Tag Archives: research

Finding Meaning in Reflective Research

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To follow on last week’s discussion of vygotsky, another central tenet of Vygotsky’s work is that in order to understand development (and therefore learning), the researcher has to observe it in the process rather than in its products.  He faulted the standard methods of psychological research of his day for focusing too much on training subjects to do particular tasks and then using those tasks to study cognition and development.  His basic claim was that by the time the subject had mastered the task, the researcher had missed the development and learning and was now documenting some sort of fossilized action instead.  He suggested alternative methods for creating conditions where learning, particularly the appropriation of meditational means and the development of concepts, could be brought into observation by the researcher working closely with research participants.

Those methods could be the subjects of future blog posts, but given last week’s topic of documenting personal sense making and how standardized ways of learning, testing, and research are not effective in generating or documenting personal sense, it’s interesting today to think about what sort of changes to research it would really take to arrive at rigorous ways of documenting the development of personal sense, including the role of emotions, values, beliefs, and biography in that development.

It seems that in part this kind of research itself still requires a substantial paradigm shift for researchers to stop “chasing” results/outputs as the key to understanding learning and to start encouraging this very chase itself as the subject of research.  In our theory group right now, we are reading Jerome Bruner’s Acts of Meaning. Bruner outlines where the cognitive revolution veered away from being able to really understand the road map where development takes place, especially given the role of emotional patterns and their relationship to reflective states of mind.  Bruner suggests that meaning cannot be pre assigned, so, like Vygotsky, he believes that meaning itself cannot be measured as an outcome of learning, but that learning can be seen in the process of making meaning.  He suggests further that meaning making is different from information processing. This does not discount the importance of understanding how human beings process information.  It does mean that education and learning have to be more than simply the business of training humans to use the tools that are necessary for life. Meaning, rather than knowing, should be the business of education as the ultimate way of “being.” This is very similar to Dewey’s arguments about the purposes of education in leading development.  Like Dewey and Vygotksy, Bruner is talking about cultural shift in education, but also in research.

Bruner turned to the exploration of how everyday thinking tools (or meditational means more accurately) were appropriated for complex meaning making that included both public, shared meaning and personal sense. In Acts of Meaning, he describes the role of narrative, especially jointly constructed narratives, in shaping individual biography and identity over time.  Retelling, re-narrating our experiences is in essence a reflective exercise in personal sense making, which also generates both public and shared meaning under the right circumstances. It is an exercise that brings to bear the very problematic of the so-called transformative education implicit in many of the other texts our group has been reading: the subjectivism, situatedness, and relativism circling human thinking and action and challenging the role of cognitive research. Accounting for such relativism and subjectivism not as gibberish or nonsense but as essential characteristics of human development, learning and behavior is to recognize the construction of meaning as transformative not authoritative. With that in mind, not only learning is a reflective state of mind but research itself should also be. What would a reflective research encompass? Perhaps it would be the type of research where its applied and flexible methodology consists of mediational means that lead to and promote a larger joint reflection between participants and researchers, allowing for a true dialogicality that moves quickly beyond the search for understanding of “fossilized” actions to the kind of active transformation of the research and learning situation that people like Dewey, Freire, and Vygotsky call for.

Such paradigmatic shift in the view of education and education research is nothing short of a “philosophical” debate between philosophy and science, our customary ways of knowing and seeking knowledge and how they came to be. The positivist characteristics of today’s research hindering the possibility for true dialogicality reflects nothing less than the human need to find some absolute truth and find it quickly. We can’t stand not knowing, not being able to trace down a beginning, middle and end for everything under some logical explanation. Embracing subjectivism and relativism as important pieces of the puzzle is recognizing there is no absolute truth when it comes to the human mind; it is to decrease the role of logic in favor of increasing the role of wonder in the process of knowing. This requires a cultural shift to assign reflective states of mind as the valued goal of education and research concerned with meaning making. Everything else would fall into place. Logicality can be unidirectional and give us tools for information processing, but dialogicality can’t. It requires exchange of reflections into retold narratives for it is the only way to unravel meaning making and acts of meaning.

Thanks to Susan O’Brien for her significant contributions to this post!

Making Meaning Making Personal

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Meaning making is an idea that seems to resonate with lots of people studying learning or creating contexts for learning.  We want visitors or students to make meaning of their experiences.  As a construct, meaning making seems to be a way to capture the active elements of learning as well as the uniqueness of each learner’s prior experience and knowledge and the open ended nature of free-choice learning experiences in general.

But what do we really mean by meaning making?  And how should we approach operationalizing it for research? For Vygotsky, meaning had two components – meaning proper and personal sense.  The component of meaning in Vygotsky’s work focuses attention on the shared, distributed, what Bakhtin would call repeatable, and “public” denotations of a word, gesture, action or event.  This is largely the aspect of meaning making that researchers have in mind when they are thinking about education. This approach to meaning encourages researchers to ask whether the students and learners are making the “right” meaning? Are the meanings that they are making recognizable and shareable with us, with more expert others, and with each other? Are they getting the content and ideas and concepts right? But this shared, public aspect is only a part of the whole of meaning that person makes.

