not realized - we simply did not have time. Although I had ambitions plans for providing you with experiences in the different approaches to data collection and analysis, I am realizing that the broad "overview" demanded by this course will not leave time for this. I am hoping that as you decide on methods for your study, you will come back to the references suggested by the book and in our discussions.
For next week:
Read: Mertens, Chapte 4 - Experimental and Quasiexperimental design: read this material with a focus on how issues surrounding validity, generalizability, and establising causality affect ALL research. The discussion here is on work where researchers manipulate variables - but I want our discussion to consider how the issues Mertens raise bear upon YOUR research projects - which may or may not be "experimental". The section on experimental design is probably less relevant to your work than the discussion at the beginning of the chapter,.
Also read: Chapter 12 through page 379. We will discuss standards for reliability in class - you can skim this but I think we can cover it in discussion.
Also read: Emotions of Professional Writers (posted to the right)
In class we will discuss (quasi)experimental research and data collection, and examine an instance of how experimental research plays out in writing studies. I will also post a copy of the exam question and we can talk through the process for the March 9 in-class exam on research methods up through readings assigned up to Chapter 4& 12.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
Qualitative analysis: grounded theory + participatory research
We had a general discussion of qualitative methods with a focus on what kinds of questions they are best suited to answering, what kind of information they can produce, and how the different qualitative methods frame different kinds of knowledge. I managed to unintentionally delete the study guide I wrote for Chapter 8, but hope to post it before next class.
Eric's discussion of "Community Literacy" highlighted to inherent problems of the transformative paradigm: speaking for the other, conflicts between researcher-research subjects' worldviews (discursive realities); and the dangers of endorsing a standpoint immersed in values and identities that are both politically important and highly contested. Peck et al's work clearly has transformative elements, but as I pointed out (just so nothing stays too simple) it also had a pragmatic basis - both in its setting at a (former) settlement house, in its references to Dewey and James, and in the focus of the collaborative writing projects that were highlighted as the project's central accomplishments. Each of the projects focused on a real-world problem and the writing could be interpreted as solving (working to solve) that problem. At the same time, the essay presents itself as effecting broader social change (presenting a new model for education). So maybe being in one paradigm or another is not really important? From my perspective, understanding the consequences of particular actions/theoretical orientations as they are articulated in terms of the research paradigms is what can help researchers think about the importance, consequences, and flaws of their research designs.
While I chose this study as an example of ethnographic, participatory research - Eric's critique rightly characterized it as a new kind of coercion, where participants didn't really have full choice either in terms of taking part in the work of the project - or in terms of the conclusions they reached. While it is unclear what value the outcomes of the projects had for student-participants, inequalities in power (subjects rights to self determination) were not fully addressed. I think that given the deeply entrenched privileges, blindnesses, and vexed patterns for communication in our education system = truly transformative research is very difficult to design. As Eric pointed out - those with power have to "give up" their power - and we (researchers and teachers) are often more inclined to use it for the "good" of the disempowered - than to work on re-structuring the power dynamics set up by the status quo. I am going to stop here though there is much more to say.
Nic's discussion served as our introduction to grounded theory. Nic also pointed out the difficulties of placing a study within one paradigm and one method. He suggested the approach as constructivist based on the study's recognition of the different meanings for/interpretations of how writing engenders knowledge within different kinds of writing. I complicated this discussion by suggesting that it might also be considered pragmatic - since it focused on the use of writing within a particular profession. My claim was a little on the lame side since pragmatic research is focused on solving a particular problem - and this was "basic research" in that it explored relationships among invention processes, writing, and knowledge making. Nic drew our attention to the methods used both by the researcher (her choice of subjects, data collection, and analysis) and suggested that this might be case study and grounded theory - and I would agree. It announces itself as grounded theory - which referrs primarily to how the author collected, analyzed and theorized data, but as Nic points out - it also qualifies as a case study in that it follows a single, clearly defined case.
