Gordon - I guess the greatest difference lies in the fact that the
constraints of politicized climates for research in very real ways force
inquiry into what may be most generalizable. Ana alludes to some of the
dilemma in her previous email:
"It is really unfortunate that the whole educational system is heavily
based on tests and scores, and not only based on test and scores but for
a wrong reason: they are used for purposes of evaluation and tracking -
and not for diagnostic purpose - to discover the nature of a probable
learning/teaching barriers and to decide how to overcome the problem."
I absolutely agree that local participants should be integral to
decision-making. I'll try to give an example which relates to my own
research: I'm currently trying to develop interventions which support
youth in developing expertise relating to the (hopefully productive and
critical) use of new information/communications technologies (I've been
influenced strongly by Luke and Cazden's multiliteracies approach). I'm
interested in designing activities that are responsive to children's
popular cultures and goals grounded in play contexts. By analyzing
localized discourse and grammars surrounding technology use, I can
derive a set of principles that may be used to negotiate the design
process and in turn, the participants renegotiate the resulting
activities and so on.
But what if the goal is to design a curriculum model for creating these
types of literacy events across contexts with greater numbers of
participants over great distances (something that is often required to
demonstrate "rigor" and secure access to support)? How to move between
these levels of analysis as the basis for justifying design logic(s)? I
guess I see this as a main challenge within qualitative research - but I
am still a student and defer to others!
Thanks,
Kristen
Kristen Radsliff Clark
Doctoral Candidate
LCHC and Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/People/Kristen_bio.html
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