EdL 708: Qualitative/Descriptive Research Methodologies

1. EdL 708: Qualitative/Descriptive Research Methodologies Weekend 4: April 2010 Goals: • Discuss exemplary research in literacy through ethnographic, case study, and discourse analysis methodologies. • Read and respond to analyses of qualitative research studies.

2. Friday agenda • Welcome, questions, comments. • Study group presentations • Applied qualitative research exemplar 1: “Funds of Knowledge.” • Dinner • Applied qualitative research exemplar 1: “Horizontalidad.”

3. Guiding question for the weekend: • In what ways can our understanding of qualitative research methodologies inform the work that we do as university researchers/ practitioners in language and literacy?

4. A model for research and practice: Horizontalidad • In the spirit of democratic collaboration, education researchers Campano, Honeyford, Sánchez, and Vander Zanden engage in university-school partnerships to conduct research and effect positive change in practice. • Horizontalidad is a Latin American idea based on an Argentinean popular power movement, which emphasizes consensus, direct democracy, and shared knowledge construction. • These education researchers propose this model as an antidote to failure of top-down policy mandates, standardization, high-stakes testing, and remediation to ameliorate the achievement gap for low-income, minoritized students.

5. Continued… • Assumes that “those most affected by circumstances are often uniquely positioned to discern how to bring about change.” • Emphasizes “the creative, everyday practice of theorizing from practice, where the means of achieving a goal is in fact the goal itself.” • Research is “not driven by a problem or need identified a priori outside of the context from the vantage of the university, but rather it is work that involves supporting participants in identifying and taking up the issues that are of significance to them.” • Requires “tending to established relationships and making new ones, understanding and respecting the cultural values and traditions embedded in our sites, and constantly negotiating the lines of our insider/outsider locations.” (Campano et. al., 2010)

6. Funds of Knowledge • Research goal: “to alter perceptions of working-class or poor communities and to view these households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources (or funds of knowledge) as their defining pedagogical characteristic” (x). • Claim: “first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge […] to open up many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions” (x).

7. Continued… • Conversation: “In recent years, building on what students bring to school and their strengths has been shown to be an incredibly effective teaching strategy. The Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence at UC Santa Cruz has developed five research-based standards for effective pedagogy. One of these, contextualization, is concerned with making meaning and connecting school to students’ lives. What better way to engage students than to draw them in with knowledge that is already familiar to them and to use that as a basis for pushing their learning? (8)

8. Cont… • Knowledge gap/ Research questions: “How do we know about the knowledge they bring without falling into tired stereotypes about different cultures? How do we deal with the dynamic processes of the life experiences of students? How can we get away from static categorizations of assumptions about what goes on in households? How can we build relationships of confianza with students’ households?”

9. Continued… • Theoretical framework: “sociocultural perspective […] that views the everyday practices of language and activities as constructing knowledge” (25). • Vygotsky: cultural-historical psychology—cultural practices and resources mediate the development of thinking (4). • Postmodern epistemology: knowledge is situated and all knowledge claims are partial (42). • Critical theory/pedagogy: interrogates issues of knowledge and power with the ultimate goal of affecting positive change.

10. Continued… • Methodology/Methods: qualitative ethnographic methods taught to teachers through the process of doing ethnography in order to impact practice. • Participant observation • Respectful interviewing structured informally at first and then through questionnaires divided into three sessions: collecting family & labor histories; regular household activities; how parents construct their roles as parents/caretakers. • Reflective field notes • Study groups: facilitated by the university researchers. Participants discuss background readings, introduce observations and note-taking, revise interview procedures, review findings from visits, discuss classroom practices and implications. • Theorizing practice: “funds of knowledge” concept

11. Continued… • Participants: Two sets– 14 practicing elementary and middle school teachers (even mix of minoritized and non-minoritized) volunteered to conduct the household research. They were studied by the university researchers to understand whether the process of visiting households for the purpose of learning about the students’ funds of knowledge would impact classroom practice. • The families were the participants in the teachers’ household ethnographies. Teachers typically interviewed three families– some as few as one. Each teacher had her own method of selecting participants.

12. Continued… • Findings: • Teachers’ identities shifted through internalization of perspectives- strong elements of agency; disposition to question and redirect one’s teaching. • Classroom practice shifted toward inquiry-based pedagogy, with students viewed as active learners and an emphasis placed on literacy for action.

13. Continued… • Implications?

14. Saturday agenda • Welcome/ check in • Workshop prep. • Round-robin peer workshop • Looking ahead…

15. Workshop prep. • In two or three sentences, please write a brief description of your research study. • Please email this to me: ahvarley@stritch.edu when you are ready. • I will collect these and create a menu, which I will then email back to everyone.

16. Round robin peer workshop • Select four studies from the menu we have just created that describe topics about which you are most interested in learning. • We will take turns making first picks, so you will each have a peer’s essay. • Using the rubric provided, please read and respond to your peer’s draft as thoughtfully as you can. • We will repeat this process as often as we can so that each student’s draft will have benefited from multiple readings by the end of the day.