Keep on Singing
I am hearing the song “Keep on Singing” by Helen Reddy. It makes me think of listening to the Helen Reddy’s Greatest Hits album on our gargantuan record player when I was little. Yeah, it was a behemoth machine. What can I say… it was the 70’s.
I read through the next reading for my course: an article is called “Research Methods: Qualitative and Ethnographic” from StateUniversity.com. I didn’t find this article to be particularly helpful for my current task at-hand. At this point and time I am looking for something with concrete recommendations on how to structure a methodologically-sound teacher research project (this article was too high-level to provide this guidance).
The article attempts to outline featurs of “qualitative and ethnographic” research methods. Here are the features that stood out when I read:
- Draws on methods from sociology, anthropology, and other humanities and social and behavioral sciences,
- Adapts methodologies to address educational goals and concerns,
- Is pitted against quantitative and experimental methodologies,
- Attempts to include the voices of research participants in the research,
- Gathers information in a way that is specific to the goal attempting to be achieved,
- Interacts with data,
- Defines and redefines guiding questions,
- Recognizes that research is coming from a “situated perspective”, i.e., that research is coming from a localized scenario that may not be generalizable,
- Asks for permission to use artifacts generated by participants in the research,
- Utilizes observation and interviews as the most common methods of gathering information,
- Focuses not so much on the artifacts themselves, but the importance of the artifiacts in the context of the research,
- Reviews and analyzes field notes,
- And reports findings.
One of the things that I thought was good about the article is that it addressed (although briefly) the need to ask for permission to use study participants’ artifacts, interview answers, etc. What surprised me is the scope therewith. The article indicates that you need to acquire permission from parents, students and district personnel. I had thought about the parents, but I had not thought through district personnel. I will have to get on that and ask the director.
One of the things that I did not find helpful about the article is the way that it ended. I think that the author is attempting to make an important distinction, but it is not written in a way that is clear to me what is meant. Specifically:
“The researcher does not seek to generalize from the specific case. Rather, qualitative or ethnographic researchers provide in-depth descriptions that lead to general patterns. These patterns are then examined in other situations to see if, when, and how they occur and what consequences they have for what members in the new setting can know, do, understand, and/or produce. In qualitative and ethnographic studies this is often referred to as transferability, in contrast to generalizability.”
It seems to me that the author is trying to make a distinction here between generalizability and transferability. This caught my attention because I agree that generalizability should not be a goal of teacher research (in the way that teacher-research has been presented thusfar in this course). But, what is transferability if it is not generalizability? I suspect that the author is attempting to make an important point here, but I’m not currently in a position to grasp it.