For Vygotksy and generations of Activity Theorists, a more primary aspect of this shared, public, testable, and authoritative meaning is personal sense.  The construct of personal sense attempts to capture the very personal, biographical, embodied, situated connotations of words, gestures, actions and events. This is the realm of what those things mean for us as part of our personal narratives about ourselves, our experiences, sense of place or even sense of ourselves.  It is about how they resonate (or not) with our values, beliefs, judgments and knowledge.  As learning researchers, we often discount or ignore this hugely important aspect of meaning making, and yet when people visit a museum or learn something new, this element of personal sense may be in the forefront of the experience.  The realm of personal sense is where emotional experiences get burned into memory, where motivations and identities are negotiated, tried on, and appropriated or rejected. This is also the realm where we need the most help from learners as co-researchers.  We can measure and document the meaning aspect of their meaning making relatively easily, but we rely on them to report about the personal sense they are making. As researchers, we should add to our documenting of the development of accurate and sharable meaning and develop serious ways to embrace the notion of reflection instead. Experiences that support meaning making as personal sense making are effective in supporting the overall learning process because they are essentially reflective.

What kinds of dialogues with learners most support that reporting are an open question to me right now.  I’d welcome ideas here!

Promoting Participants as Co-researchers

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Last week I wrote about Bakhtin’s idea that in order to put together a real, full research account, the researcher point of view has to be put in dialogue with the point of view of the participant in research.  Neither point of view is complete in and of itself.  The question I raised was how do we make sure and include the voices of research subjects in our work such that they are co-researchers with us and help create those fuller research accounts of experience.  One of the primary tools for engaging in shared research used in professional development of educators is video.  When we video our practice as educators and (re)view it with others, we create the possibility of real dialogue among multiple points of view.  My own experience working with classroom teachers and museum educators, floor staff, and volunteer interpreters using video to reflect on experience has convinced me that neither my outsider observations nor their reflective writing have been sufficient to create real dialogic relationships where we become co-researchers.  In some cases, overarching cultural and social narratives about teachers and learners inevitably drown out the details of their experiences as they experienced them. In other cases, the details of those experiences defy categorization and reflection.

As one example, in one project to develop a professional learning community among veteran K-10 teachers, observations showed very little evidence of student led inquiry, but teacher narratives about their teaching reported detailed regular use of student-centered science inquiry techniques as part of their normal routines.  Having teachers observe each other using a researcher-generated rubric did little to change their assertions about their teaching even though they were directly contradicted by the observational evidence.  Similarly, in multiple projects with museum educators, those educators report a basic belief that visitors do not read labels.  Putting these educators in the position of researchers observing visitors generated copious examples of visitors reading labels, yet educator narratives about visitors consistently fail to include that reading. The data and observations simply don’t stick and are overwhelmed by other kinds of details or by larger-scale institutional narratives about visitor behavior.

In both instances, we eventually turned to video as a way of creating what we hoped would be shared texts for analysis and reflection.  Yet, the existence of video itself as a shared text is also not enough to form the grounds for researchers and participants to become co-researchers.  Watching video and talking about it, even using a rubric to analyze it definitely helps educators be more reflective about their experiences and to put them in larger contexts than the overarching narratives we tend to fall back on.  But there still seems to be a missing step.

For Bakhtin the missing step seems to engaging in co-authorship to create some kind of new text or new representation of or about that experience.  When we watch video and reflect on it with each other, educators and researchers both come away with a stronger shared sense of what’s happening, but in the absence of creating some kind of new shared text or representation, we don’t have the opportunity for truly developing as co-researchers.  Are there places and projects beyond video that we can do on the museum floor that will help visitors (re)create, write about, or otherwise represent their experiences with us as co-authors?

Dialogic research

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I’ve been thinking and writing today about research participants as authors of their own experiences — or more accurately as potential co-authors with us of the representations we make of their experiences as learners. The problem in a nutshell is this: we are each the only people who can make meaning out of the flow of impressions, actions, activities, and encounters that make up our lived experiences. But when we attempt to reflect on that lived experience we always do so from an incomplete point of view – we have difficulty stepping out of the lived experience itself in order to reflect on or represent it. Even when we manage, our point of view is limited. We can take the point of view of the “I” who experienced, but in order to create a fuller, more complete account of that experience, we also need to be able to take the point of view of others towards ourselves. We need to see ourselves as both subjects of our experience and objects of our (and others’) reflections.
The problem, of course, for researchers is just the opposite. The researcher has access to their own points of view on our actions, and potentially to multiple points of view on our actions, but unless they also engage us in dialogue about our points of view on those actions, their representations are also incomplete at best and simply caricatures at worst.
In either case, we end up with incomplete representations of human experiences: either the outsider (researcher) view is privileged, or the insider (subjects) view is privileged. As Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out in his work from the 1920’s on the relationship of the author and hero and in his work from the 1970’s on human sciences, both of these perspectives tend toward monologue. They tend to be presented as authoritative statements about our experiences that don’t allow much room for interpretation or negotiation of meaning. The end results it is that I am either represented as a unique subject whose experiences are not generalizable, or represented as an object of research whose experiences are so generalizable as to be personally irrelevant.
Bakhtin’s solution to this problem is to base the “human sciences” on dialogue. Specifically, he calls for dialogue among points of view represented by the voices of active subjects of lived experience and active observers who address and respond to each other. But what would that actually look like in a research setting like the Cyberlab at HMSC? How do we maintain both the generalizable aspects of visitors’ experiences while giving room for visitors’ own personal, unique experiences to shape our research, our findings, and our representations of those findings? That’s a question I’ll be returning to in upcoming weeks and one I hope will spark a dialogue here.

