Building your head

Section Two of Piantanida and Garman’s The Qualitative Dissertation (2009, Kindle edition) describes the conceptual work one must perform prior to conducting a qualitative research project.  A considerable amount of mental heavy-lifting precedes the more technical aspects of “doing” research.

If I actually knew anything about weight training and conditioning (or physical exercise in general, for that matter), I could get really carried away right now with metaphor. Suffice it to say, I felt pretty fit while reading some portions of Section Two and woefully out-of-shape while reading others.

I was reminded of the phrase “building your head” from H. L. Goodall’s (2000) Writing the New Ethnography (p. 51). Scholarship is a process of locating yourself in the “storyline” of your discipline.  It means reading widely and writing daily.  Piantanida and Garman would call it developing oneself as the “instrument of inquiry.” Whatever you call it, it’s a heavy workout.

Qualitative researchers must do this conceptual work if they want their research to be taken seriously and to resonate with their desired audience. As Piantanida and Garman explain, qualitative researchers approach topics and issues of inquiry with different assumptions and knowledge claims that don’t conform to prevailing positivist and postpositivist research paradigms. Our work is cut out for us.

Image by MR. LIGHTMAN, courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net 

The fundamental challenge of qualitative inquiry is answering the question: What is legitimate knowledge? According to Piantanida and Garman, “This question pushed qualitative researchers to articulate more clearly the nature of knowledge claims they were making” (Ch. 5, “Considerations of worldview,” para 5).

I wish I had known about this book last semester. The Reflective Interludes, particularly 5.1 and 7.1, provide terrific prompts for drafting the “Assumptions” section of a dissertation proposal. At any rate, I have identified some goals to work on – dare I say, “workout goals”? – for the coming semester:

Resist the “residue” of positivism and postpositivism

Piantanida and Garman refer to the “default language” of positivism and the fact that for so long quantitative research served as “a shorthand descriptor for a world-view embedded in the Western European ‘Enlightenment’” (Ch. 5, “Considerations of worldview,” para 4). Amen. I was 37 years old and at the tail-end of my master’s coursework before I even knew what qualitative research was! All in a tizzy, I did not think I could complete a master’s thesis without at least collecting some survey data and learning SAS. At that point, my adviser sat me down and explained that there were alternative methods that did not require an experimental design and a large n.

Over the last several semesters I have made concerted effort to curtail my use of words and phrases that suggest postpositivist assumptions. Two that come to mind are “achievement” (erroneously used as a synonym for “learning”) and “best practices” (falsely generalizing about instructional practice without respect for context and learner).

Yet, even as we come around to our own enlightenment, the language of the dominant paradigm is hard to resist. It just creeps up on you. Now, at the tail-end of my doctoral studies, I have had committee members scrutinize my word choice, calling into question seemingly benign words such as "factors" and "confirmed."

And, now, per Piantanida and Garman, I may need to more carefully consider use of the word “data.” That will be difficult!

I really do appreciate the distinction drawn in Chapter 8 between “data” and “text.” It jibes with my professional roots as an English/Language Arts teacher, trained in reader-response theory. Piantanida and Garman anticipate readers’ objections that the distinction borders on playing with semantics. They argue that representations of social phenomena, as opposed to representations of the physical world, “are always and inevitably interpretations offered by a particular person with a particular perspective and a particular position” (“From Data to Text,” para 4).

This is the essence of Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and writing, which views reader and text as inextricably bound in dynamic, mutually conditioning relationship. I cut my teeth on this stuff as a young preservice teacher! What’s not to love? I just wonder how forcing the distinction between “data” and “text” (much less forms of text – raw, experiential, discursive, and so on) might stall collaborative dialogue within one’s research community. It would certainly raise eyebrows among some dissertation committee members. 

Nonetheless, I am intrigued and would like to explore implications for more conscientious use of these terms in my own research journey.

Avoid simplistic dualisms

I understand that for the immediate task at hand – the dissertation – it is important for me to build a “conceptual frame” (Ch. 5, “Considerations of worldview,” para  17). As Piantanida and Garman recommend, “…[F]or purposes of conceptualizing a study, it is useful to sort out what form of knowledge claims one hopes to make by the end of the research process” (Ch. 5, “Considerations of worldview,” para 16).

This poses an interesting balancing act between being true to one’s core values, on the one hand, and acting pragmatically within the immediate research context, on the other.

What I struggle with is the possibility of being boxed in or branded by my conceptual frame, which, at present, is defined by a sociocultural perspective and a desire to seek insight and meaning rather than definitive proofs. I wonder if I limit myself by not seeking a more solid grounding in quantitative methods. Some of my colleagues are pursuing both research certificates, and, whether they are doing it for future job security in academe or because they see both paradigms as potentially valuable to their research agendas, I admire their hard work and ambition.

Piantanida and Garman seem somewhat dismissive of this pragmatic stance, but I like it, especially in the way it opens up potential for collaboration between camps. In my own readings on professional development and digital technologies, I see ways in which both kinds of research studies and knowledge claims can serve each other.

Maintain stance of "self as instrument"

I must see myself as the “instrument of inquiry,” all else is ancillary. This is the most crucial "workout routine" of all, and it is an especially difficult exercise for the teacher-researcher, coming from the culture of disempowerment that largely defines K-12 education. In the field of literacy especially, where decentralized decision-making, canned curricula, and scripted instruction prevail, thinking, planning, and acting instrumentally can be unfamiliar territory.

In the Chapter 6 section on voice and stance, I was struck by how the different researcher stances paralleled certain teacher dispositions. The researcher’s worldview affects her subject-object orientation with regard to participants. Similarly, a teacher’s worldview dictates how she regards her students. Are they subjects in or objects of her instructional design? The third stance described in this section, in which the researcher risks challenging her own certitude and self-understanding, is, in fact, what teacher development expert Gerald Duffy (1998) has called the “thoughtful adaptation” of effective teachers (p. 778).

This process of “thinking through one’s relationship with that which is under study” (Ch. 6, “Stance and voice,” para 1) reinforces Piantanida and Garman’s earlier assertion that the dissertation is an orientation to a life of scholarly inquiry. It is as much an opportunity for personal development as it is an obstacle to surmount in the quest for professional advancement. It is the “thinking through” that stimulates “a reforging of one’s ontological stance,” leading to new understanding (“phronesis”). This is the ultimate goal of qualitative research: to share these new understandings in hopes that others may recognize "new possibilities for their way of being in practice.” 

Does that not fulfill the “legitimate knowledge” requirement?

References

Duffy, G. G. (1998). Teaching and the balancing of round stones. Phi Delta Kappan, 79(10), 777–80.

Piantanida, M., & Garman, N. B. (2009). The qualitative dissertation: A guide for students and faculty (Second Edition, Kindle edition.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Building your head