[xmca] need CHAT training

[Peter Farruggio <pfarruggio@utpa.edu>]

This is a recent exchange between Mike and my colleague, Alcione Ostorga, about our interest in learning more about how to use CHAT for a longitudinal case study we'd like to do with a group of our bilingual preservice students. 

I'm going to follow Mike's suggestion and tap into the collective brain power on xmca to see if anybody can guide us in learning how to use CHAT

Pete Farruggio
________________________________________
From: Alcione Ostorga
Sent: Monday, August 16, 2010 4:03 PM
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; Peter Farruggio
Subject: RE: need CHAT training

Hello Mike,
Nice to meet you too.
I am on vacation this week so I may be a bit slow to reply.

 I am really interested in using CHAT for our studies.  From the little I have read about CHAT, I see that it offers a lot of potential for our multiple studies in bilingual preparation because in my opinion, it offers the most appropriate theoretical foundation to examine our bilingual teacher development.  I like the way it examines learning from a context based perspective, taking into consideration the sociocultural and historical aspects.   I really think that to understand the development of our pre service teachers we need to consider their history, their experiences both in our program and in their lives.  Since we are situated in the US/ Mexico border, the development of these preservice teachers is heavily impacted by their hybrid identities as both American and Mexican.  Multilingualism is also an important component and we cannot forget the history of the area and how it impacts the overall development of everyone here.

Our research project has multiple layers. Some of us are focusing on very specific aspects of our bilingual teacher preparation program.  I am particularly interested in examining the development of professional identities in our teachers and how the development of their cultural identities interacts with their professional identities. We have a lot of data. from cultural identity surveys and online discussions, educational philosophy assignments, focus group discussions that asked for their perspectives on the program and some incredible assignments. Some are very reflective, like the development of a classroom management plan and video analisis of thematic units used in teaching children in a sumer library program. In the fall, I will be doing observations of student teaching. As a long term plan, I will observe some of these participants when they become teachers.  I am interested in examining their growth as teachers longitudinally from the time they entered the program last fall semester to the completion of their first year as teachers which will be December of 2011.

Although, I think CHAT is the way to go in my study, I must also state that I am a novice and have only recently become familiar with CHAT.  I realize that is a complex theory, because it is based on examining the world from multiple perspectives. I think this is one of the positive aspects of CHAT. After all, the world is complex and there are many simplistic approaches that are overly superficial and cannot possibly help us to fully understand human development.  I am not interested in those approaches. But because CHAT is complex, I feel I need to really learn it before I can use it.

I am now getting familiar with the vocabulary and main concepts through a lit research of the latest writings and studies that have used CHAT.   A big question I have at this point is what kings of analytical methods are used in CHAT studies? Are qualitative methods generally applied in other kinds of studies also applied in studies that use CHAT as an analytical lens? Or have CHAT theorists developed their own methods for analyzing data that best fit activity theory? This is only the beginning, to fully use CHAT as a foundation for our research, we need to get some good professional development in the use of CHAT as a theoretical basis for our analysis and interpretations of the development of bilingual teachers.

In the meantime, I will check the XMCA. Do we have to subscribe to the listserv to post questions?

Thanks Pete for making this dialogue possible. Let's see if we can plan a video conference for us to learn more about how to use activity theory.

Alcione


My

Alcione N. Ostorga, Ph. D
Associate Professor
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
College of Education
The University of texas Pan-American
Edinburg, TX


________________________________
From: mike cole [lchcmike@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 6:13 PM
To: Peter Farruggio
Cc: Alcione Ostorga
Subject: Re: need CHAT training

Peter--

Skype works pretty well, even for small group- small group. I will think of other refs (some of Engestrom's papers come to mine because he follows cases and he is always thoughtful) but I cannot help recommending the chapter in Luria's chapter on romantic science from his autobio.


Hi Alcione, nice to meet you! Either you or Peter should get on XMCA and post the question about case studies and CHAT. I'll bet people have not thought much about that issue in that way, but rather, they have unconsciously been using case study methods under the banner of
"qualitative research". There are several such articles in Mind, Culture, and Activity over the years.

mike

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Peter Farruggio <pfarruggio@utpa.edu<mailto:pfarruggio@utpa.edu>> wrote:
Mike,

Thanks for the rapid, thoughtful reply. I'm copying to my colleague, Alcione Ostorga, because she's the one with the interest in using CHAT for the study. Several of us are interested, but she's the one who brought it up. She can jump in with a precis, as you suggest.

I like the idea of doing a videoconference with you as an initial brainstorming session. We have the technical capacity to set something up to have an open conversation.

Could you recommend some readings for us to do prior to such a conversation?  Maybe some concrete stuff that shows how others have used CHAT integrating the big picture (institutions, communities, local & state politics and policy making, etc) with the finer focus (our students moving through the system and into their careers)

I'll wait for Alcione to explain to you before we think about some teleconferencing.

Thanks again,

Pete
________________________________________
From: mike cole [lchcmike@gmail.com<mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>]
Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 5:44 PM
To: Peter Farruggio
Subject: Re: need CHAT training

Pete-

If you could perhaps send a precis of your proposal to XMCA, it would allow you to tap into a lot more brain power. The general issue of case studies from a CHAT perspective is a challenging one. Maybe Luria will make a comeback?

Also, I can interact from skype or Polycom but basically do not travel any more. Maybe a preliminary chat about CHAT via that zero cost route would be helpful?
mike

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Peter Farruggio <pfarruggio@utpa.edu<mailto:pfarruggio@utpa.edu><mailto:pfarruggio@utpa.edu<mailto:pfarruggio@utpa.edu>>> wrote:
Mike,

We have a faculty team in bilingual teacher ed that has been working together for two years on research about our teacher preparation program. We'd like to do a longitudinal case study of some of our students as they finish with us and go into the teaching profession. We've already been teaching an experimental cohort of students as a pretty cohesive faculty team for the past three semesters.

We'd like to do our study from a CHAT orientation, as best we understand it. To help us, we'd like to find a good CHAT "trainer" who could come down here to South Texas to meet with us and lead a professional development session about how to use CHAT with our circumstances. We have a federal grant, so we can pay a reasonable fee plus travel, lodging, etc.

Would you recommend somebody, or put the word out to help us find such a person?

Thanks,

Pete Farruggio
University of Texas Pan American
Edinburg, TX


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