The point of being here...

Last night and tonight I spent on the Quad (grassy area where students gather at night to socialize. Last night I had a 3.5 hour conversation with two students. The topics included gender theory, anarcho-primitivism (which I sincerely hope the students will grow out of), why the one who wants to drop out of school shouldn't, and sundry other things. Today after class, another student asked me if she could talk to me tonight. I met her on the Quad and spent 1.5 hours with her, helping her work through some issues that no child should have to think about.

I am consistently amazed at these students' trials. Sure, many of them are well-adjusted and come from lovely homes, but too many are just psychological wrecks because of how adults have treated them. I get so upset and frustrated at the fact that I have to send these kids home, away from this program, which they have come to see as a refuge. I know that I should strive to maintain some perspective, be an outsider looking in so that I don't miss important data. However, all that logic goes out the window when I am dealing with a child. For me, completing research will always be a lesser priority than my students. If helping them survive and cope means I have to contend with tainted data, that is a risk I am willing to take.

Of course, my current project has nothing to do with students, but hopefully my future investigations will. I need to figure out how to balance the interests of the students with studying a phenomenon critically...but I know that in my heart I will never strike that balance if it is not in the child's best interest. Does this mean I shouldn't be a researcher? I honestly don't know. I am so emotionally involved with this program, with the students in the program...there are some students (usually the ones with the biggest emotional problems) that I follow informally for years after they leave this program. I have students that I regularly email, that I hired to work at this program, that I recommend to my old college program so that they will be in good hands and will be taken care of when I can't anymore. It seems irrational to think that after all these years of emotional investment in this program and its graduates that I will be able to study it as critically as I need to. This saddens me to no end...I am just at a loss and am not sure what to do.

Ethics Conundrum

Long day today (actually, technically it should read "long day yesterday," since it is 1 a.m., but I'm not worried about technicalities at this point. So much has happened--there was a faculty meeting with our boss' boss, which did not go well and went an hour over time, then my focus group, which was so wound up from the faculty meeting that I am not sure we got much accomplished, then a GSA meeting to attend so I could take fieldnotes, then a guy who used to work for me as a TAC came to visit, so we all went to the bar across the street, and there were several interesting conversations there for me to mentally record as a source of data. Then of course I had to come back and make fieldnotes immediately since I didn't write anything down while the conversations were going on...if I had gone to bed I would not have remembered the conversations as well in the morning.

I am kind of worried that I might have done something--not unethical, exactly, more like atypical. There were about 10 faculty at the bar, hanging out and chatting. I asked two faculty members across from me how they felt the first time they came to campus. Neither of them had attended the program and so really didn't know what to expect. I got some excellent data from them, but I also feel like I led the conversation in a way to get data without telling them that is why I asked the question. Should I be able to use this data? I'm simply not sure. Neither of the faculty is a participant in my interviews/focus groups, so it's not like I have their implied consent or anything. I'll do some research on the issue tomorrow, I suppose.

Fieldnotes: Reflection 1

I've decided against posting my fieldnotes here, for several reasons. First, I want to keep this blog public and accessible to everyone. Even if I remove all identifiers from my fieldnotes, I think that anyone who is reasonably familiar with me or the program could accurately attribute statements that I have recorded. In the interests of protecting anonymity, I can't post the fieldnotes.

Second, though the lines among data types are fuzzy (at least to me) in qualitative research, I still am making a differentiation between fieldnotes and this research journal. I have conceptualized this journal as a tool for reflection on the research process, on my struggles, and as a way to realize what my biases are in this research project. This journal will eventually be a data source unto itself, but I do not want to muddy the waters with other types of data. Frankly, doing so would make me lazy...I could just cut and paste my notes or transcriptions into this blog without actually sitting down and thinking about them. The way I have set up this blog requires me to reflect on my data gathering and to actually write down those reflections for later analysis. Posting other data seems to be "cheating."

