1987. Well, at the risk of getting too personal, life was interesting for
me at the time to say the least. I was still a graduate student at the
University of Chicago, having completed my course work in 1984. I got
sidetracked by my personal life; between 1985 and 1998 I got married and
became father to two children. I also returned to my full-time job as a
high school English teacher in 1984, so had to complete my degree with a
lot of other things going on in my life. I guess that being grounded for
most of my day in these pursuits helped me appreciate the need for applied
research, given that most of what I was doing all day was applied. Nothing
will ground you more than changing a few thousand diapers!
Theoretically, I was immersed in the work of cognitive psychology. My
dissertation used protocol analysis to study writers who had been taught
with different kinds of teaching methods, using pre- and post-intervention
protocol analysis to study changes in their writing processes. I was
strongly influenced by the leading protocol analysis proponents of the
time: Ericsson & Simon, Simon & Newell, and more particular to writing
research, Flower & Hayes and Scardamalia & Bereiter. My work paid very
little attention to social and cultural factors. Like other information
processing researchers, I was interested in cognition, which I would say
now is not possible to do irrespective of studying culture and
activity. My work was different from most cognitive theorists in that it
was situated, i.e., was conducted in a school rather than a lab and looked
at cognition as a consequence of the mediation of instruction (terms I did
not use then). My article on protocol analysis in MCA in 1998 was an
effort to explore the theoretical changes I have experienced since the
early 1990s when I began reading Vygotsky et al.
I would say that social science research is now in a period of
methodological ecumenical-ness. At least in my piece of the field, which
I'd broadly call literacy research in the field of education. I've been
co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English for 5 years now and have
seen a lot of different approaches to conducting studies and writing them
up. Few people still conduct "horse race" experiments, or if they do they
don't submit them to us; and very few of the ones that we've received have
been insightful enough to merit publication. People in my department have
gotten tenure doing very different kinds of work, from self-study teacher
education, to philosophically-based studies of reading literature, to
poststructural feminist studies of senior citizen book clubs, to Marxist
studies of the book publishing industry....the bottom line is, does the
person have a coherent line of inquiry that meets the standards of a
community of scholars?
Hope that helps you with your project!
At 09:02 AM 6/5/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Well, having been spyphological yesterday I responded to xmca instead of the
>sender today. Apologies.
>
>Peter asked who my note saying I would be in "the city" was to. To Joe
>Glick. Having bothered you with lack of substance, let me remark, perhaps
>usefully on Joe's note and indicate why it would be interesting to know
>the state of his thinking/experience circa 1987 would be.
>
>Note that Joe remarked on a fetishism of qualitative methods in the home
>of Sylvia Scribner, Katherine Nelson and others who represent an early
>geration of US researchers influenced by Vygotsky. Niether of those people
>made a fetish of qualitative research. Both used/use a mixture of methods
>in a manner we might call a methodology to link theory and data. Sylvia's
>work may have been more closely linked with practice and it would be
>interesting to explore that difference in their work. And, they add to the
>growing list of people who have been influential to current xmca members
>which my 1987 question initated.
>
>Peter, what about your thinking/doing circa 1987 and your view on whether
>theory/practice methodologies are now a broadly accepted norm?
>
>I have been wondering the extent to which one's experience/views of this
>matter depend on the institutional framework from which one works. Education
>and psychology, for example, may well differ in this regard.
>mike
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