What do grades measure?
Performance assessment… how DO students perform? Can learning be equated with performance? Can grades empower students to learn? In what way?
Scientists are like drunks
Vaillant, G.E. (1993). The Wisdom of the Ego. Harvard University Press.
“Social scientists tend to study what they can measure rather than what really interests them. In this way, they sometimes resemble the proverbial drunk who searched for his car keys, not where he had lost them, but under the street lamp where the light was better.” ch 5
Reflexivity and vulnerability of autoethnographic research
Brand, G. (2015). Through the looking glass space to new ways of knowing: A personal research narrative. The Qualitative Report 20(4).
“Personally reflexive and vulnerable approaches to research have
been criticized, namely as being self -indulgent or airing dirty laundry that is not appealing to the wider research community. However, I refute this argument by suggesting that researchers need to more fully understand themselves in order to understand how they interpret other people’s stories.”
“I have come to learn that my previous way of working with
people does not feel right for me anymore.” (p. 522)
Awesome suggestion from Firefox, but leaves me wondering about my relevance as an authentic thinker.
An unexpected source of my profound source Mozilla Firefox suggested article and link to Quarts
A story about Claude Shannon
https://qz.com/1365059/a-universal-way-to-solve-problems-from-a-mathematical-genius/
”
Shannon’s reasoning, however, was that it isn’t until you eliminate the inessential from the problem you are working on that you can see the core that will guide you to an answer.
In fact, often, when you get to such a core, you may not even recognize the problem anymore, which illustrates how important it is to get the bigger picture right before you go chasing after the details. Otherwise, you start by pointing yourself in the wrong direction.
Details are important and useful. Many details are actually disproportionately important and useful relative to their representation. But there are equally as many details that are useless.
If you don’t find the core of a problem, you start off with all of the wrong details, which is then going to encourage you to add many more of the wrong kinds of details until you’re stuck.
Starting by pruning away at what is unimportant is how you discipline yourself to see behind the fog created by the inessential. That’s when you’ll find the foundation you are looking for.
Finding the true form of the problem is almost as important as the answer that comes after.”
What is interesting, is that Mozilla Firefox’s algorithm suggested this article based on my clicking in the past week (I typically do not do this due to lack of time and resist the urge to click Firefoxes suggestions because they are distractions. Yet, yesterday, I ended up reading an article about slow walkers and turned into a simulation for Dr. Richards. Today, I found this and several others. Should I be concerned that my journey as a researcher is not being overseen by a string of code (a very sophisticated, research-based code, but code nevertheless?). Should I perceive my thought development is unauthentic? Or is it merely technology-aided?
This ability of code to predict my interests to such a degree that I canNOT resist the urge to click the link contrary to my conscious decision, makes me think of how easily I can be connected to other readers and seekers of truth, and ultimately, it makes me feel unspecial, unoriginal, blah. Here I am contemplating the importance of thinking environments, creativity, human experience; I am reveling in own humanity, and boom! Here is the reality of human (my own) predictability fed to a machine as a formula and processed as suggestions that (most upsetting part) WORK!
Method Meets Art (ABR) quotes
Leavy, P. (2014). Method meets art, second edition: Arts-based research practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.comCreated from usf on 2018-08-27 09:02:12.
“Narrative researchers attempt to avoid the objectification of research participants and aim to preserve the complexity of human experience (Josselson, 2006). The turn to narrative can be attributed to a confluence of other factors as well. Stefinee Pinnegar and J. Gary Daynes (2007) note four converging phenomena with respect to the turn to narrative inquiry: (1) the relationship of the researched and researcher, (2) the move from numbers to words as data, (3) a shift from the general to the particular, and (4) the emergence of new epistemologies.” p. 42
Just thinking:
So far, qualitative researchers effectively defended the importance of their subjectivity and solidified their presence in own studies. Similarly, we stretched the boundaries of what counts as data by turning to narratives, music, drawings, even fiction, and other forms of artistic expression. How, then, do we define research? What makes a difference between the work of a “proper” social scientist and a journalist? Why are some pieces beelined into academic databases and others exist in digital spaces of the world wide web?
Is it the degree that makes researcher a researcher? The formal training? Does one have to have a degree in teaching to be a teacher? Does one have to go through chef training to bring superior culinary experiences and then discuss their methods and undergirding cultural experiences? Is “research” a term either deliberately sustained or occurred as a by-product of neoliberal worldview?
Positivism is like a map.
Navigating life as it is framed by personal ontological beliefs, social frames, and ecologies, and even global dispositions of collective humanity (neoliberalist values, for example) reminds me of a life in a city. I now live in a single-family home and must drive everywhere, even to a store. But I grew up differently, and therefore, have the freedom to transport myself to my hometown any time I please through my memories.
Some streets are well-known and I rely on them to take me to my routine destinations. They are also starting routes to bus stops or even train stations or airports that transport me to places yet unknown. By traveling through these neighborhoods, I can predict where I will be if I take this road or this particular street. I can plan my route and calculate the time it will likely take me to get where I need to go. More often than not, I visit these destinations because of certain obligations or necessities: work, school, store, a meeting.