I will, however, begin to post entries I typed into my Word files before I thought to start this blog. I'm trying to decide if it is ethical to backdate these entries. By "backdate" I mean post them now but date the posts for the day that I originally wrote down the content and saved it in a word file. I have an uneasy feeling that this would be cheating...I think I should just put the date of original writing in the body of the post and leave the HTML dating as-is. I know it doesn't sound like a huge deal, but it makes me feel more honest. Really, that is what this blog is all about--it's a way to keep me honest and thinking about the ethics of research in general as well as my study in particular.

Data Storage Paranoia

One thing that sounds silly but is actually a great source of anxiety for me right now is storing my data. Last semester, one of my professors exhorted us to have the data, a backup file, a backup to the backup, and a backup to the backup to the backup. Why the extreme nature of precautions? Because, he explained, field notes and audio files are not like experimental variables. If you lose data in a replicable experiment, it sucks to be sure, but you can also run the experiment again. If your fieldnotes, et cetera, are destroyed, there is no way to ever recover that data. They’re just gone forever. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

I was thinking about this yesterday, because the fire alarm went off at 10 a.m. I neglected to grab my laptop on the way out the door, and could have killed myself for not doing so. Of course, no dissertation is worth dying over, and I did store my audio files in cyberspace, so that is some consolation (yes, it was a real fire, and no, my computer didn’t burn to a crisp). However, I still can’t believe how stupid I was to not think to grab the laptop.

In light of these events, I have come up with a plan. I have the audio files and transcriptions on my laptop’s hard drive. I also have them stored in a separate email account. I intend to purchase an external hard drive and leave it in North Carolina with my parents. Finally, I am going to print out everything I type each day and store it in my refrigerator. Yes, this last one sounds stupid, but think about it—have you ever seen a refrigerator burn in a house fire? It’s usually the only thing left standing—way more fireproof than our “fireproof for 15 minutes” document box. If I have any other ideas regarding clever storage options, I’ll be sure and post them.

Qual/Quant Wars

I’ve been reading Ely’s (1991) Circles Within Circles to help me firm up my data analysis paradigm, and I keep thinking about the following quote from Pollan’s (2006) The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The quote in question is:

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery…gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine” (147-8)

I find this passage a pithy and elegant summary of how I feel about research. I am not inexorably opposed to mixed methods or quantitative work by any means. However, the type of questions I am interested in simply cannot be answered by reducing a phenomenon like curricula to an input/output paradigm. People are not machines, and it bothers me to no end that we (Ed. researchers) treat them as such.

I know this topic was also the subject of my last post, but it’s what has been consuming most of my mental energy for the past few days. In fact, this issue seems to concern the entire staff of the summer program where I am a participant-researcher. A few days ago (Thursday night), one of my peers (I’ll call her P.) was sitting in our faculty lounge (on the faculty floor of our dorm) reviewing Judith Butler’s work. This peer is a participant in my study. She and I attended the same undergraduate program and M.Ed program, taught in the same county, and taught the same subjects in public school and in this summer program. In fact, I was the one who told her to apply for a position at this summer program. While P. and I disagree on a good deal in regards to gender theory (she’s a womanist, and I’m more of a postmodern feminist), we’re very sympathetic to each other’s views. At any rate, another teacher—a white, heterosexual male who teaches Math—asked P. what the book was about. P. began to explain performative gender theory…and then it was like a bomb exploded. The Math teacher began to vehemently disagree with P. He claimed that biology was destiny and that women were simply different (read: inferior) to men in certain ways, and that gender was an innate disposition, not a social construct.

Other faculty who were hanging out began to jump in, including another white male teacher who is very supportive of Butler’s theory. More and more faculty came into the lounge to see what was so interesting. At the peak of the discussion, there were 14 faculty members crowded onto sofas, sitting on the floor, or jumping up and down, contributing their voices to the discussion. It lasted from 10:15 p.m. until almost 3 a.m.

