Living the stage of "living with the study"

To reflect on the ideas in the final chapters of The Qualitative Dissertation is somewhat difficult for me in a public venue such as this; although, I harbor no illusions that even a handful of people look at this blog.

I am in the stage of "living with the study," and to speak with candor about this stage partly entails sharing my frustration and regret, which could reflect poorly on those directly affected by my project and on my committee members who are helping me steer it.

I never approached the formation of a dissertation committee with any sense of anxiety or dread. I thought I knew which individuals were best suited for the job. I held my prospective committee members in high personal and professional regard and felt reasonably confident in our past working relationships. I never made broad assumptions about their "wealth of experience and wisdom." I just personally liked these people!

I was naive. I may have inadvertently placed together people who possess different mindsets and stances regarding the dissertation process. For instance, I asked one faculty member to serve on my committee for the simple fact that she has mentored me since my days as a master's student. In hindsight, I may not have sufficiently weighed the consequences of the fact that she is a postpositivist researcher with little experience in qualitative inquiry. 

Then, I invited another individual onto my committee who I knew would hold me accountable for methodological rigor. Meanwhile, the other two committee members possess practical, on-the-ground expertise directly related to my research context and participants.
 
I now feel the tug between both ends of a spectrum: what is methodologically "right" and sound on the one hand, versus what is practical and do-able, on the other. And my greatest fear is ending up a cautionary tale for the next crop of doc students in my program.

Storyboarding

Reflecting
The messy two-part phase of "living with the study" is punctuated by an "aha moment" or "conceptual leap." The second half of this phase is spent crafting the experiential, discursive, and theoretic text that warrants the new-found thesis. This stage requires "systematic rigor," not random jottings of notes and reflections. 

This is my pitfall. For better or worse, I jumped into a context without a concrete plan -- the exact form of "unstructured immersion" that Piantanida and Garman warn against. My own committee was split on this move. Some members suggested I use my experience in the fall 2012 semester as an exploratory or pilot study, but my committee chair basically said, "Why wait? This experience may never come again."

"Vigilance" in the form of daily or weekly reflection is one way to avoid the pitfalls of unstructured immersion. I think I did some aspects of this pretty well during fall 2012, when the actual phenomenon under investigation was at its peak of activity. I wrote weekly field notes, observations, and reflections and labeled and coded them according to their content, using the system described by Laurel Richardson (1994):

• observation notes (ON)-concrete, detailed, fairly accurate renditions of what you see, hear, feel, taste, and so on
• methodological notes (MN)-messages to oneself about how to collect data -- who to talk to , when to phone, etc. A "process diary" of your work
• theoretical notes (TN)-hunches, hypotheses, connections, critiques of what is being observed.  Opening up your field note text to interpretation and a "critical epistemological stance." (I view these as akin to analytical memos.)
• personal notes (PN)-feeling statements about the research, doubts, anxieties.  No censoring.  A method of "inquiry into the self"

A conceptual leap

I think this notetaking schema closely parallels Piantanida and Garman's three forms of reflection (recollective, introspective, and conceptual).

My weekly contact with the study participants has since ended, and, consequently, my process of reflection has stalled. This is especially worrisome to me, as now, more than ever, I must guard against losing sight of my study. I have entered into a stage of conducting intense one-on-one dialogues with participants, and I need to be more disciplined about reflecting on this process as it happens.

Making the "conceptual leap"
I am a big believer in creative procrastination, cogitating on what I want to say before I take to saying it (writing it). Activities such as folding laundry or doing dishes (or soaking in a bubble bath) have often provided me the mental space in which "elusive images emerge." The key is having the resources and materials near at hand so you can jot down or, in some cases, draw, diagram, or dictate your ideas.

Although I have worked hard to maintain a paperless work ethic over the last year and a half, the rawest form of my conceptual "leaping" tends to happen on yellow legal pad paper and sticky notes. I am still clinging to a blue sticky note that I scrawled last semester when I was simultaneously collecting texts, writing comps, and co-teaching a course pilot. The contents of that note went through multiple iterations and drafts, ultimately becoming the conceptual spine of my dissertation proposal.

Owning the study
After reading this section of Chapter 13, I believe I need to revisit the language of my proposal and revise my "claims to truth." I enjoyed reading Exemplar 13.2 and the author's multifaceted stone metaphor (reminiscent of Richardson's crystal metaphor). Instead of informing or helping my readers know how teachers learn technology, I am sharing my understanding of how a particular group of teachers learned technology, my unique theoretic perspective.

In the field of literacy studies, particularly New Literacy studies, the multiple realities perspective (Labbo & Reinking, 1999) is often referenced in qualitative studies. It is a good frame from which literacy researchers can exert their "authorial right," as Piantanida and Garman put it. Rather than chasing after grand truths, the multiple realities perspective “allows us to seek research-to-practice connections that are specific to particular instructional realities, that is, to focus on research findings that might be applied more confidently to particular situations rather than to seek principles so general as to be relatively meaningless in any particular context”  (p. 486).

In my proposal, I used the multiple realities lens to complement my substantive frameworks, and it is my intention to use it as an anchor and guide for my observations and interpretations of technology in practice. The multiple realities appropriately situates the topic of technology inside the bigger picture: technology as an extension of literacy and literacy as an extension of selfhood, identity.

Keeping my eyes on the prize (and dog poop)
So, this morning I am leaving the house with the kids, mad at myself because I hadn't finished this blog post, which I really wanted to have "out of the way" so I could enjoy chaperoning my son's class trip, piano class, and other "acts of domesticity."

Halfway to the car, my daughter stops in our backyard, looks up, points, and says, "Look, Mommy, a crescent moon!"

And I reply absentmindedly, "Yeah...watch out for dog poop."

If I have learned anything from reading The Qualitative Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Faculty it's the importance of deliberation as a means of attaining phronesis, "a valuing of wisdom that can guide action within the complexities of unfolding experience." The concept of deliberation resurfaces in chapters 13 and 14 as the essential mindset, the essential form of self-understanding.

The deliberative stance enables the doctoral candidate to "build bridges," first in the actual writing of the dissertation, which seamlessly connects lived experience to theoretic interpretation, and, later, in professional life. "Ideally, graduates who have developed a capacity for deliberation are better able to build bridges between the world of practice and the world of research."

Clearly, my deliberative stance needs work. I should be able to enjoy the moon and a walk through the grass both.

Piantanida and Garman describe the exemplary dissertation as "a fully developed conceptual picture that flows seamlessly from concrete, lived experience to a significant theoretic 'So what?'" In the coming months, I will aspire to write with "exquisite narrative sensibility," but I imagine I will have my moments (much like this morning) when all I will care about and hope for is meeting some "minimum threshold of acceptability."

References

Labbo, L. D., & Reinking, D. (1999). Negotiating the multiple realities of technology in literacy research and instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 34(4), 478–492. doi:10.1598/RRQ.34.4.5

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

Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 516–529). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Living the stage of "living with the study"