Yet there are always neighborhoods and places I have never visited before, whether they are a block or thirty blocks away. Occasionally, life will demand that I visit these places for whatever reasons, so I ask for directions, I pair up with another person to find my way, I consult a map. Sometimes, if I have a general idea of where my destination may be, I may even take risks by just trying to find the spot heuristically, using signs, clues, and just plain common sense; it all depends on my destination, the nature of my visit, and my time frame.
Positivism is like a map–it is created using rules and measures. Its utility is tied to its accuracy and rigid assumptions of accuracy. To serve its purpose, a map cannot be too general or ambiguous or mislabeled; otherwise, it is just a bad map. It is UNRELIABLE. Of course, there are maps that attempt to identify places that are still being developed or not even yet explored (Columbus, for example, was in the business of doing just that). Yet, life is more than a map. Some of my most satisfying adventures happen when I just walk and explore, take in the sights and the sounds, and smells, ask other people for help and their opinions, when I connect and create new memories, and when I EXPERIENCE my journey.
Therefore, I can say that I create knowledge about a place either through familiarity or through experience. Both methods are valuable. Both are needed.
I fear, however, that if I live my life by the map, afraid to be lost, I will be no better than a hamster in a wheel. A hamster’s hope is that it is stupid; I, on the other hand, may develop unwanted regrets to haunt me on my deathbed. Similarly, as a researcher, I wonder that if I follow maps and prescriptions, I may just miss my chance at greatness, and join the multitudes of garden-variety scholars (all lovely people, I am sure!) afflicted by the “poverty of complexity” (Manning, The Minor Gesture, p. 17) for the fear of being judged and not found worthy by other scholars, to attain tenure, to survive budget cuts, to publish or perish, to please, to appease, and for any other reason they stay clear of the “confused heap” (Manning, p. 17) that sometimes represents qualitative research.
Minor Gesture, Erin Manning
“Here I am following Henri Bergson, who suggests that the best problem is the one that opens up an intuitive process, not the one that already carries within itself its fix. A solvable problem was never really a problem, Bergson reminds us. Only when a question is in line with the creation of a problem is it truly operational. Most academic questions are of the solvable, unproblematic sort. What the undercommons seeks are real problems, problems intuited and crafted in the inquiry.”
“The challenge, as Bergson underscores, involves crafting the conditions not to solve problems, or to resolve questions, but to illuminate regions of thought through which problems- without- solutions can be intuited.” p. 10
Thoughts on knowledge
i feel like I am camping near the entrance of something important. I have been roaming these shores for months, unable to enter. I smell it, I see its contours obscured by fog, I hear sounds, I am drawn, but I cannot figure out how to grow gills. Arts based research and its philosophical fibers. Currents and waves. Or just an alien world, not necessarily one like a sea. I want to breathe it in, but even at my best, I am just a snorkler with a mask who bobs on the surface, limited by my physiology of a land creature. Or an earthling limited by my earthly shape. I am taking classes with Janet and now and then I talk to Jenni, and I want to come visit them where they are, but I was raised a positivist. Positivism is my reality. I understand its rhetoric, or at least, I feel comfortable inhibiting its structures, but in my heart, I know I am more, much more. I never fit in. As a child, I used to draw a lot. I played an instrument and enjoyed classical music. I knew where to escape when life became monotonous with all its demands for sense-making.
Postructuralist ideas became a highway that brought me back to the familiar shores of thought. And now I am quieted and dumstruck by Erin Manning’s “what if knowledge were not assumed to have a form already? What if we didn;t yet know what needed to be taught, let alone questioned?” (Minor gestures, p. 9) What if? We are condiitioned and trained to live in the reality that Manning calls neo-liberalism. What if we did not have to conform? If only I could take a pill like Neo in the Matrix trilogy and wake up a real reality. Is it even a specific reality? Neo and his fellow humans shared one, but are realities singular?
Spencer, 2010: Mapping Society, a Sense of Space
Spencer, 2010: Mapping Society, a Sense of Space in Spencer, S. (2010). Visual research methods in the social sciences: Awakening visions. New York, NY: Routledge
“Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space criticised much modern theory for taking space as a given rather than a highly problematic and undertheorised concept, a concept in need of its own science which might distinguish between and examine its different forms: mental, physical and social.” p.70
Understanding space and sense of place brings together philosophical concepts of production and dialectical change (Hegel, Marx and Nietzche) p. 70
While the mechanics of vision have a biological and physiological basis, the way in which we ‘see’ the world is culturally ascribed, learnt, a process of recognising and separating pre-determined categories and meanings from the visual array before us. p. 71
Art Bochner
” memory is both an epistemic project, a seeking after fidelity with what actually took place, and a pragmatic one, a coming to terms with what chance has given us in order to make a self for oneself” p.172
Bochner, A. P. (2012). Bird on the wire: freeing the father within me. Qualitative Inquiry, (2), 168.