Patience in the process

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I’m feeling my way around.  The path branches out in several directions.  I explore one avenue hunting for clues that may have the insight I need, and then I try another route.   This is not a distracted wandering but a focused drive seeking creative possibilities.  In my search I encounter more questions.  Channeling my inner detective, I analyze methodologies and interview subject matter experts.   I turn concepts inside out and backwards.  Maybe if I think about them from a different angle, I will see details that I did not notice before?  There are moments of exhilaration, exasperation, and fascination.  The answers will not come to me on a silver platter.  I have to be patient with what develops while keeping the end goal in mind.  Thus the creative process of a project unfolds.

While working in the cyberlab I have been reflecting on the process of a project.  Our team has a goal in mind – to create a customizable research platform that will provide a setting for researchers to investigate free-choice learning, human and computer interaction, or sociology principles (to name a few).  We have many tools and resources to use, but more pieces are needed to reach our destination.  Seeking out advisors for assistance, their insight inspires more questions and new routes.  My personal comfort zone prefers this to be orderly and structured, but this confining mindset is breaking down, forcing me to question my grip on a pre-determined map.  Instead of traveling on a firm road, I am moving along a fluid river.  The comfort zone begins to stretch.

I am reminded of the idea to embrace the journey, whether it is related to a project for the cyberlab, graduate school, or life in general!  There is beauty in the iteration, the failed attempts, and the pieces that finally connect together.  The creative process requires patience and time.  Keep driving to design, refine, and reflect.  Great inventions and innovations require passion, persistence, and alterations.  All of this builds to learning and growth.  With this in mind, I am off to navigate the wild river.

It is not always about numbers!

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The challenges of integrating the natural and social sciences are not news to us. After King, Keohane and Verba’s (KKV’s) book entitled “Designing Social Inquiry”, the field of qualitative methodology has achieved considerable attention and development. Their work generated great discussions about qualitative studies, as well as criticism, and sometimes misguided ideas that qualitative research is benefited by quantitative approaches but not the other way around. Since then, discussions in the literature debate the contrasts between observations of qualitative vs. quantitative studies, regression approaches vs. theoretical work, and the new approaches to mixed-methods design. Nevertheless, there are still many research frontiers for qualitative researchers to cross and significant resistance from existing conservative views of science, which question the validity of qualitative results.

Last week, while participating in the LOICZ symposium (Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I was very encouraged by the apparent move towards an integrated approach between the natural and social sciences. There were many important scientists from all over the world and from many different disciplines discussing the Earth systems and contributing steps towards sustainability of the world’s coastal zone. Many of the students’ presentations, including mine, had some social research component. I had many positive conversations about the Cyberlab work in progress and how it sits at the edge of building capacity for scientists/researchers, educators, exhibit designers, civil society, etc.

However, even in this meeting, over dinner conversation, I stumbled into the conflicting views that are a part of the quantitative vs. qualitative debate — the understanding of scientific process as “only hypothesis driven”, where numbers and numbers alone offer the absolute “truth”. It is still a challenge for me not to become extremely frustrated while having to articulate the importance of social science in this case and swim against a current of uneducated opinions about the nature of what we do and disregard for what it ultimately accomplishes. I think it is more than proven in today’s world that understanding the biogeophysics of the Earth’s systems is essential, but that alone won’t solve the problems underlying the interaction of the natural and social worlds.  We cannot move towards a “sustainable future” without the work of social scientists, and I wish there would be more of a consensus about its place and importance within the natural science community.

So, in the spirit of “hard science”…

If I can’t have a research question, here are the null and alternative hypotheses I can investigate:

H0 “Moving towards a sustainable future is not possible without the integration of natural and social sciences”.

H1  “Moving towards a sustainable future is possible without the integration of natural and social science”

Although, empirical research can NEVER prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that a comparison is true (95 and 99% probability only), I think you would agree that, if these hypotheses could be tested, we would fail to reject the null.

With all that being said, I emphasize here today the work Cyberlab is doing and what it will accomplish in the future, sitting at the frontiers of marine science and science education. Exhibits such as the wave laboratory, the climate change exhibit on the works, the research already completed in the lab, the many projects and partnerships, etc. , are  prime examples of that. Cyberlab is contributing to a collaborative effort to the understanding and dissemination of marine and coastal issues, and building capacity to create effective steps towards sustainable land-ocean interactions.

I am very happy to be a part of it!