[Xmca-l] Re: The Science of Qualitative Research 2ed

[David Kellogg]

Martin--

I thought that your solution--presenting concrete cases that were
theoretically defensible and yielded practical results for students--was a
good approach, and I was contrasting it with the alternatives:

a) Theoretically indefensible approaches. I don't think Richards's
approach  of ragging students for thinking that they might actually get
something useful from their analyses as teachers is theoretically
defensible. (Actually, I find the question that Piaget disparaged as the
"American Question", how teachers can intervene in development, to be
absolutely reasonable and even indispensible.)

b) Vague pieties. "Reflect on analytical codings" is the qualitative
researcher tutor's equivalent of the writing tutor's "write more clearly".
Physician, heal thyself!

I think I agree still more with your frustration: Is qualitative research
ALWAYS a matter of bespoke tailoring? If it is, then everything we have
said and thought about the merger and the continuum connecting quantitative
and qualitative approaches must fall under the combined heading of
theoretically indefensible vague pieties.

 Vygotsky has what he calls a "working hypothesis". It's not a general
methodological theory (of the sort that Wolff-Michael makes from
"neoformation" in the article under discussion). It's also not just
fact-gathering (the sort of thing I spend too much time doing). He calls it
a conjecture, a guess, a kind of mini-theory to be checked against facts.
Actually, Chapter Five and Chapter Six (of Thinking and Speech) present two
different "working hypotheses" about abstraction and generalization (the
five complexes and the measure of generality). I think Chapter Seven is an
attempt to synthesize them in a general theory that instead produces a new
working hypothesis (the wind, the clouds, the rain, the deluge....).

We're working through the "Pedology of the Adolescent"--the real one, not
the "greatest hits" comp you see in the Collected Works. So at the end of
Chapter Four, LSV points out that adolescent studies present a kind of
inversion of the situation in early childhood studies: the former is all
big ideas and no facts, while the latter is all facts and no theories. He
proposes a "working hypothesis" instead: all of the "lines of development"
in adolescence (e.g. dissociations, crushes, concepts) can be linked to the
"non-coincidence of three peaks or summits of development": the sexual, the
general-organic, and the socio-cultural. The problem I'm having is linking
this "working hypothesis" with the ton of linguistic data I've got. That's
what I'm doing in 2018.

(Oh, and job-hunting. It's kind of interesting, actually--salaries for
foreign professors have decreased by nearly forty percent and hours have
practically doubled here since I left to do a PhD two years ago. I was a
little miffed at the idea of having a job with twice the teaching hours and
less than half of what I was making before I left until I looked at the job
prospects for my future students. Korea is a very high tech place and that
means that teachers have to deal with the "working hypothesis" that the
practical skills we are teaching even the adolescents will be obsolete by
the time they graduate: the equivalent of teaching teenagers to be typists
or telephone operators or typesetters. The curriculum material I've looked
at seems to be based on two "working hypotheses"--"coding across the
curriculum" on the one hand, and "learning how to learn" on the other. Both
of these seem like unworkable hypotheses to me,  for different reasons. But
what do I know?)

David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 6:47 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:

> David,
>
> I have struggled various times over how to structure a How To book. I have
> found that I can teach research methods in the classroom only by means of
> constant interaction with (and among) students, and I cannot figure out how
> to replicate or simulate this in a printed book!  It’s quite frustrating.
>
> Martin
>
>
> > On Dec 20, 2017, at 4:27 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Compare
> > with Keith Richards, "Qualitative Inquiry in TESOL" (Palgrave Macmillan)
> or
> > Johnny Saldana "Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers" (Sage).
> Richards
> > begins his collection of piecemeal accounts with horrifying "how not to"
> > vignettes of how he victimized his students for "misapplying"
> Conversation
> > Analysis: this is how not to teach ideas to students. Saldana is a little
> > better, but the closest he gets to good examples of how to be continent,
> > object-specific, and concrete is advice like "reflect on analytic
> codings".
> > Show me, Professor!
>
>