What Constitutes Creativity in Qualitative Research Teaching?

Here is a set of related sentences:


What constitutes creativity in teaching?


What constitutes creativity in research teaching?


What constitutes creativity in qualitative research teaching?


Like stair steps, each one brings me closer to the thing that is at the heart of what I do--teach qualitative research in as creative of a manner as possible.  But, what is that? 


There is creativity in teaching and research teaching, both of which are necessary and related, but then there is creativity in qualitative research teaching. 


Before we get too much further into this conversation, I should probably mention that I love teaching qualitative research.  Maybe it is not coincidental that generally when I am teaching qualitative research, I feel I am deep in the flow of creativity.  So, it would stand to reason if I looked more closely at what feels like flow, I might gain some insight into the elusive notion of creativity in qualitative research teaching. 


When I thought about digging deeper, however, I worried that there would be nothing there specific to qualitative research.  In other words, was I simply being a creative teacher and/or a creative research teacher?  Is that really the sum total of what is needed?  But I persisted and here is a list of things I can identity as part of my practice:


1.  I like my students.
2.  I like my subject:  qualitative research. 
3.  I have been reading about it for quite some time.
4.  I like the mundane parts of my craft as well as the elevated parts, that is, the tedium of organization is as likely to get my attention as the theory, and I consider them to be related.  You can't have one without the other.
5.  I like to find new ways to put my students in charge of the doing and thinking, so I can sit back and watch them make meaning. 
6.  I don't mind trying out new or risky instructional activities.
7.  I never seem to get tired of the excitement that comes when I see students making new discoveries and shifting their understanding of what research is or could be. 
8.  I love it when students go out and find new methodology resources. 
9.  I love it when students identify and develop new efficiencies with digital tools or other items that support their research?
10.  I like teaching students how to write up qualitative research.


Looking over this list of ten items, I am hard put to see how creativity in qualitative research teaching is different than creativity in teaching.  I am not sure if that is a good thing or bad. 


To another academic year of qualitative research students, I say, "Thank You!"  It gets better year by year. 

Wikipedia: Why should female academic qualitative researchers care?

I have been slow to come to the Wikipedia party.  I knew people who edited.  I had heard other academics complain, “never use Wikipedia as a reference in a professional paper!”  I used it regularly myself.   I realized it wasn’t perfect, and I took the information with a grain of salt, glancing over the references to see where the stuff came from.  Sometimes I quoted Wikipedia because I wanted to reference the information most people had access to at any given time.  But by and large, Wikipedia was backgrounded for me. 

That was until recently, when, thanks to my Library colleague, Sara Marks, I began to pay attention.  For over a decade, Sara has been editing Wikipedia, leading wikihackathons, and attending Wikimania, the international conference of Wikipedians.  She is deeply into it. 

So, when I went to her recently and said I would like to see if I could use Wikipedia editing as a practical means of using the information my advanced qualitative research class would glean from writing papers on methodological topics…her eyes begin to glow with a strange light.  It could be done, she promised me.  I should have realized she was choking back a smile, pleased to think she might be adding more Wikipedians to the institution. 

In anticipation of getting started planning a project, I began, on my own, to dip into Wikipedia and see what was already available on my topic.  The article on qualitative research was one of the first places I visited.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research  

It’s not a very inviting place.  There is a banner across the top warning the reader that the article has multiple problems—related to writing and references.  The topic seems to be “owned” by sociology, as it is linked to that project.  Based on some of the text near the beginning, I had the feeling it might have been written by a student of Robert Bicklin (of Bogden and Bicklin fame!)  At least, I thought, there is lots to do here.  Definitely room for growth as an editor. 

Interesting, but I wasn’t getting close to my key concerns which I would express like this:

• Why does anyone care about Wikipedia?  Why is it such a phenomenon?
• Why should I, as an academic, care about Wikipedia?  [Many academics hate it with a passion, so why am I hanging around here looking at it?]
• Why should I, as a qualitative researcher, care about Wikipedia?  [If the generic article possesses warnings, what is the state of the other articles related to this topic?]
• Why should I, as a teacher, care about Wikipedia? [Do I want students to struggle with poorly formed text and mis-information?  Is that learning?  Shouldn’t they be given the right information and the best models?]
• Why should I, as a woman, care about Wikipedia? [I was already aware that there was a dearth of women represented on Wikipedia, but poking around I found that only 10% of the editors are female.]

