Introduction#
Context is everything. My struggle with positivist paradigm research is that, much of the time, the outcome isn’t surprising, and does leave me with more questions than answers. It may come to be that, as I move through my Ph.D. process (and I’m going to consider it a process versus a program), I discover that literally all research does this. It may be a me-thing versus a research-thing. (Where is the locus of control for curiosity? It’s all in your head.)
In the first paragraph of Critical CinéEthnographic Methods (Gratch & Warren, 2018), the author’s state that positivist research answers the “What happened” questions, but leaves the other investigative Ws (why, when) and their friend how out. (Good research should answer who, what, and how in their methodology sections).
Context is everything, though. If this study took participants (a word that others the people in educational research) out of their natural context, the results are already in question. This problem regularly comes up in educational neuroscience.
Reflection#
This past semester I have been in a classes on technology implementation and systems design. Through the lens of soft systems methodology, I took the graphic of my research design and the description of my work environment and turned it into a systemigram that can be generalized across much of K-12 formal education.
That systemigram is then being used to inform my implementation of a real product at my real job. No part of this has been theoretical, or at least, it’s grounded in my professional experience. The tool in question zSpace is in the process of being implemented. We have them, and the context is important. I have had to stop writing on my final submission in order to take calls with my colleague about the tools, and our student who interned at the company was emailing us about implementation ideas during the writing process.
Because context is everything. The research I will do, whether it is formal research that goes through IRB approval, is turned into a manuscript, then submitted, or informal research, where I take my skills at asking questions, talking, and then changing my approach within my context, does not matter to it being research. We’re talking Big-R Research, versus little-r research, as we differentiate it in my own learning environment. (The academic language is formal research versus everyday information seeking research, a differentiation I make with my students regularly to help them understand research having a curiosity, wonder, or question, then using sources of information to discover answers. In a perfect research situation, we then share our new knowledge with others but that doesn’t always need to happen.)
The best research is used. End of sentence. It’s used to help other researchers, it’s used to help create the best best-practices we can, it’s used to help others make decisions. In context. Which means, the best research has to be applicable in-context.
A question I’ve always had is “Why do large-scale projects/ideas/implementations feel so bland?” This semester has solidified an answer for me: because in order to create at scale, nuance is inevitably lost, and nuance is everything. I am a take-things-as-they-happen type person, and the idea that I had to have answers for “Where are you going to store your data?” 6 months before I even considered gathering data was incredibly hard for me in 2018ish when I was working on my Ed.S. It’s not that I don’t have a thousand plans, but they’re all contingency plans, and I was being asked to do one thing. Because context is everything.
As I wrap up the semester, I acknowledge that I live at multiple levels of my own systemigram at once, within my own work context:
I am the practitioner at selecting which resources I use for my own learners, while also being at the school and district (although in private school, it’s division then school, but that’s a clarification for another blog post).
The projects this semester all serve the purpose of taking a tool that is being implemented at my school, and using research-backed practices to help guide teachers through these questions.
Idea: Actually turn the first two levels into a handout to use during the trainings. Research isn’t useful if it isn’t shared, and this is research.
Conclusion and Invitation#
This blog post serves as my culminating reflection on the semester for both LTEC6220 and LTEC6250. If you’re reading this, you probably did some form of search for one of those two class codes. Read the other posts with those tags. I did the same thing when I was preparing for these classes, and I hope they help you the way other LTEC students helped me. That said - I didn’t read the instructions for reflection. This wasn’t prescribed, and you should probably read other students perspectives as well. Context is everything, and this is only one perspective, after all. The systems you exist inside of will be different. (Don’t worry - you don’t actually have to write as much as this blog post lets on. I’m just chatty.)
If you read this and have questions, wonders, or curiosities, please feel free to reach out to me! Email, social media, if you see me in a hallway. I’m always happy to help!