Academia – Page 27 – Silence and Voice

First Thoughts from the 5th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2009)

Here I am at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all checked into the hotel and unpacked, and ready to attend this evening’s Pre-Congress Reception, from 7:00-9:00 in the Levis Faculty Center. I just heard about this reception yesterday, and think it is a nice (though not widely publicized) way to begin this, my first International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.

Then, off to try to get my first full night’s sleep all week so I can be prepared for the two Pre-Conference Workshops I registered to attend tomorrow:

New Experimental Writing Forms with Yvonna Lincoln
Writing Autoethnography and Narrative in Qualitative Research with Art Bochner and Carolyn Ellis

More about the final preparation I am doing for my own two paper sessions (that I will present on Friday) tomorrow!

Autoethnography Research Project Proposal ~ Feedback Requested

I have an assignment for my doctoral program that I want to share here and possibly (hopefully) generate some constructive feedback. We have a short period of time for this project / assignment, so I can not take the usual time to work out all the issues before I begin. As I am not accustomed to discussing this early in the process, some suggestions and possible direction for identifying potential participants will be most appreciated.

This project is a small-scale research project that is intended to:

Get some experience doing what we have been studying, namely research itself
Write about educational research methods after using some of them
Set personal learning objectives and then reflect on how they were met

I have never publicly discussed this process before I have it completed, and as my program at Lancaster University in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning focuses on participatory and networked learning, I thought I will work with my tutor and colleagues in the cohort as well as share this experience here on my blog.

While this is intended to be an original piece of research, it is within the context of a class, so the (proposed) research headings are slightly different than a pure research paper.

Working Title
Educational Explorations of Autoethnographic Inquiry: A Tale of 2 Teachers

Research Problem
Autoethnography is increasingly used as a research method, pushing the boundaries of qualitative inquiry by focusing on a phenomenon in the life of the researcher as the central aspect of study, and publishing the findings as a cultural critique. With online technologies making the entire research process more transparent and potentially interactive, the process and research intentions themselves may be explored more fully, as the steps can be studied as part of the process, rather than by looking only at the final, published product. Little is known about what the researcher learns and wants his or her readers to learn within the process of autoethnographic research.

Literature Review
This will focus on autoethnographic inquiry, what it is, why it is done, and what is learned through it. I am planning to focus around the work of Carolyn Ellis, Art Bochner, Deborah Reed-Danahay, and Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly.

Purpose & Research Design
The purpose of this case study is to understand the intentions and learnings of researchers who engage in autoethnographic inquiry. This will be a qualitative research design, with a constructivism philosophical worldview. The strategy of inquiry will be case study. The research methods will be interview.

There are no expected ethical issues in this research. Participants will remain anonymous, with fictitious names being used and the transcripts from the research secured in my password-protected computer.

This research is important to me because I am interested in learning more about how autoethnography can be used as a method in online and distance education, particularly for its seeming relationship with reflective practice and transformative learning. This is part of a large research interest of mine, which I am seeking to begin exploring in this smaller research project. I hope to better understand this to ultimately help improve the effectiveness of online teaching and learning practice.

Methods
As this is an exploratory case study, there will be 2 people interviewed for this research. I will reach out to my network of colleagues and distribution lists to locate 2 people who have published autoethnographic inquiries (I have not actively looked for potential participants yet). Interviews will be conducted over the phone. Open-ended interview questions will be used:

Why did you choose to use autoethnographic inquiry?
Who is your intended audience?
What intentions did you have for your readers?
What role did technology play in your research?
What did you learn in the process of this autoethnographic inquiry?
If you were to conduct further autoethnographic inquiry, what would you do differently?

Interview results will be hand-transcribed and sent back to the participants for their review and approval.

Data Analysis
I will look for themes between the results; though need to develop this section more (for possible hand-coding?).

Findings and Next Steps
TBD

Personal Learnings
I will explore what I learned in doing this research project. I do need to develop personal learning objectives, though am not sure about the format for them and how many are realistic given the time and scope limitations.

References
Listed as used.

Lancaster Doctoral Residential, 2009

Here I am in the middle of my residential in the northwest of England, where I have recently started as a doctoral student studying toward a PhD in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL or ERTEL).

After teaching and learning for so many years, why not focus on the PhD? After all, while I work full-time as a project manager, I also teach doctoral students, MBA and other graduate students, undergraduates, and continuing education students. I already have four earned masters degrees, review countless academic and peer-reviewed presentations, papers, and journal articles. Why not get the credential I have already worked long and hard to achieve (not to mention my own countless papers, international presentation, and articles of some sort or another)?

While I have held off thus far discussing my studies which began two months ago (I have been busy, even by my own standards!), they will become more a part of my life and thus my blog postings.

Nothing like more opportunities for reflective practice to improve my teaching and learning.

The Worth of Humanities in a Postmodern World

I have been asked at times to explain my blog’s by-line:

Research and Practice in Postmodern Learning

and have found it as much as a challenge to do so as it is to define postmodernism itself (BTW, I do like Lyotard’s definition in The Postmodern Condition, “incredulity toward metanarratives”). I enjoy researching and living a life of education in ways that challenge the established worldviews.

Case in point, check out the article in yesterday’s NY Times, In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. The days of believing:

the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice

may be nearing an end, especially as these previously unassailable virtues are now being challenged (such as by the economy, which does not generally pay people for having these virtues). The idea that a humanities background may not be considered particularly valuable any more is a postmodern thought. We have always assumed that this value is beyond doubt (right up there with democracy is always the best form of government, free speech is good, and it is a bad idea to sell wine in supermarkets in New York).

Postmodernism as a philosophy of practice is both critical as well as constructivist (I wonder if any of my students are reading this?), and basically challenges established worldviews as frameworks of power imbalance and limited perspective. I like considering this, researching this, practicing this, and trying to introduce this in my teaching to help my students to see the complexities in the teaching and learning process that are often under the surface of clearly articulated objectives, assessment plans, and nodding heads.

BTW, I also believe it is easier to challenge and knock the humanities after having completed two graduate degrees in the humanities and knowing enough about them to know I really know very little. I suppose this is a little postmodern, too . . .

Learning from Impromptus

I watched the impromtus during our final class last night, and it appears they were well-received. I changed the format of how I handle these, as well as making the questions more open-ended and general than traditional business-related issues, and then used a Critical Incident Questionnaire to better understand the experience. There are a few things that stick out in my mind about this end-of-course activity:

Speaking on your feet is not scary with practice.
Seeing how things work well and then trying them out can be effective (such as asking the audience a question and getting their responses at the beginning to capture their attention).
Humor goes a long way to engaging and maintaining audience involvement.
Using a general communications model can be applicable to all communications situations.
Using a personal story on a topic with which the audience can directly relate is engaging.

I am pleased with the results, and like the way it seemed to end the course on a positive note by taking what we learned and applying it to a larger context (life). I hope my students found it as useful as well.