Here are some reasons that I have come up with to answer my questions:

Wikipedia is one of the top Internet sites in the world.  It has more unique visitors visit it every day than multiple of the world’s top newspapers and other communication sites.  It is developing repositories of information in languages from across the world. 

Wikipedia is a unique experiment in community knowledge creation, primarily driven by volunteers.  The information on Wikipedia is getting better and better.  It grows, changes, and is revised with great rapidity (in certain areas).  Some disciplines or organizations are taking on the task of vetting the information in their area of expertise.  As this happens, Wikipedia takes on a greater and greater role as a central source of information. 

Wikipedia is widely accessible, unlike many kinds of journals or books in specific disciplinary areas.  For many people in different corners of the world, Wikipedia may be a primary text.  If qualitative researchers want to make their topics known to the world, they probably need to care about the kind and quality of information that is represented about qualitative research in Wikipedia.  As with many things technological, however, I would bet that Wikipedia has not yet caused the hearts of too many qualitative researchers to beat faster. 

As I searched for resources about how to teach with Wikipedia, I realized that it was a phenomenal tool.  Higher education classrooms around the globe have begun to make Wikipedia editing a component of a dynamic class.  I was excited to see that I would not be alone if I undertook this effort.  Moreover, there were good resources available to help me hone my skills. 

This last week, Michelle Obama was featured on a documentary about the ways girls are losing out in the educational arena.  To be blunt, millions of girls around the world are not even enrolled in school.  If they were in school, maybe they would be asked to turn to Wikipedia to find information—where women are under-represented, and few women are participating in the development of what has become a universal text.  That’s not good.  Wikipedia clearly needs women’s participation.  I find it thrilling to think that I could be developing texts that could become part of the curricula for these unknown girls and women who may be about to begin their education. 

I realize that it might be a slow path, but I think I see Wikipedia in the future of this female, academic, qualitative researcher.  Tune in for more…

Diana Eck: India: A Sacred Geography—Writing at the Intersection of Anthropology and Religion

Lotus; courtesy of Creative Commons

Recently shopping for some light reading for a short vacation, I came across Diana Eck’s India: A Sacred Geography on Amazon.  I was surprised to see Eck's name associated with a book on India, because my knowledge of her was related to work on diversity in the American religious scene.  In fact, at first I thought the odd last name was only a coincidence; but not so!!  Eck's decades long work with Indian religious issues is actually the catalyst for her current work with pluralism and American religious change. 

India: A Sacred Geography is a rich treat.  A book that has been gestating in its author for many, many years.  This long process of production started with her earliest work on Benaras (her dissertation I would presume), and includes many years of visiting India, going to numerous places of pilgrimage, and thinking about landscape, architecture, literature, language—how it all fits together. 

The underlying premise is that India was India long before the latest colonial invasions.  India created itself by foot and pilgrimage, endowing the landscape with a sense of meaning and story that is re-enacted again and again by the constant visiting that crosses various territories.  More powerful than any boundary drawn by British or other parties, India’s sense of consolidation is written on the landscape through the circulation of pilgrims. 

“Many Indian scholars have noted the significance of the network of pilgrimage places in constructing a sense of Indian “nationhood” not as a nation-state in the modern usage of the term, but as a shared, living landscape, with all this cultural and regional complexity,” says Eck (location 365) 

 A landscape that is created in this way is mythic, historical, and contemporary.  It is both natural and contrived.  Of the natural—rivers play a huge role, of which there are many, many crossing the geography of the country.   Of the contrived, temples, buildings, and cities are significant.  Tirthas, dhams, lingas—I began to lose count of the many kinds of constructions that could be linked to weave together this landscape. 

The anthropologic piece, for me, is the way Eck understands this landscape of vast proportions from a kind of participant-observation perspective.  She has walked the ways of the pilgrims…and yet she has also read and constructed a theoretical understanding of the ways goddess bodies are distributed across landscape, the way cities are connected through myth and pilgrimage, and the role that rivers play throughout it all. 

