Transcript Researching difference and particularity: new perspectives

Reducing the social: thinking
differently about small-scale
research
Tamsin Haggis
University of
Stirling
Small scale research
• What are the issues?
• What’s complexity theory?
• How might complexity help us to
think differently?
iPED website (2006)
Pedagogic Research is recognised
internationally as an important and
exciting growth area for higher
education. It is, however, an area that
poses a challenge to all those working in
higher education since it forces a shift in
our understandings of academic identity
Inquiring Pedagogies Research Network
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/researchnet/d/393
And a lot more besides….
• Cultural assumptions
• Assumptions about knowledge
• Research procedures, habits of
analysis
• Academic hierarchies
• Historical approaches to the
study of teaching and learning in
HE
Some challenges in (conceptualising)
small-scale research
• The boundary of the
case
• Legitimation/claims
crosssectional
abstraction
– links to other
studies/generalisation
• Relationship to theory
• Using quotes
(‘authenticity’)
• Role of the researcher
theme
narratives
Some responses…
• Re-define notions of reliability and validity
– ‘trustworthiness and authenticity’
• Introduce elements seen to be missing
– Power, gender, class…
• Undermine/question basic premises (poststructuralists)
– ‘validity is the researcher’s mask of authority’…
(Lather, 1993)
• Practical action
– Research based on specific value positions. Eg.
feminist, emancipatory, participative approaches
Other issues: ‘science’?
• Knowledge generated by researchers and
then ‘applied’ (Geelan, 2003)
• Bassey: ‘big’ research and ‘practitioner
research’ (2003)
• Big research:
– aims to produce general statements about
some aspect of learning (‘big ideas’)
• Practitioner research:
– gives practitioners insights into what they do
– (tests ‘big’ ideas in local settings)
More questions/problems
• Many current conceptualisations
avoid certain problems
– ‘we don’t want to be scientific anyway’
(power/class/ gender is more important)
– ‘research funders only want one kind of
research’
More questions/problems
• Power v. relationship between small scale
studies
• How to theorise context & specificity?
• New framings; new means of blinkering
and stereotyping
– Eg gender, ‘ethnic minority’
Questions about underpinning
ontologies…
Encouraging teachers to conduct
classroom research to find local
solutions to global problems has been a
widely discussed issue in educational
sciences
Renda, 2006 (iPed conference 2006)
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Problems conceptualising and
researching difference,
specificity and context
The conclusions reached in this case study may not be
generalisable, at least in detail, to other institutions….
Even so, it is argued that lessons can still be drawn
which can illuminate how we think about policy
development and implementation…. (Newton, 2003)
Two stories should be read as indicative of the
experience of all ten volunteers, but space precludes
covering them all (Bamber, 2002)
Although we are duly circumspect about generalising
from case study analysis, a number of issues are raised
that have wider implications, and might be offered as
fuzzy generalisations (Bassey, 1999)
Something to unearth….?
The shapes of classical geometry are lines and planes, circles and
spheres, triangles and cones. They represent a powerful abstraction
of reality, and they inspired a powerful philosophy of Platonic
harmony. Euclid made of them a geometry that lasted two millennia,
the only geometry still that most people ever learn. Artists found ideal
beauty in them. Ptolemaic astronomers build a theory of universe out
of them.
(Gleik,1987:94)
The shapes of classical geometry are lines and planes,
circles and spheres, triangles and cones. They represent
a powerful abstraction of reality, and they inspired a
powerful philosophy of Platonic harmony. Euclid made of
them a geometry that lasted two millennia, the only
geometry still that most people ever learn. Artists found
ideal beauty in them. Ptolemaic astronomers build a
theory of universe out of them. But for understanding
complexity, they turn out to be the wrong kind of
abstraction.
(Gleik,1987:94)
Clouds are not spheres, Mandelbrot is fond of saying.
Mountains are not cones. Lightening does not travel in a
straight line. The new geometry mirrors a universe that is
rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a
geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the
twisted, tangled, and intertwined.
(Gleik,1987:94)
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Problems conceptualising and
researching difference,
specificity and context
The conclusions reached in this case study may not be
generalisable, at least in detail, to other institutions….
Even so, it is argued that lessons can still be drawn
which can illuminate how we think about policy
development and implementation…. (Newton, 2003)
Two stories should be read as indicative of the
experience of all ten volunteers, but space precludes
covering them all (Bamber, 2002)
Although we are duly circumspect about generalising
from case study analysis, a number of issues are raised
that have wider implications, and might be offered as
fuzzy generalisations (Bassey, 1999)
Prevailing epistemologies: similarity
categories, key factors and deep
structure
crosssectional
abstraction
theme
narratives
What gets left out?