The discussion was interesting in large part because of how the sides were divided. The Butler camp had its strongest voices in:

Me (Gender studies/English degrees)
P. (Gender studies/English degrees)
Both Theatre teachers (MFAs and performance studies)
Dance teacher (MFA in Dance)
Music teacher (BA in Music Education)
Two English teachers (one of whom specializes in gender theory)

The opposing camp, which I’ll call the Essentialists, was largely composed of:
Two Math teachers
Natural Science teacher

What was so interesting to me is how the discussion ended. The Butler group was trying to explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Derrida’s theory of texts, and how words are intrinsically loaded—i.e., that this discussion cannot be conducted in neutral terms, because words like “mother” or “baby” or “pro-choice” were so wrapped up in cultural contexts. The Essentialist group flatly denied this view of the world and insisted that “mother” was the same thing as “a female homo sapien who gives birth.”

It was a fascinating moment for several reasons. It seems to me that researchers and intellectuals on both sides of this divide need to come together and begin to talk to one another about basic premises of their disciplinary worldviews. There is simply no way I can come to a consensus or have a productive discussion with, say, an extreme positivist, unless we define terms very carefully beforehand. We need to understand very deeply where the other camp is positioned, how they view their research, what types of questions they think are important, and what are the best methods for answering these questions.

In this case, the bonds of collegiality remained intact at the end of the discussion. I attribute this to several things. First, we live together, and thus the pressure to maintain friendly relations keeps us from ad hominem attacks or just walking out. Secondly, many of us have built strong friendships with one another throughout our years here. We are more inclined to listen to each other and genuinely respect the ability and integrity of one another, even when we are on opposite sides of a discussion. However, I think that this ability to disagree and walk away friends is rare. If we all happened to be strangers at a conference, I think a few punches would have been thrown before the night was over. We as researchers have got to stop behaving as if we were opposing armies. We need to begin to find ways to work together to communicate. I do not expect that we will come to a consensus—in fact, I sincerely doubt it. However, we can’t just keep yelling across the aisles at one another and hope that something productive will get done in the meantime.

Ontological Objectivity, Research Methodology, and the Utility of Bias

I just finished having a conversation with B., a science teacher at the summer program where I am currently working. B. is actually an anomaly among scientists; he’s a firm believer in complex systems and taking a more subjective, imaginative view of scientific phenomena (e.g. studying protein folding patterns in an effort to design buildings that increase E.R. rapidity). Our discussion basically centered on whether or not ontological objectivity is possible, and if so, of how much use is it?

Let me begin by stating that I am in no way an absolute relativist (talk about an oxymoron). I do believe that absolute truths exist. To paraphrase Terry Eagleton, either there is a tiger in the bathroom or there is not; the tiger cannot be both there and not there simultaneously (sorry, Schrödinger). However, the number of these absolute truths is relatively small, and they are not extremely helpful in solving problems. When we begin to think about how to apply such knowledge, subjectivity inevitably begins to creep into our calculations, and with subjectivity comes bias.

An example: I am a researcher in a university lab. I discover that compound A affects the shape of the protein coat on virus B, which is directly responsible for Disease X. Okay, fine. Now what? Well, I probably want to design experiments to see if manipulating the protein coat of virus B with compound A makes the virus unable to survive in the human body, thus curing or preventing disease X. How do I go about investigating it? Here is where the biases and subjectivities come into play. Some subjective issues that directly impact my ability to solve this problem include:

1. if any funding body thinks Disease X is important enough to try to cure
2. if enough people contract Disease X to make a drug to treat X profitable
3. if Disease X presents differently in people of different genders, races, or geographic origins
4. whether or not I think it is appropriate to engage in clinical trials on animals (if I don’t, I’m not going to be curing Disease X, because the FDA won’t approve my clinical trial design)
5. if I can recruit a large enough patient pool to run Stage III clinical trials
6. if I believe the scientific method is the best way to solve this problem (if not, my drug is never going to make it onto shelves)

I could go on, and there are certainly counter-arguments that can be presented for each one of these issues, but you (hopefully) get my point.

I must note that I am not in any way saying that bias is necessarily a negative thing. Our biases may prompt us to look for new and creative ways to solve problems, to transcend disciplines to find solutions, et cetera. However, as human beings, ontological objectivity is almost impossible to attain. We can study things in a more objective or less objective fashion, but I just don’t think that humans can ever be entirely objective—we’re too enmeshed in context (personal, disciplinary, academic, religious, et cetera) to not have some sort of bias.