Studying the Indian sense of India as constructed through a religious landscape that has been evolving for centuries is a different kind of anthropologic feat than sitting in “x” village for a year and trying to figure out water rights (although there is nothing wrong with that).  And I am not at all sure that Eck would describe herself as an anthropologist.  But there is something here that is highly anthropologic and deserves to be thought about as a form of qualitative research.  As such it provides insights about how to study things that seem irregular, large, diffuse—not a village, school, or business department.  We need, I think, to make use of qualitative research tools to study the irregular as well as the regular and confined (made strange).  I would assume she has some items that count for traditional data, but I would also assume that much of her thinking is not data-driven in the traditional way we are using it right now—time bound and scientific—but incorporated in embodied memories of visits and time spent watching and thinking.  I think her method required lived experience, and, as she says, it was gestating for a long time. 

As I page through my digitally highlighted notes of the book it’s hard to know what to stop and share—there is so much that I felt was significant.  It is definitely a good read for a qualitative researcher in search of new models. 

 Diana Eck.  2012.  India: A Sacred Geography.  Published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House.  New York. 

Making Sense of Obrist and Ways of Curating

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s book, Ways of Curating, is a marvel for many reasons.  He is so widely read and so deeply intertwined with artists and curators through his decades long interviewing activities that he is able to make amazing connections between the history of curation and the current trends.  There are many lessons and overlap with qualitative research. 

Below is a curated collection of quotations drawn from my highlights in the Obrist text.  Taken from various parts of the text, they began to form a new narrative about the bringing together of the arts and science, which was one, but certainly not the whole of Obrist’s discussions. 

As he has done in many sphere’s, Obrist suggests ways of creating connections, making sparks fly through juxtapositions, miming, and reorganization.  My question to the world of qualitative research is:  How might we change the way we bring things together—people, ideas, conferences—to “allow different elements to touch”?  What would happen if we did? 

Page 1 · Location 33

There is a fundamental similarity to the act of curating, which at its most basic is simply about connecting cultures, bringing their elements into proximity with each other –the task of curating is to make junctions, to allow different elements to touch. You might describe it as the attempted pollination of culture, or a form of map-making that opens new routes through a city, a people or a world.

Page 20 · Location 264

Zones of contact was my working phrase for what Boltanski, Lavier and I were trying to create. I took it from the anthropologist James Clifford, who had written about a new model for ethnographic museums, in which the peoples whose culture was being ‘represented’ by the museum proposed their own alternate forms of exhibiting and collecting. They were taking it upon themselves to recollect their own story and create their history from the inside. This changed the whole historical narrative of the ethnographic museum, which has mostly been a place for one culture to tell the story of another.

 

Page 23 · Location 305

The current vogue for the idea of curating stems from a feature of modern life that is impossible to ignore: the proliferation and reproduction of ideas, raw data, processed information, images, disciplinary knowledge and material products that we are witnessing today.

Collecting Knowledge

Highlight(orange) - Page 39 · Location 526

Though the aim of amassing evidence may sound like a rather scientific way to think about collecting, it is necessary to remember that the hard distinction between science and art which marks more recent centuries was not evident as late as the sixteenth century. The separation of art and the humanities on the one hand, and science on the other, is a fundamental feature of modern life, but it also constitutes a loss.

Highlight(orange) - Page 40 · Location 534

To study the Renaissance is to gain a model for reconnecting art and science, sundered by history.

 

Curating (Non-)Conferences

Highlight(yellow) - Page 152 · Location 1921

Having suddenly been introduced to such an interdisciplinary mixture of people was like a revelation to me. So I thought more about how to connect the arts and the sciences within my own curatorial work.

