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

[Edward Wall]

Martin

     In a sense I had Garfinkel in mind although your last paragraph is essentially what I was getting at. One of Garfinkel’s student’s, Eric Livingston, sort of gave this a try in his Ethnographies of Reason. It is interesting, but not entirely convincing.

     I have tried various textual strategies in things I have written for teacher education students/math teachers so as to get them to ‘interact’ with chapters I had written and I remain very skeptical about my effectiveness. I, of course, question what I did. However, I also think that students come to me ‘knowing' how to read a chapter (on whatever) and that does not necessarily translate into the kind of learning for which I hoped.

      I am sure about one thing. No matter how well your chapters are written (and I am not at all critiquing what you have written), I would - as a teacher - be very unlikely to sit down and read a chapter to my students. Paraphrase, yes. Act out, yes. Reading (as some forms of listening), can be too passive. That isn’t to say it should be or needs to be.

Ed

> On Jan 4, 2018, at  2:17 PM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
> 
> Ed,
> 
> I think you’re referring to Garfinkel’s distinction between “instructions” and “instructed actions.” All instructions are necessarily incomplete, because to interpret and apply them requires background competence which cannot be itself the object of instruction.
> 
> I think an interpretive approach can grapple with that issue to some degree, because any interpretation of what people say or do rests unavoidably on a prior understanding, as a skilled member of the community. (I cannot analyze an interview conducted in Spanish, for example, because I don’t have the necessary competence.) I don’t need to try to provide that competence; I can (I have to) assume that students already have it. 
> 
> When I struggle with teaching in the classroom, an essential resource for me is a sense (I’m sure it’s incomplete and inaccurate) of what and how the students are learning. I think that I am at times a successful practitioner in the teaching-learning business (so to speak), in the classroom.
> 
> When writing a book, however, in which the aim is not simply to provide knowledge and argument but practical expertise in conducting an interview, for example, the feedback loop from teaching to learning has been cut. I can’t figure out how to reconnect the loose ends.
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
>> On Jan 4, 2018, at 11:54 AM, Edward Wall <ewall@umich.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
>>    For various reasons I find this an interesting discussion; however it is your last sentence that catches my attention. 
>> 
>>    A number of years ago, Gary Fenstermacher wrote a short piece on the ontological dependence of teaching on learning. So it strikes me that an interesting additional question is, perhaps, ‘how does a person ‘learn’ from this chapter to conduct research.’ An (not ‘the’) answer to that question, I suggest , can be found in the work of Garfinkel and Murleau-Ponty (and others). An (not ‘the’) answer to the teaching question, I think, can be found in the work of Dewey, Greene, Shulman, and Schwab (and others). Vygotsky, in an interesting way, cuts across teaching/learning somewhat.
>> 
>>     Speaking for myself, I know that I have struggled with such learning/teaching questions in the area of mathematics for many years (pragmatically and theoretically) including how does one learn how to teach (children and teachers) or even research the teaching or learning of mathematics. I cannot say I see a satisfying end in sight.
>> 
>>    Anyway, perhaps I can say it this way. While the chapter under discussion might well teach (and I use teach here as Fenstermacher) me how to do research what are termed 'language arts classrooms’ it is unlikely that I would easily learn how to do such despite the chapter (I think Garfinkel illustrates this, in part, nicely).
>> 
>> Ed
>> 
>>> On Jan 4, 2018, at  10:06 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Okay, yes. The new final chapter of the book uses as an example of research that is focused on constitution the study by Loïc Wacquant of boxers in a South Chicago gym. It is reported in Wacquant’s book “Body and Soul” and in various articles. For me it has the advantage that Wacquant conducted ethnography, carried out interviews, and even did some analysis of interactions, and these are the three ‘components’ of qualitative research that I focus on in the book.
>>> 
>>> One of the articles by Wacquant is titled “The pugilistic point of view.” Ironically, in it he argues strongly that boxers don’t have “a point of view,” because that would imply that they are only observers of their own life. In a dense paragraph he manages to call into question statements about the goal of ethnography (and by implication of qualitative research generally) made by Malinowski, Geertz, and Dilthey, and proposes instead, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Garfinkel, that his aim is to study, to ‘reconstruct,’ the “ontological complicity” of the boxers with the form of life of boxing.
>>> 
>>> You can see the value of this in a book that seeks to question the assumption that qualitative research is the ‘objective study of subjectivity.’ Wacquant rejects ontological dualism (subject-object, subjectivity-objectivity) as much as Vygotsky did!
>>> 
>>> But I’m not at all convinced that a chapter like this actually teaches a reader *how* to conduct research. At best, it can only be one component among several, and I haven’t yet figured out the others! I’m still in a childlike state, I guess. 
>>> 
>>> Martin
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Jan 3, 2018, at 9:08 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I was referring to what you said about the second edition, Martin. Didn't
>>>> you say there was an ethnographic study of boxing in South Chicago? I
>>>> remember that the first edition didn't have much by way of concrete studies
>>>> in it: it was a sustained argument rather than a working hypothesis. But
>>>> maybe what I'm remembering is Greg's review of it and not my own; I think
>>>> what happened was that I looked at it and found that there was too much
>>>> methodology and not enough method for my students.
>>>> 
>>>> See what you think of this, from Chapter Five of the pedology of the
>>>> adolescent. Vygotsky has argued that the crisis at adolescence is caused by
>>>> the non-coincidence of three peaks: general-organic, sexual, and cultural
>>>> historical development. Then he says:
>>>> 
>>>> "Blonsky thought, profoundly, that at the end of childhood the child is an
>>>> anthropological analogue with so called “childish races”, i.e. with various
>>>> primitive tribes, lacking that period of development which commences after
>>>> sexual maturation but passing instead from childhood directly into the
>>>> state of sexual maturity. In Thurnwald we find some indications that the
>>>> epoch of sexual maturation is critical for the children of primitive
>>>> peoples, who in at school age find themselves on a par with enculturated
>>>> peoples but after maturation frequently cease advancing and manifest a
>>>> “relapse into primitivity”, sinking to the general level of the whole
>>>> tribe."
>>>> 
>>>> Ugh. Thurnwald was a reviewer for the PhD thesis of Eva Justin, a nurse who
>>>> learned Romani in order to take part in the extermination of the gypsies.
>>>> After her PhD work was done, she arranged for the extermination and or
>>>> vivisection of all 29 of her research subjects. Thurnwald gave her a B.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 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 Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 10:24 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Sorry to be dense, David. Are you referring to my book?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Martin
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Jan 2, 2018, at 5:56 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 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:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
>