• What isn’t amenable to
description in terms of
variables and categories
• What isn’t amenable to
some form of counting or
measurement
crosssectional
abstraction
theme
narratives
1 Differences between
things
2 Original contexts
3 What’s not deemed to be
‘key’
4 Time and process
5 The impossibility of
discerning causality
1 & 2: Eradicating the
‘difference’ of local contexts
• Less-easily disciplined situational factors
may nonetheless be crucial
– In making something functional
– In making something meaningful
• Not trying to get a ‘complete’ picture but
reducing differently…
• Problems with the conceptualisation of
context
Adults in a post-92
university
Conceptualising
context
Each adult has
their ‘own’ set of
contexts
Theme relating to
adults in a post-92
university
Adults in a post-92
university
Does the theme relate to adults in
this particular group, or to
‘characteristics’ of this ‘type’ of
adult?
Usually presented as
referring to individuals…
• ‘These adults are all
motivated by career
prospects’ …rather than…
•‘This university setting, in
the context of current
political and cultural
agendas, encourages these
adults to talk about learning
in terms of career prospects'
Understanding individual
experience?
3: The search for
‘key’ aspects of phenomena
… a desire for centre in the
constitution of structure…
Derrida in Thomas, 2002
4: Time and
process
Processes constitute the world of
human experience – from nature to
cognition to social reality. Yet our
philosophical and scientific theories of
nature and experience have
traditionally prioritised concepts for
static objects and structures.
Seibt, 2003
Complexity: a
different way of
looking
Complexity
• Three types of scientific enquiry:
– Problems involving very limited numbers of
variables (Newtonian mechanics)
– Problems involving millions or billions of
variables; ‘can only be approached by the use
of statistical mechanics and probability theory’
(‘Disorganised complexity’)
– An area in the middle; a substantial number of
variables, but with one crucial difference:
‘Organised complexity’
Much more important than the mere number
of variables is the fact that these variables are
all interrelated… these problems, as
contrasted with the disorganised situations
with which statisticians can cope, show the
essential feature of organisation. We will
therefore refer to this group of problems as
those of organised complexity
Weaver, in Johnston,
2001:47 (italics in
original)
Dynamic systems and emergence
• multiple systems, embedded in each other
• systems are open
– materially, energetically
• far from equilibrium
– continual flow of energy and matter
• each has a large number of components
• interacting at a local level (only), in response to the
environment
• interactions are non-linear
– Multiple, recursive feedback loops
• multiple interactions through time result in the
periodic emergence of particular forms of order
– which benefit the survival of the system
• what emerges cannot be tracked to antecedents
– no central, or linear, determining causative mechanism
(Dynamic systems) solve problems by
drawing on masses of relatively stupid
elements, rather than a single, intelligent’
‘executive branch’…. In these systems
agents residing on one scale start producing
behaviour that lies one scale above them:
ants create colonies; urbanites create
neighbourhoods; simple pattern-recognition
software learns how to recommend new
books
Johnson, 2001:18
Cities have no central planning commissions that
solve the problem of purchasing and distributing
supplies… How do these cities avoid devastating
swings between shortage and glut, year after
year, decade after decade? The mystery
deepens when we observe the kaleidoscopic
nature of large cities. Buyers, sellers,
administrators, streets, bridges and buildings are
always changing, so that a city’s coherence is
somehow imposed on a perpetual flux of people
and structures. Like the standing wave in front of
a rock in a fast-moving stream, a city is a pattern
in time.
Holland, 1998, in Johnson, 2001:27
An unfathomable determinism, or no
determinism at all?..
• Untrackable interactions through time
– Too many, too fast; multiple feedback loops
• No underpinning structures
– No gene-like causes, only constraints
• Emergence: ‘a free act of creativity’
spontaneously arises as a result of the
interactions (has adaptive function)
A dynamic system has…
• A particular starting point in time
– (‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’)
• A particular history of interactions
through time
– Resulting in emergences specific to that
system
• Multiple ‘presents’ at any one point
in time
– Embedded within other dynamic systems
• A dynamic coherence which is in
continuous formation
– An identity, a ‘sense of itself’
• It is, in some important ways, always
unique
– The system transforms larger system
interaction patterns
Three types of ‘context’
1. The dynamic system which is the focus
of the analysis
2. Selected group(s) or institution(s) which
the focus system is embedded within
3. Selected larger group(s) or culture(s)
which contain the previous two systems
System trajectories
Context 1
Context 2
Context 3
Conceptualising difference,
specificity and context
Complexity theory challenges the nomothetic
programme of universally applicable
knowledge at its very heart – it asserts that
knowledge must be contextual…
Byrne, 2005
A complexity framing for research
• Position
• Role
• Conditions, interactions
and effects within specific
systems
• Causality
• Processes through time
• Multiple levels of scale
simultaneously