RE: The link between "macro" and "micro" (fwd)

Eugene Matusov (ematusov who-is-at cats.ucsc.edu)
Fri, 05 Jan 1996 18:01:33 -0800

Hello everybody--

First of all, I want to apologize for my e-mail software (MS Exchange 4.0
for Win 95) that seem to attach some symbol "noise" at the end of my
messages. Sorry for the inconvenience (I like MS Exchange because it has
in-built spelling checker -- so important for a dyslectic foreigner). I'll
go to buy Eudora Pro today.

Jay wrote very interesting response to my proposal of "globalization" of
activity situation to avoid compartmentalization of local activities. It
seems to me that Jay like my proposal at the conceptual level and sees
difficulties in its realization at the methodological level.

Let me start me response (because I think the issues Jay raised are
resolvable) with stating my "credo" about research methodology. I believe
that research is guided by the phenomenon of interest and by researcher's
inquiry. The final stage of the research is the "honest and comfortable
match" between the phenomenon and the inquiry which means that both of them
should undergo transformation in the process of research. I believe that
almost all "good" research is done by this way but often researchers do not
report on their process of doing the research but instead they report only
the final stage, i.e., perfect match between the phenomenon and the inquiry
and they pretend that this was the beginning of their endeavor (see for nice
exception from this case research reports produced by Mike Cole and his
colleagues -- you find there interesting histories of how initial phenomenon
of researchers' interest and researchers' inquiries got transformed in the
research process). "Good" research is full with surprises, inspirations,
discoveries, frustration, broken deadlines, despair, excitement, planning,
improvisation, transformations of obstacles and failures into opportunities
and discoveries, etc. I believe it is art. I also believe that a "good"
methodology can help to navigate this art (without transforming the art into
machine-like algorithm).

Taking my "methodological credo" into consideration, it is difficult for me
to answer to Jay's specific examples because I am neither excited about
phone conversations as a phenomenon of my interest (which, of course, does
not mean that phone conversations can not be a subject of excitement and
interest for somebody else or even for myself in future) nor I know Jay's
inquiries as starting points of his research project. So, I'd like to be
excused from considering these examples. Instead, I suggest to bring my own
example, if you don't mind.

Currently, Barbara Rogoff & I are in the mid of the project that focuses on
children's collaboration in the classroom in the innovative public
elementary school in Utah (that you, probably, heard from us). We thought
that learning how to collaborate is a skill that both derives from
participation in this school and is prerequisite for the participation. Our
starting-point inquiry was to examine if kids learn how to collaborate in
the classroom. We had a vast amount of videotapes where kids work together
and with adults (parent volunteers and teachers). We decided to start with
measuring amount of collaboration (by extracting periods of "collaboration"
defined by us from the activity session and measuring time of the periods
that reflect the collaboration extent). We wanted to compare the extent of
collaboration in different grade levels (interpreted as experience in the
innovative school).

So far, our initial project was "deviated" or better to say transformed
dramatically by : 1) a "causal external" observer, 2) phenomenon itself, 3)
existing literature that we were reading.
1) Once we showed some of our tapes to our colleague Chikako Toma who is a
native Japanese (and a very keen observer!). She immediately noticed one
important "detail" that had been invisible for us: the many of activities
designed by parent volunteers with children had individual final products
(e.g., write your own story, do your own clay boat or game board). It
brought an interesting question of how the character of final product
relates to possibility for children's collaboration (we are getting
predominate results that the relationship is complex).
2) Preliminary results show that, indeed, there was more collaboration in
upper grades than in lower grades. But we have got feeling that the story
was more complex than just "older kids do it better." There was something
else. It seems that children in younger grades (from K to about 3rd grade)
involve in different types of collaboration than kids in upper grades (from
3rd to 6th grade). So far we define the differences as different extent of
systematicity of activity progression. What is more, many adults (parent
volunteers and teachers) seems to be uncomfortable with collaboration with
non-systematic progression that younger kids demonstrate which leads to
either the adults being non-supportive for this collaboration (and not
guiding the kids) or even the adults trying to stop this kind of
collaboration. As you can see these observations made us to transform both
observed phenomena (to make it more global) and our initial inquiries.
3) Reading Robert Kaplan on types of thought progression in academic
discourse, Sarah Michaels and Courtney Gazden about black and white kids'
narrative styles, Jerome Bruner about literature styles helped as to develop
working descriptions of differences in collaboration types (we call them for
now as "topic-centered collaboration' and "topic-fluid collaboration").

We are still in the mid of the project and we don't know what will be our
final story (i.e., there are still things that are unresolved between our
inquiries and phenomena of our interest). I just wanted to illustrate that
there is no universal recipe for how to define the appropriate "activity
situation." My guess it develops in the research project. It hardly can be
pre-defined (but there is a starting point for future transformation -- it
is not just "fishing in phenomena water." Probably, there some things that
are (and will be) left invisible for us in the phenomena we are studying.
Some other things we feel are irrelevant in the phenomena (for example,
gender of the kids).

Bill Penuel visited me just a few days ago. We talked about what will
replace the notion of "looking for THE truth" in a sociocultural
methodology. We came to a tentative solution that "providing a report on
our research endeavor at the best of our knowledge" can be a good
substitute. What do you think?

Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz

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Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz