Handbook of Complementary Methods in Education Research

Judith L. Green, Judith Green, Gregory Camilli, Patricia B. Elmore, Patricia Elmore, Judith L. Green, Judith L Green, Gregory Camilli, Gregory Camilli, Patricia B. Elmore, Patricia B Elmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135283308
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Published for the American Educational Research Association by Routledge.

The Handbook of Complementary Methods in Education Research is a successor volume to AERA's earlier and highly acclaimed editions of Complementary Methods for Research in Education. More than any book to date (including its predecessors), this new volume brings together the wide range of research methods used to study education and makes the logic of inquiry for each method clear and accessible. Each method is described in detail, including its history, its research design, the questions that it addresses, ways of using the method, and ways of analyzing and reporting outcomes. Key features of this indispensable book include the following: Foundations Section-Part I is unique among research books. Its three chapters examine common philosophical, epistemological, and ethical issues facing researchers from all traditions, and frames ways of understanding the similarities and differences among traditions. Together they provide a tripartite lens through which to view and compare all research methods. Comprehensive Coverage-Part II (the heart of the book) presents 35 chapters on research design and analysis. Each chapter includes a brief historical overview of the research tradition, examines the questions that it addresses, and presents an example of how the approach can be used. Programs of Research-Part III examines how research programs connected to eight specific lines of inquiry have evolved over time. These chapters examine phenomena such as classroom interaction; language research; issues of race, culture, and difference; policy analysis; program evaluation; student learning; and teacher education. Complementary Methods-As the title suggests, a central mission of this book is to explore the compatibility of different research methods. Which methods can be productively brought together and for what purposes? How and on what scale can they be made compatible and what phenomena are they best suited to explore? Flexibility-The chapters in Parts II and III are largely independent. Therefore, selected portions of the book can be used in courses devoted to specific research methods and perspectives or to particular areas of education. Likewise, established researchers interested in acquiring new techniques or greater expertise in a given methodology will find this an indispensable reference volume. This handbook is appropriate for any of the following audiences: faculty teaching and graduate students studying education research, education researchers and other scholars seeking an accessible overview of state-of-the-art knowledge about specific methods, policy analysts and other professionals needing to better understand research methods, and academic and research libraries serving these audiences.

II

INTRODUCTION TO DESIGN AND ANALYSIS

This section represents a broad range of research approaches currently used to construct knowledge about educational phenomena. The chapters describe systematic ways of uncovering and investigating research questions. Broadly speaking, the material runs the gamut from discovering important processes or phenomena to proposing and testing particular hypotheses regarding educational practices, and examining phenomena from multiple perspectives and multiple levels of complexity. Within and across chapters, readers will have an opportunity to explore how the different approaches, many with their roots in other disciplines (e.g., humanities, social science, physical and biological sciences, as well as applied fields such as agriculture, business and medicine), can be used to address complex issues of interest to the discipline of education. Readers will recognize the continuing maturation and increased sophistication of research approaches available within education.

We anticipate that readers new to the field of educational research, as well as experienced practitioners, will be challenged by the theoretical, philosophical, and methodological pluralism in this section, as no individual researcher will be equally familiar with or have engaged in the full range of approaches. Each chapter is designed to provide an introduction to the approach and a concrete application. The authors provide background of the method, including a history of the approach, the questions it addresses, and some discussion of issues regarding diversity and social justice. Those seeking mixed methods to address the complex problems and issues of education will find this section particularly helpful. Together, these chapters constitute a rich and vibrant resource for enabling researchers to select methods of interest in principled ways and to understand how a set of mixed methods can be complementary. The challenge for those seeking new perspectives, multiple perspectives, or mixed methods will be to provide a clear rationale for bringing the different traditions together to examine more complex educational phenomena. The chapters are purposefully presented alphabetically by title, in order to leave decisions about relationships between and among chapters to readers.