We spent the remainder of the class discussing and practicing grounded theory methods. Many, many writing studies researchers use grounded theory methods (or some relative or distant cousin) to work with their data. It provides a set-by-step conceptual system for approaching what can otherwise feel like an overwhelming, disorganized body of unrelated information (that is how many qualitative data sets present themselves). Strauss and Corbin's text is probably the most practical introduction, and if you are stuck, it provides many analytic tools for seeing your data in new ways.
Administrative notes:
Grading practice for reaction papers: Because this class is about learning to be a researcher - not about know how to be one before you came to the course - grades will weight work produced later in the course more strongly than first attempts. For the reaction papers, you may choose to receive your grade for your final essay multipled by 3 - as your grade for all three papers. If for some reason, you did not do your best on the last paper - you may also choose to have a flat average.
Exam I: Your first exam will be during the second half of class March 9. It will be an in-class exam and will cover all work up through Mertens, Chapter 4 and the associated readings. I will give you the question(s) on March 2, and you will write your exam during the second half of class. You may use your text books, but writing should be generated in class (no pre-written text).
Thanks for the good discussion in class - and hope you enjoy the warm weather over the weekend!
Read: Review - ethnographic, case study + phenomenological approaches in Mertens, Ch 8 Qualitative Methods; Remediation as Social Construct,(1991), 783; Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading and Material Racism (2005) 919; A Family Affair: Competing Sponsors of Literacy in Appalachian Students’ Lives (2007) 1600.
Reaction papers: Remediation as Social Construct,(1991), 783; Kena; Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading and Material Racism (2005) 919; Angela; A Family Affair: Competing Sponsors of Literacy in Appalachian Students’ Lives (2007) 1600; Nic
Eric's discussion of "Community Literacy" highlighted to inherent problems of the transformative paradigm: speaking for the other, conflicts between researcher-research subjects' worldviews (discursive realities); and the dangers of endorsing a standpoint immersed in values and identities that are both politically important and highly contested. Peck et al's work clearly has transformative elements, but as I pointed out (just so nothing stays too simple) it also had a pragmatic basis - both in its setting at a (former) settlement house, in its references to Dewey and James, and in the focus of the collaborative writing projects that were highlighted as the project's central accomplishments. Each of the projects focused on a real-world problem and the writing could be interpreted as solving (working to solve) that problem. At the same time, the essay presents itself as effecting broader social change (presenting a new model for education). So maybe being in one paradigm or another is not really important? From my perspective, understanding the consequences of particular actions/theoretical orientations as they are articulated in terms of the research paradigms is what can help researchers think about the importance, consequences, and flaws of their research designs.
While I chose this study as an example of ethnographic, participatory research - Eric's critique rightly characterized it as a new kind of coercion, where participants didn't really have full choice either in terms of taking part in the work of the project - or in terms of the conclusions they reached. While it is unclear what value the outcomes of the projects had for student-participants, inequalities in power (subjects rights to self determination) were not fully addressed. I think that given the deeply entrenched privileges, blindnesses, and vexed patterns for communication in our education system = truly transformative research is very difficult to design. As Eric pointed out - those with power have to "give up" their power - and we (researchers and teachers) are often more inclined to use it for the "good" of the disempowered - than to work on re-structuring the power dynamics set up by the status quo. I am going to stop here though there is much more to say.
Nic's discussion served as our introduction to grounded theory. Nic also pointed out the difficulties of placing a study within one paradigm and one method. He suggested the approach as constructivist based on the study's recognition of the different meanings for/interpretations of how writing engenders knowledge within different kinds of writing. I complicated this discussion by suggesting that it might also be considered pragmatic - since it focused on the use of writing within a particular profession. My claim was a little on the lame side since pragmatic research is focused on solving a particular problem - and this was "basic research" in that it explored relationships among invention processes, writing, and knowledge making. Nic drew our attention to the methods used both by the researcher (her choice of subjects, data collection, and analysis) and suggested that this might be case study and grounded theory - and I would agree. It announces itself as grounded theory - which referrs primarily to how the author collected, analyzed and theorized data, but as Nic points out - it also qualifies as a case study in that it follows a single, clearly defined case.