Highlight(yellow) - Page 153 · Location 1932

So I thought it would be interesting to apply the idea of changing the rules of the game for a discursive event like a conference, similar to what I had done in exhibitions. A mischievous idea occurred to me. What if one had all the accoutrements of a conference: the schedule, hotel accommodation, participants with their badges, but dispensed with the ‘official’ elements of panels,

Highlight(yellow) - Page 153 · Location 1937

The idea was to create a contact zone where something could happen but nothing had to happen. And so the ‘conference’ we organized at the research centre, ‘Art and Brain’, had all the constituents of a colloquium except the colloquium. There were coffee breaks, a bus trip, meals, tours of the facilities, but no colloquium.

Highlight(yellow) - Page 154 · Location 1943

the role of the curator is to create free space, not occupy existing space. In my practice, the curator has to bridge gaps and build bridges between artists, the public, institutions and other types of communities. The crux of this work is to build temporary communities, by connecting different people and practices, and creating the conditions for triggering sparks between them.

 

 

Qualitative Research Methodology discussions in Non-Methodology Journals

Vraagteken (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The semester is over and I am slowly picking up the pieces.  In re: the classes that are now behind me, one of the most important tasks is asking myself what worked, what did not work, and why.  What could I have done differently?  What assumptions did I bring to the assignment that were or were not fulfilled? 

One of these question marks was the last assignment for the doctoral qualitative research course.  I asked each class member (there were 12) to select an article describing a qualitative research study related to their research passion.  These passions ranged from lesson planning and the use of social media in community colleges to teaching logrhythims and universal design as a tool for working with troubled youth. 

I provided a chart of qualitative research issues to address in the analysis of the article.  All were representative of the issues raised in the textbook and readings--in other words, they represented the standard fare of methodologists.

Full APA Bibliographic Reference

Background/Problem:  What is the problem or dilemma faced here?

Question Article seeks to answer

Paradigmatic Stance/Research Strategy Used by Author

Ethical Processes and Issues discussed:  Subjectivity Concerns  Discussed

Data Collection:  What was collected/How/When/Where

Data Analysis:  What was the process of analysis described?

What were the key findings?

How is evidence marshalled to support findings?

How does the author account for validity or trustworthiness?

Quality of the analytic discussion? (How does the author probe findings? Question them? Offer challenges?)

Issues of representation

Significance:  What is the significance of this piece?  How does it connect to the discussion of the background or problem?

In the week's before the assignment came in, I had questions from several students asking about the articles they had chosen.  Several students complained that they couldn't find qualitative research studies in their area of interest.  These and others complained that the articles they found didn't talk about the methodological issues we had discussed in class.  Many said they were having to do a work around, that is, they were writing about the absence of a variety of methodological proofs.  I chalked up the questions to their own jitters and assumed things would be straightened out by the time I read the assignments.  

So, now that the grading is behind me:  What did I learn? 

Well, first I learned that I live in a methodological bubble.  I live, work, and breath in a world dominated by qualitative research methodology discussions.  I think that every researcher is with me under the same big tent.  However, this is not the case.  There are many researchers out there, very happily pursuing their various non-methodological interests.  These people make use of qualitative research to meet their ends, but they are not as worried about crossing their t's and dotting their i's.  If you know what I mean. 

This means that much of the qualitative research that is out there, reported upon, in various non-methodological journals, is doing its best to contribute to the understanding of a given topic, but it may not be representative of all the whistles, bells, and frills, for which the methodological purists are looking.

My students (all of whom were reporting on qualitative research studies published in peer reviewed journals) found that discussions of methodological tasks and steps were often subsumed under a simple label.  Grounded theory was the most popular label, although that title could cover a range of meanings.  Overall the mention of research strategies (as I would call the ways we refer to approaches like Grounded Theory, ethnography, etc.) got little space. 

I had asked them to look for information about the paradigm discussions we had read about in depth in the Handbook of Qualitative Inquiry.  No one found a word about that in the articles they had chosen.  So they wrote about the absence of paradigms and the implied paradigmatic stance of the author. 

The actual act of analysis was often collapsed into a one sentence description.  "Back and forth," meaning movement between an interview transcript and coding, was a frequent way to talk about analysis--so frequent that I got tired of writing:  "What does this 'back and forth' mean?!"   