4

Analyzing the Multidimensionality of Texts in Education

Charles Bazerman

University of California, Santa Barbara

Written texts pervade the educational process, the educational system, and the policy and political processes that shape education. The scripted speech of a governor translates into legislation that frames school policies, impacting classroom materials and practices. Along the way texts are written and read at every level. Knowing appropriate ways of analyzing the texts students read and write is, of course, necessary to understand the development of students’ writing and reading abilities, to assess their skill, to provide them guidance in their production and reception of texts, and to produce materials and curricula for such competence. Even to understand classroom discussion and face-to-face interaction is aided by looking at the texts that go into the organization and educational substance of the classroom activities. But the study of education presents many other reasons for analyzing texts that go far beyond looking at student skills in language arts, such as

• to understand students’ interaction with texts and the development of the knowledge and intellect.
• to understand the role texts take within classroom activities and the adult activities for which school is preparing them.
• to understand the implications and practical consequences of instructional guidelines and standards and how they link to classroom practices.
• to understand the ideological underpinnings of a policy movement also requires analysis of texts;
• to understand how teachers and administrators form links with parents.
• to understand how public opinion is formed by journalistic reports and how journalistic representation influences politics, policies and community relations.

Understanding the role, function, and consequences of these varied texts requires different forms of analysis that extend far beyond the most familiar classroom practices of evaluating student productions or interpreting assigned texts. Even these familiar tasks can be aided by bringing less familiar analytic tools to texts students read and write.

The key to understanding the variety of methods of text analysis is to see that texts are parts of actual social relations—written in specific circumstances at specific times and read in specific circumstances at specific times, thereby realizing concrete social transactions. Through inscriptions that travel between places and between time, texts mediate meanings and actions between people. In their social and psychological lives texts are parts of complex events. On the other hand, the inscribed text, which serves as the mediator of meaning seems itself stripped of its human action and location and seems to carry meaning entirely within its signs. We can learn many things about texts by examining what is inscribed within the texts, but for a fuller understanding it is important to consider how texts move within and affectthe social world of human action and human meaning.

THE NATURAL ATTITUDE OF READERS, WRITERS, AND TEACHERS

Indeed, it is the fundamental problem of writers to create an inscription that will convey the intended meaning so as to carry out the desired action. And it is the fundamental problem of readers to extract a meaning from the text to enable informed action. Many disciplines of text analysis have developed to address problems of inscribing and extracting meaning—and then inspecting and questioning the extracted meaning. When people first think of text analysis it is these they usually think of—foremost literary interpretation, but then prescriptive grammar. logic, rhetoric, religious interpretation, and legal interpretation. These methods of text analysis have much to tell us about what gets inscribed and extracted from texts, but they might also be said to reflect the natural attitude of particular kinds of text users. They are the deeply habituated tools that we have learned to use when we write and read. so deeply habituated that they seem the obvious and natural way to look at texts. Deviations from “correct” spelling and grammar jump out at most educated readers, and they learn to monitor correctness of their own writing. As educated readers read, they deploy the interpretive tools they learned in school or church to extract meaning or to resolve confusions about meaning. Again. as writers we monitor our own texts to make sure they convey the meanings we intend, and we try to strengthen the meanings through consideration of such things as logic and metaphor. These stances and their associated tools are so deeply habituated they, seem so self-evidently natural and obvious, that it is hard to see texts from other perspectives—this is what phenomenologists call a “natural attitude.”

Common experiences of writing teachers illustrate how obdurate natural attitudes are, but also how limited. From the perspective of teachers who have spent years marking student writing, incorrect spelling and errors of verb form are intrusive and obvious. But students who haven’t had that experience find it difficultto inspect their own writing from a correctness perspective. Their perspective often is deeply tied to their struggle to make their words say something. Those struggles can result into a stubborn commitment to the words they have produced as “what they mean.” Even students who are skilled at grammatical correction exercises on words not their own can find it difficultand “unnatural” to read their own writing solely to look for technical correctness. Frequently in conference when I have tried to get a student to see a small technical issue in a sentence. the student has responded, “but what I was trying to say was…” or “What I mean was…” What is natural to the teacher is unnatural to the student. In this respect it is worth noting that regularization of spelling and grammar did not occur in English until the 18th century as part of the development of print culture centralized in metropolitan centers of power and the associated spread of schooling.