We spent the remainder of the class discussing and practicing grounded theory methods. Many, many writing studies researchers use grounded theory methods (or some relative or distant cousin) to work with their data. It provides a set-by-step conceptual system for approaching what can otherwise feel like an overwhelming, disorganized body of unrelated information (that is how many qualitative data sets present themselves). Strauss and Corbin's text is probably the most practical introduction, and if you are stuck, it provides many analytic tools for seeing your data in new ways.
Administrative notes:
Grading practice for reaction papers: Because this class is about learning to be a researcher - not about know how to be one before you came to the course - grades will weight work produced later in the course more strongly than first attempts. For the reaction papers, you may choose to receive your grade for your final essay multipled by 3 - as your grade for all three papers. If for some reason, you did not do your best on the last paper - you may also choose to have a flat average.
Exam I: Your first exam will be during the second half of class March 9. It will be an in-class exam and will cover all work up through Mertens, Chapter 4 and the associated readings. I will give you the question(s) on March 2, and you will write your exam during the second half of class. You may use your text books, but writing should be generated in class (no pre-written text).
Thanks for the good discussion in class - and hope you enjoy the warm weather over the weekend!
Read: Review - ethnographic, case study + phenomenological approaches in Mertens, Ch 8 Qualitative Methods; Remediation as Social Construct,(1991), 783; Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading and Material Racism (2005) 919; A Family Affair: Competing Sponsors of Literacy in Appalachian Students’ Lives (2007) 1600.
Reaction papers: Remediation as Social Construct,(1991), 783; Kena; Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading and Material Racism (2005) 919; Angela; A Family Affair: Competing Sponsors of Literacy in Appalachian Students’ Lives (2007) 1600; Nic
Friday, February 11, 2011
Surveys
You began class by doing some more writing about the focus for your project. You should be spending some time thinking about the kinds of questions that interest you & the kinds of problems you hope to solve, and reading broadly to identify ideas that you might be interested in studying. Within the next two weeks you should have a clear enough idea of your focus to begin focused reading on your topic.
You signed up for conferences where we will put together a draft list of important researchers and studies related to your topic.
Conference times: Wednesday, February 16
4:00 Eric
5:40 Kena
6:00 Nic (but I am hoping to reschedule)
6:20 Josh
6:40 Fran
If you send me an email with a short description of your general focus - I will have some time to think about useful texts for your work ahead of the conference.
Surveys:
We began our discussion by thinking about what kinds of data surveys can provide -and the purpose they are therefore best suited for. The study guide is meant to highlight important questions/terms and direct you to the sections where Mertens covers those ideas.
Fran started our discussion of Integrating Multimodality into College Composition. She defined the purpose of the survey as "to learn more about what composition teachers were doing with multimodal composing, what technologies they used in support of composing multimodal texts, and how faculty and administrators perceived efforts to introduce multimodal composition into departmental curricula and professional development;" and she pointed out that the authors had not clearly defined the term. She also connected to an issue raised by Merten - that surveys can open up assumptions that researchers bring to their work - by discussing how Anderson, et al's essay had asked what was displaced by multimodal teaching - and subjects had responded by recasting what happened not as displacement but as altering, shifting or remediating the work of writing classes.
We used discussion of this text to consider problems associated with sample selection (participants were self selected and were primarily from Research I univeristies); how data interpretation from such samples can still produce powerful and important results (multimodal teaching had little support, was primarily sponsored by individual instructors - implications?), and how the paradigm drives the statement of findings implications (this seemed a pragmatic rather than a transformative study).
