Thanks for your response, Gary. Its an issue that reverberates around the
all the places where doctoral students are struggling to learn their trade
and trying to sense the political issues that shape the lives of their
supervisors and will come to shape their own.
What is perhaps most interesting in your response is the way I fitted into
your theoretical dichotomy of (semiotic) realism vs nominalism. As far as I
can tell, (its always hard to identify all of the implications of the
positions you take) I did not mean to imply that research methods exist
outside and
independently of theoretical perspectives. What I did mean to imply was
that theoretical perspectives do not prescribe methods. I thought I was a
realist at heart
My claim that quantitative and qualitative methods are deeply embedded in
each other comes from my struggles to make sense of the relationship of
mathematics (and its embodiment in physics and computer software) to human
experience and meaning making. That remains an unresolved mystery.
And also out of my experience that, as I work with observations and
recordings and interviews with students in classooms, reading, re-reading,
seeing new things, seeing connections, themes, - the methods I plan to use
in future studies emerge as possibilities and opportunities, rather than as
theoretical positions. One of the things I enjoyed most in Mike Cole's
Cultural Psychology was the history of the methods he and his colleagues
tried and discarded, the solutions and puzzles that each study produced.
There is something compelling about the pragmatic experience of research
that must figure in the development of theories of reseach? I don't think
that's naive, or self-indulgent, but where and how it figures, I do not
know.
Others will have clearer ideas.
Graham
Graham Nuthall
Professor of Education
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch, New Zealand
Phone 64 03 3642255 Fax 64 03 3642418
http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/educ/ultp.html