There are, however, other analytical stances that place us apart from the typical stances of the common roles of text producers, users. and teachers. Some examine what appears in the text itself such as content analysis, linguistic analysis, graphic analysis, analysis of ideology, and analysis of chronotope. Other forms of analysis look at the text in relation to other texts, such as intertextual and genre analyses. And still other analytical methods look at texts in relation to the people and practices engaged in text production. circulation. reception and use—these include process analysis. analysis of the relation of talk and writing, and analysis of textually mediated activity. Each of these forms of analysis adopts a different stance with respect to the texts to answer different kinds of questions.

THE TOTAL ANALYTICAL PROCESS

All of these methods of analysis. as with any mode of analysis, help one to pull out particular elements to look at, to reorganize, and to come to conclusions about. But the isolating of the elements is a limited part of the total analytical process. That process begins as you develop a research question that directs you to examine texts and only ends when you have made sense of your analysis and articulated what you have found in a thoughtful, empirically grounded argument. Along the way you will need to do the following:

• Formulate your research question.
• Identify what it is you want to find out from texts.
• Identify and collect a corpus of texts that are appropriate and sufficient for the inquiry.
• Determine which analytical tools will focus your inquiry, provide you the appropriate perspective on the texts, and isolate those particular aspects of texts that will tell you what you need to know.
• Develop and refine the particular analytical categories or focused questions you will use to identify and categorize data within the texts. This you might do by first doing an impressionistic reading of a selection of your corpus and informally noting what seems important or salient. From these first explorations you can then develop and finally fix your analytical categories, coding scheme. or sets of questions to be answered about each text or text segment.
• Systematically go through all the texts in your corpus, following the categories, procedures. or questions you have fixed.
• Examine the results of coding in various formats, from eyeballing your data scoring sheets to developing graphic displays. In addition to traditional charts and graphs, color-coding texts with highlighters according to your analytical categories may help you to notice patterns of relations. Another technique is to collect in a text file all the instances of each data category you have defined. Of course. the kind of data display you look at will depend on your material, the kinds of analysis you are doing, and the categories you have. It is worth doing some creative thinking and experimenting to find useful ways of displaying data that will make patterns most evident.
• Articulate the patterns you are tinding and then write up your tindings, giving both an overview of the conclusions and detailed elaboration with text examples of each of your observations.
• Before writing the final draft of your paper. return to a naturalistic reading of your text corpus to see whether your preliminary results make sense and whether reading the texts through the perspective of the analytic observations leads to noticing something further or more detailed to pursue.
• Write an argument that brings out the meaning and implications of your analytical findings. Don’t let the readers (or yourself) get lost in all the details of your findings so that they miss the large patterns you found and the implications. But also make sure your readers get to see the evidence that supports your conclusions along with a few concrete examples, so they can see exactly what you are talking about.

The presentation in this chapter will focus on pointing out the many different kinds of elements one can pull out for study—the ways of cutting up texts to find something in it that wouldn’t otherwise be visible. But always remember this pulling apart is only an early stage—it is the finding patterns, thinking them through, coming to conclusions, and making arguments that give a point to the technical work of analysis. It usually is not enough to just cut up all the parts and show them lying on the table. One must select and put them back together in new and enlightening ways.

This chapter will first look at more familiar kinds of analysis of text, then move to the less usual. It will also move from text-based modes of analysis to modes of analysis that locate texts within the human situations of production, circulation. and use. Because there are so many varieties of text analysis available, this chapter can do little more than introduce a number of them, suggest some of the potential uses of each, and identify some useful resources for in-depth treatment. The reader is referred to Bazerman and Prior (2004) for more complete elaboration of a number of the analytical methods. Two other general book-length resources that consider a variety of analytical approaches to text are Barton and Stygall (2002) and Stillar (1998).

ANALYSIS FOR PRODUCING AND EVALUATING CORRECTNESS

The most familiar mode of textual analysis associated with schooling, for good and ill, is the use of prescriptive tools to isolate and to measure the correctness of textual form at the level of word (spelling and morphology). sentence (syntax). and larger organizational structures. Students as well are frequently taught these tools so as to support self-editing, correction, and initial production of formally correct writing. Students are taught phonetic correspondences, typical patterns of spelling, spelling rules. and word analysis skills. For grammatical forms students are typically taught to analyze parts of speech and identify their relations for agreement. Stude...