Only one student had selected an article from one of the tried and true qualitative research methodology journals, and she alone could fill in the blanks for the assignment with close to the purity for which I had hoped.   For her, it was easy, because everything was laid out based on the template I had given her.  For the others, however, the task was not nearly as clear.  Clearly, she was not the only one who had done it right.  The issue was much larger. 

What should I do? 

Hating failure, my first thought was--I'll never give this assignment again.  But this was reactionary, and, in truth, they had actually done a very interesting job on the assignment. 

My second thought was:  I will assign all the articles in future and they will only have articles in their hands that represent the way qualitative research methodology SHOULD be described.  But that didn't seem to make great sense because from what I had learned from this assignment--that's not going to be what they enounter in the real world.  It's obvious that the template created by methodologists lives and breaths in our world, but is getting limited attention from those further from this limited group of gurus. 

My third thought was:  Let's do some more shared/guided reading of articles with strong and weak methodological descriptions and talk about the difference.  This will probably be where I end up. 

The challenge of working through the "Bringing it all Together" assignment, as I called it, is similar to the earlier blog mention I made of the journal that mandated a number of interviews as representing good methodological practice.  Lacking an adequate (read: informed) discussion of the qualitative research methodology in articles submitted to peer-reviewed journals, such mandates may seem like a reasonable response.  It seems that the other response--requiring good methodological description is much harder because writers, reviewers, and editors may lack the skills to provide this or shepherd these changes. 

So, should we stop permitting qualitative research results to be reported?  Is it too much trouble to get it right?  Or should we stop permitting their publication without a full methodological discussion?  What does a "full methodological discussion" mean?  Is "full" too long to be fit into the average peer-reviewed journal article?  What kinds of methodological short-hand is acceptable in reporting on qualitative research methodology? 

I think it is time to eat breakfast--there is no quick fix for this one. 

Action Research Journal Blog

Wassily Kandinsky, "On White II", 1923 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am going to be teaching Practitioner Action Research, Spring 2013, and in preparation, I signed up for alerts from Sage's Action Research Journal.  Just discovered they have an interesting blog with extended content and commentary. 

Action Research Journal Blog

Take a look--you might find it interesting. 

Maxqda 11 Introduced

Simple emoticons of the five temperaments: Sanguine (top right), Choleric (bottom right), Melancholy (bottom left), and Phlegmatic (centre), with the new temperament Supine (top left) and Phlegmatic blends in between. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Exciting!  I just took a look at the new features of Maxqda 11.  It is definitely running neck and neck with what NVvivo is offering, BUT here are two new features that are very different:

1.  A cell phone app!!!  They are right--this is a first for the larger comprehensive qualitative data analysis software packages (There are apps, but not produced by these companies to interface with their products). 

2.  Emoticon coding!!!  I like this idea too.  Just as you can define a color for a coding stripe in some packages...now Maxqda lets you assign an emoticon as a quick visual reference for a code. 

Here is a link to the introductory video.  I am going to have to try this out. 


Introduction to Maxqda 11

Sample Size and Qualitative Research

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Someone had to do it.  Do what? Make a definitive answer to what the sample size should be in a qualitative research study published by a peer reviewed journal.

In this case the someone was Shari L. Dworkin, Associate Editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the individual responsible for qualitative research submissions at this journal.  She takes her stand in an editorial (2012) 41:1319-1320.  Henceforth, the policy of her journal will be to recommend that:

25-30 participants is the minimum sample size required to reach saturation and redundancy in grounded theory studies that use in-depth interviews. 

A part of me admires her for putting a number to her answer.  I, too, have struggled many times when people ask me that question--"How many interviews does it take?" "What's enough data?"  "How do qualitative researchers figure out what is the right sample size?"  The answer that most qualitative researchers give:  "It depends," is not very satisfying for the novice or the researcher who is struggling to gain an understanding of this methodology. How easy it would be just to say "25-30; take it or leave it". 

In her editorial, she does a good job of talking through the rationale for her answer and discussing the literature upon which she drew for her answer (the primary grounded theory gurus).  She identifies this number as about right if you are seeking to find saturation...no new leads...not much new coming up. 