Josh discussed Web Literacies of the Already Accessed and Technically Inclined. The quoted the main focus of the study as “…a study of electronic literacy as practiced by middle-school students belonging to a highly successful economic group may strike some as suspect…[y]et if we consider that literacy ethnographers target for scholarly inquiry those sites where changes in literary practice are afoot, then the American Institute of Monterrey is a choice site, for literary education at AIM is both undergoing and causing significant change.” At this point I emphasized the fact that this study was authored by three individuals with three very different perspectives, and drew attention to pointed the theoretical lenses the authors used to look at "change." Josh indicated disatisfaction with the clarity of focus + findings for this study - and our discussion considered how the authors' analysis was in some sense directed toward making sense of a set of answers that would make no sense (as Josh pointed out) if presented in terms of statistics. I chose this reading because of its conflicted paradigm, the narrative interpretation of findings, and the way the authors both did and did not draw attention to the social justice issues that accompany the adoption of new literacies as a social,
economic and educational standard of proficiency.
We then used what we had learned about developing effective surveys as a basis for assessing the dispositions survey created to assess incoming college composition students. We first identified what we wanted to find out - and then reviewed the questions. We looked at clarity of language (whether the statements would generate unambiguous responses), coverage (did we find out about what students knew about writing, how they used it, and how they felt about it?). We didn't cover issues related to how the data would be assessed (statistically as in Multimodality) or in terms of a narrative (as in Web Literacies).
Good class and good discussions. Thanks!
For next class:
Read: Mertens, Ch 8- Qualitative Methods with attention to grounded theory, participatory research, and focus groups. Miller: Invention and Writing in Technical Work: Representing the Oject (1994) 843 (Nic); Community Literacy (1995) 1097 (Eric)
You signed up for conferences where we will put together a draft list of important researchers and studies related to your topic.
Conference times: Wednesday, February 16
4:00 Eric
5:40 Kena
6:00 Nic (but I am hoping to reschedule)
6:20 Josh
6:40 Fran
If you send me an email with a short description of your general focus - I will have some time to think about useful texts for your work ahead of the conference.
Surveys:
We began our discussion by thinking about what kinds of data surveys can provide -and the purpose they are therefore best suited for. The study guide is meant to highlight important questions/terms and direct you to the sections where Mertens covers those ideas.
Fran started our discussion of Integrating Multimodality into College Composition. She defined the purpose of the survey as "to learn more about what composition teachers were doing with multimodal composing, what technologies they used in support of composing multimodal texts, and how faculty and administrators perceived efforts to introduce multimodal composition into departmental curricula and professional development;" and she pointed out that the authors had not clearly defined the term. She also connected to an issue raised by Merten - that surveys can open up assumptions that researchers bring to their work - by discussing how Anderson, et al's essay had asked what was displaced by multimodal teaching - and subjects had responded by recasting what happened not as displacement but as altering, shifting or remediating the work of writing classes.
We used discussion of this text to consider problems associated with sample selection (participants were self selected and were primarily from Research I univeristies); how data interpretation from such samples can still produce powerful and important results (multimodal teaching had little support, was primarily sponsored by individual instructors - implications?), and how the paradigm drives the statement of findings implications (this seemed a pragmatic rather than a transformative study).
Josh discussed Web Literacies of the Already Accessed and Technically Inclined. The quoted the main focus of the study as “…a study of electronic literacy as practiced by middle-school students belonging to a highly successful economic group may strike some as suspect…[y]et if we consider that literacy ethnographers target for scholarly inquiry those sites where changes in literary practice are afoot, then the American Institute of Monterrey is a choice site, for literary education at AIM is both undergoing and causing significant change.” At this point I emphasized the fact that this study was authored by three individuals with three very different perspectives, and drew attention to pointed the theoretical lenses the authors used to look at "change." Josh indicated disatisfaction with the clarity of focus + findings for this study - and our discussion considered how the authors' analysis was in some sense directed toward making sense of a set of answers that would make no sense (as Josh pointed out) if presented in terms of statistics. I chose this reading because of its conflicted paradigm, the narrative interpretation of findings, and the way the authors both did and did not draw attention to the social justice issues that accompany the adoption of new literacies as a social,
economic and educational standard of proficiency.
