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. 

Adding Qualitative Research to the Classic Research Design Course

This week I had so much fun at my institution, UMass Lowell!  I got to teach the qualitative research component of our classic research design course in the Graduate School of education.  I had 10 so-called research newbies in front of me, and it was my job to give them their first real taste of my passion--qualitative research. 


Why is this such a big deal, you ask?  Well, let me explain.  At my institution and at many others around the world, there is an introduction to research course that anchors all the other social science research training, which is supposed to give students a taste of all the possible flavors of research coming up in their doctoral program.  Most of these classes, however, are taught by people with deep roots in positivist perspectives, using textbooks that emphasize positive perspectives.  I am sorry if this sounds like over simplification to some, but that's what my experience has been.  Their interaction with qualitative research has been limited--and they tend to see it as affirming or instrumental, but not as a creative component in and of it own right, nor do they usually have a very complex view of the paradigmatic issues that burden methodological approaches. 


However, having launched the Research Methods and Program Evaluation in Education Ph.D. program, our little faculty has been meeting and discussing these issues with real openness...and the result was that my colleague who teaches our Introductory Research Course invited me in to teach the two weeks devoted specifically to qualitative research.  Last week was the first week of the two-week experiment.  


Selfishly I used it to introduce materials I am developing about the historical beginnings of qualitative research, the chronologies we use to describe its beginnings, and the plethora of research kinds that we now face about a century and a half since those first anthropologists and sociologists were beginning to take lay out the foundations of the field.  An interesting exercise I shared was this table of kinds of research taken from the indexes of four qualitative research textbooks on my shelf. 

Research Kinds In Qualitative Research:  J. Davidson    Derived from the Indexes of these texts. 

Patton, M. (2015).  Qualitative research and evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice (4th ed.).  Sage Publications.	Savin-Baden, M. & Major, C. (2013).  Qualitative research: The essential guide to theory and practice.  Routledge:  New York.	Hays, D. & Singh, A. (2012).  Qualitative inquiry in clinical and educational settings.  The Guildford Press:  New York.	Punch, K. & Oancea, A. (2014) Introduction to Research methods in Education.  (2nd ed.) Sage Publications.
Action Research Anthropology Autoethnography Embodied Ethnography Case Studies Collaborative/Participatory Research Ethnography Education action research Empowerment Evaluation Ethnographic futures research Applied Ethnography (anthropology) Narrative Ethnography Organizational Ethnography Public Ethnography Virtual Ethnography Ethnomethodology Grounded Theory Hermeneutics Indigeneous Research Interactive Inquiry Mixed Methods Narrative Inquiry Phenomenology Pragmatic qualitative inquiry Qualitative inquiry Symbolic Interactionism	Action research Critical/emancipatory action research Pragmatic action research Participatory action research Anthropology Arts-based case studies Arts-informed inquiry Autoethnography Case study Discourse analysis Feminist theory Democratic evaluation Duoethnography Ethnodrama Ethnography Autoethnography Grounded theory Hermeneutics Interpretivism Life course research Narrative research Naturalistic inquiry Participatory Action Research Phenomenology Pragmatic qualitative research Symbolic interactionism	Action Research Participatory Action Research Anthropology Applied Research Autobiographical case study Autoethnography Biographical case study Case study                        Life Histories Collective case study Critical theory Ethnomethodology Dialectical hermeneutics Discourse analysis Ethnography Femininst research Grounded theory Hermeneutics Mixed methods Narrative analysis Narratology Symbolic Interaction	Action research Critical action research Participatory action research Anthropology Case studies Critical discourse analysis Discourse analysis Ethnography Grounded theory Constructivist grounded theory Mixed methids research Narrative analysis Naturalistic research Phenomenological Analysis Qualitative research Symbolic interactionism

Looks pretty daunting, right?  And this is not the sum total of kinds of research one could list--there are many more out there. 


My cry to the field is--isn't it about time that we started talking about the principles of qualitative research and started looking at these kinds of research as talking points in an ongoing conversation about those principles? 


Onward and upward--I can't wait for next week's class:  data collection and analysis and QDAS!

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.