Just as I admire her...I also fear for her, because I worry that, in making her editorial decision, there is a lot of qualitative research territory that she hasn't taken into consideration.  So, let me unpack what some of the "it depends" concerns would be:

• Grounded theory studies are not the whole of qualitative research, and in relying so heavily on this one "flavor" in our field have important views been ignored.  (Now I personally believe that the whole qualitative research flavor discussion is over-rated...see earlier blog posts...but I think it may be relevant here.)
• Grounded theory studies are not always solely composed of interviews (as the editorial appears to suggest).  I would want to know how interviews are mixed with other forms of data before I could say that, for instance, 10 interviews, was insufficient.  [How many observations?  Of what kind and length?  Was there significant document analysis?  Was visual data obtained?  What about the use of journals from the participants?]  I would need to know how the interviews were contextualized in the sea of data that is possible to gather in a qualitative research study. 
• What do you mean by "in-depth interviews"?  From the editorial, I have the sense we are talking one interview per individual (maybe 1 hour?).  In my training with Buddy Peshkin...in-depth would have meant 4-5 interviews (yes 4-5 hours divided up over a period of time) with one individual.  Whose in-depth are we using? 
• What does 25-30 mean?  In the editorial it appears that this would be 25-30 interviews with separate individuals.  If you had 5 focus group interviews with 5 individuals in each (5 x 5 = 25)...would that count? I am working on a study that relied primarily on focus groups--I can report that we interviewed hundreds...but in groups. 
• What will a ruling like this do to the incredibly important smaller exploratory start-up study, and/or the dissertation study?  These are often of smaller size than a very well funded study by a senior researcher.  Will these valuable efforts become unpublishable?  Are we starting a new kind of ranking order for peer reviewed journals?  

When I shared my concerns about the policy described here with a friend who is a qualitative researcher, her response was--"...setting a number of interviews seems to me like giving up the expert's responsibility to vet the methodology.  Maybe the problem is that the methodology wasn't adequately described.  Shouldn't we review the number of interviews as part of reviewing the methodological description.  We still have that responsibility."  

I invite all comment on this issue.  This is the first time I have seen a journal take a stand of this sort.  I am glad that this has happened, because it opens up space for a well needed discussion. 

Urmitapa Dutta at UMass Lowell: Everyday Peace

UMass Lowell is pleased to welcome a new faculty member in the psychology department--Dr. Urmitapa Dutta.  She comes to us from the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois.  Dr. Dutta brings a wealth of experience about the day-to-day possibilities of creating peace in places where violence has become a normalized event. 

This fall I was lucky to have her as a speaker in my doctoral course on qualitative research methods.  She discussed her dissertation work in northern India where she worked with young adults using a blend of critical ethnography and participatory action research.

Spring 2013 she will be offering a very interesting class that will engage students in these same methods.

 

This is a not-to-be-missed experience!  

Historical Social Research publication

Istanbul (Photo credit: Greenwich Photography)

I am pleased to announce that Historical Social Research has republished an article I co-authored that first appeared in FQS this year. 

Cesar A. Cisneros Puebla and Judith Davidson

Qualitative Computing and Qualitative Research: Addressing the Challenges of Technology and Globalization

This piece appears in Historical Social Research (Historische Sozialforschung)Vol 37 (2012) 4, No. 142.  It provides an overview of the FQS special issue of selected papers from the 2011 "Qualitative Computing: Diverse Worlds and Research Practices Conference" that was held in Istanbul, Turkey. 

Take Note to Make Note

Graphic Notetaking (Photo credit: derekbruff)

I started blogging today with an entry about the Radcliffe Institute's "Take Note" conference that I had attended at the beginning of November. 

Between that entry and this one are eleven entries in which I share a note taking experiment in my doctoral course 07.704 Introduction to Qualitative Research methods.  Each student has created a 1 page visual introduction to a selected chapter from Denzin and Lincoln's "Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research". 

The eleven entries are diverse in their methods of presentation, ranging from simple webs or a single picture to a cartoon, a powerpoint slide, and visual/textual combinations that range across a page. 

As the instructor of this interesting crew, I can see the individual personality in each one from humor or confidence, to the sense of organization or wonder.  Personal expression flows to the surface of each one-page rendition. 