We then used what we had learned about developing effective surveys as a basis for assessing the dispositions survey created to assess incoming college composition students. We first identified what we wanted to find out - and then reviewed the questions. We looked at clarity of language (whether the statements would generate unambiguous responses), coverage (did we find out about what students knew about writing, how they used it, and how they felt about it?). We didn't cover issues related to how the data would be assessed (statistically as in Multimodality) or in terms of a narrative (as in Web Literacies).
Good class and good discussions. Thanks!
For next class:
Read: Mertens, Ch 8- Qualitative Methods with attention to grounded theory, participatory research, and focus groups. Miller: Invention and Writing in Technical Work: Representing the Oject (1994) 843 (Nic); Community Literacy (1995) 1097 (Eric)
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Literature reviews, causal comparison & correlational studies - and surveys
On February 2 we covered two weeks of work in a course where we already have too much to do during each class - so it was a lot of material presented without much time to take it in. But we are - more or less caught up.
Administrative detials:
Methods chapters
With respect to the methods, what you need to know is in your text book. As discussed in class, I will be creating study guides for the remaining methods chapters, and I will post them on the site. When I get a break in my workload - I will create study guides for the chapters we've already completed.
What we will do in class Wednesday
I will check in on how you are doing in terms of finding a research topic - and pass around a sign-up sheet for conferences. If you give me a broad topic - I can help direct you to sources and particular references so you can see what has been done - and decide whether you are actually interested.
As part of your assignment for last week, you were asked to look through the appendix on writing a research proposal. The first step in the process is to write a concept paper - a document you share with your prospective advisor to see if you are on the right track. We will spend some time talking over how to write a concept paper - and do some "practice" in terms of setting one up.
Surveys: we cover the methods chapter - very briefly (be sure to bring questions) -but I am hoping that most of our work on this approach will be in terms of critical analysis of the readings, and some in-class work on designing surveys.
Read: Mertens, Ch 6 Survey methods; Web-Literacies of the Already Accessed and Technically Inclined: Schooling in Monterrey, Mexico (2000) 1474; Integrating Multimodality into Composition Curricula, pdf on Course Blog.
Administrative detials:
- Everyone is signed up for reaction papers: presenters for this week (on surveys) will be Josh and Fran.
- NIH training is complete. Keep the link for your certificate where you can find it. You will need to turn it in with your IRB application for your research project.
- I have invited you to share 2 google.docs => the reaction paper sign-up sheet, and a collaborative list of sites for sources for literature reviews in composition studies. Let me know if you have trouble accessing these documents.
Methods chapters
With respect to the methods, what you need to know is in your text book. As discussed in class, I will be creating study guides for the remaining methods chapters, and I will post them on the site. When I get a break in my workload - I will create study guides for the chapters we've already completed.
What we will do in class Wednesday
I will check in on how you are doing in terms of finding a research topic - and pass around a sign-up sheet for conferences. If you give me a broad topic - I can help direct you to sources and particular references so you can see what has been done - and decide whether you are actually interested.
As part of your assignment for last week, you were asked to look through the appendix on writing a research proposal. The first step in the process is to write a concept paper - a document you share with your prospective advisor to see if you are on the right track. We will spend some time talking over how to write a concept paper - and do some "practice" in terms of setting one up.
Surveys: we cover the methods chapter - very briefly (be sure to bring questions) -but I am hoping that most of our work on this approach will be in terms of critical analysis of the readings, and some in-class work on designing surveys.
Read: Mertens, Ch 6 Survey methods; Web-Literacies of the Already Accessed and Technically Inclined: Schooling in Monterrey, Mexico (2000) 1474; Integrating Multimodality into Composition Curricula, pdf on Course Blog.
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