One bias that particularly galls me, however, is the bias towards the scientific method in non-scientific disciplines—particularly my own. Human beings are complex creatures and cannot be studied the way genomes can be sequenced. I think one of the most pernicious aspects of No Child Left Behind/ESEA is the limits it places on research. ESEA legislation states that to receive federal funding, schools must implement programs that have been proven to be effective. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, it depends on how you define the term “proven.” ESEA tends toward a restrictive definition of “proven” that includes only double-blind trials that have a significant sample size and use quantitative or mixed methods.

There are incredible problems with this definition

1. The issue of variation and generalizability. Human beings are not like drugs or chemical compounds—they are going to respond in wildly different ways to interventions.
2. One must take into account classroom context when trying to implement any sort of intervention. What may work well in one class may be a disaster in another—just ask any teacher who’s tried to teach the same lesson plan to two different classes in one day. Whether my students speak English as a first language, whether they are academically gifted, whether they have the requisite prior knowledge for a lesson, what their learning styles are—all these variables will impact the success rate of the intervention, and no clinical trial or quantitative study can possibly account for so much variation.
3. What may work in one community or school is only successful in that educational context. It is difficult if not impossible to extrapolate the intervention’s results to other schools or communities. Generalizability is just not something one can expect from most educational research. To pretend otherwise is specious at best and foolish at worst.
4. Restricting the definition of acceptable research also eliminates the use of any research that has developed from qualitative methods. This idea is doubly foolish if one considers that qualitative methods are particularly well suited to investigating complex systems that aren’t generalizable (like a classroom).
5. Education is not necessarily a scientific field of inquiry. For too long, schools of education have been attempting to gain status by pretending to be scientific. Whether or not scientific methods are the best ways of investigating the problems at hand has rarely been addressed.

If anyone is actually interested in this conundrum, and wants to read a much better analysis of the problem, I highly recommend the following article:

Eisner, E. (1992). Objectivity in Educational Research. Curriculum Inquiry, 22(1), 9-15.

Eisner explains pithily and with great elegance how the infatuation with objectivity is itself a bias and impossible in the world of Ed. Research.

Okay, off to complete lesson plans for tomorrow’s class (funnily enough, on ontological objectivity!)

I thought I was the Brain...then realized I was Pinky

I thought that today, for your elucidation and entertainment, that I would post the statement of purpose I wrote for NYU. Luckily (for me) I reread it before posting--and realized how unintentionally hilarious it is. Though it will never see the light of day, let me assure you, it's bombastic, solipsistic, and at this stage of my life, highly embarrassing.

It's also kind of interesting that my current research topic has only the barest resemblance to what I enthused about in the statement of purpose. I knew then that I wanted to focus on curriculum models, and that is in part what my dissertation is about. However, everything else is completely different:

Statement of Purpose	Actual Dissertation
Goal: To design curriculum	Studies currently used curriculum
Focus on issues of race and class	No such focus present
Investigate curriculum's impact on students	Investigate curriculum's impact on teachers
Based on theoretical work by James Banks, Ruby Payne, and Paulo Freire	Based on theoretical work by M.M. Bakhtin, William Pinar, and Elliot Eisner
Research design would involve the design and testing of a curriculum	Research design involves teachers talking about their current curriculum
Extensive, multi-year study	Research period is seven weeks
Curriculum of concern is that used in Title I schools	Curriculum of concern is that used in a summer residential program
To design and complete a study worthy of a Research I institution	To design and complete a study without humiliating myself
Delusions of Grandeur	Nightmares of never finishing

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't...

Greetings and Salutations.

My name is Jenn Broome (but if you're reading this blog, you probably already knew that). I am starting my third year of my PhD program as an ABD. This blog is my attempt to chronicle this process, and hopefully communicate the trials, tribulations, small victories, and occasional joys of writing a dissertation.

Let the games begin.