I also see the powerful draw of the disciplinary focus in which they are embedded, be it politics, science, math, school administration, or language learning.  Each discipline has shaped the individual's preferred way of visualizing in some respect. 

In creating this 1 page set of thoughts about an article, they are, of course, interacting with a specific author or authors.  Topics included critical pedagogy, feminism, mixed methods, case study, grounded theory and more.  As the individual learner from my class encountered this new material they also encountered the author who is distinctively represented within the article.  It was this individual who introduced my student to this topic.  What kind of a guide are they?  How well do these personalities mesh, regardless of the topic and its interest? 

There were certain visual elements in each piece that stopped us in our tracks:  Jay Lang's upside down house in the discussion of grounded theory is a good example or Aubrey Rochembeau's turned upside down article about Case Study method.  It is probably not strictly correct to call Nancy Nickerson's poem a visual--but it had a similar effect.   To write a poem in response to a poetry writing ethnographer appealed to our entire group. 

In describing the process of creating a visualization, students brought us more deeply into the process of their own reading experience and the making sense of the individual text with which they were grappling.  Dave Sciuto's twining vine reminds me of this...or Kim Gustenhoven's "cells" that surround the edge of her image frame. 

This assignment and its discussion took place in a class where I am constantly nudging students to think about the possibilities of the visual or visualization.  It's a fascination of mine that I seek to share with them.  Many would not have taken this route without the assignment.   Because each student read a different article, I cannot imagine what our discussion would have been like without a visual element to help us connect to the auditory experience of simply hearing a description of the article. 

I would say I have gone from Take Note to Make Note and quite a few things in between.

In attending the Take Note conference, I was particularly interested because as a qualitative researcher, my whole world is about taking notes--fieldnotes (observations, interviews, sketches, photos)--every way that I can possibly document the cultural experience of whoever I am studying.  As a teacher of qualitative research, I am teaching others to take notes in these forms, and, in so doing to consider what it means to "take note" as qualitative researchers do. 

In the exercise that I share here in my blog, my students are taking note of the ideas of other qualitative researchers and, through these notes, I hope becoming more attuned to a certain set of notions that are important to this field.  These were not private notes, but deliberately public notes.  Also these were not informal notes; they came with instructions about format and content.  So, are they really notes?  Is this a form of a paper?  As occurred at the Take Note Conference the notion of note has become deeply problematized (at least for me) through this inquiry. 

Melinda Willis and Qualitative Research

Melinda Willis is another student who returned to the circular, as I have dubbed it.  Pathways, circles, edges and borders--these seem to characterize a certain approach to this assignment of a 1 page visual.

Here is her written introduction to Kincheloe, McLaren & Steinberg's piece:

Critical Pedagogy and Qualitative Research

By J. Kincheloe, P. McLaren & S. Steinberg

A Brief Introduction

Power.  How have those in power shaped our understanding of and relationship with our culture and others within our greater culture? These are the questions at the heart of critical research, often performed as action or participatory research.

Talking with those not in power, the non-dominant culture, to learn their perspective, opens windows into an understanding of behaviors which may not be understood or misunderstood by someone outside of a micro-culture. In the past Eurocentric researchers observed other cultures and described them from a Eurocentric perspective. In critical research, researchers are working actively with the participants of their research, asking the participants to speak for themselves, enabling the researcher to get a glimpse inside the participants’ world from the participants’ perspective. Incorporating the methodology of bricolage, the researcher uses multi-disciplinary research techniques and intentionally notes their own biases, while working to gain an understanding of both the dominant culture and the non-dominate culture. Creating an open dialogue, the researcher works to increase cross-cultural understanding, which can be carried into the classroom, both with respect to understanding student behavior and academic discussions.

Reference

Kincheloe, J. L., McLaren, P. & Steinberg, S. R. (2011). Critical pedagogy and

qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & L. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4^th ed.)(pp.163-177). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Now, here is the visual that accompanied the description:

The image, as I am calling it, is actually constructed almost entirely of text organized in different visual clusters.  There are a few simple diagrams in strategic places.  The use of underlining, arrows, and circling are made use of to draw further attention to a component.