Readings for E19.3311- Week of April 14th

Hi, Ricki has asked me to post the readings for this week.

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Please note that the last one, the Ed Researcher article, is actually for next week, but Ricki says we will start discussing the issue related to it this week…

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1. Roth, W. (2004). Autobiography as scientific text: a dialectical approach to the role of experience, Volume 5, No. 1, Art. 9. (A review of Harry Wolcott (2002). Sneaky kid and its aftermath. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press).

Link: roth_review_wolcottsneakykid

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2. Margaret A. Eisenhart, The Ethnographic Research Tradition and Mathematics Education Research, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Mar., 1988), pp. 99-114.

LInk: eisenhart_ethnoresearchtradition

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3. Frankel, R. M. and Devers, K. J. (2000). Study Design in Qualitative Research – 1: Developing Questions and Assessing Resource Needs, Education for Health, 13:2, 251 – 261.

Link: frankel_studydesign1

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4. Johnson, R. B. (2004). Mixed Methods Research: A Research Paradigm Whose Time Has Come, Educational Researcher, Vol. 33, No. 7, 14-26.

Link: mixedmethodsresearch-paradigmtimecome

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Trinh Minh-Ha on ‘New Ways of Seeing’ & the ‘Witnessing Self’

Trinh Minh-Ha was part of a panel at MOMA last night (April 11), talking about women and film, with Laura Mulvey (moderator) and Chantal Ackerman.

“Soliciting A New Seeing”

Trinh talked about digital film and the new kinds of seeing that it opens up. The politics of form that she is interested in has to do with a ‘form of witnessing’, with reflexive forms that allow for a ‘witnessing of the self’, or a ’science of the self’…

——>>>When Trinh talks, the sense comes from not just the words themselves but from their entwinement and the melodic flow of their sounds rising and falling…

Anyway, this science of the self (quote: “a science of the self, if I can call it that…”) is exactly what Ricki and I are trying to locate within the practice of educational research, but there isn’t a clear language for that yet, instead we have to make up words like ’selfother’ following Lous Heshusius.

“Witnessing the Self”

Witnessing has to do with awareness and seeing; or seeing with awareness. This kind of seeing is the middle way between subjectivity and objectivity, between dualistic categories of knowing, and to quote: “practicing the middle way doesn’t mean half-way, the middle is where there is no duality, hence there are no foreclosures, what comes to our senses is already on go”… The middle way is the passage, it is the journey, life is what takes place in the ‘middles’, life is the movement and unfolding of passages, middles, or (another term) intervals:  “Life is the unfolding of intervals within intervals.”

Buddhism also talks about  the ‘middle way’, and also about the middles, the intervals, the gaps where consciousness is free to manifest in any direction, any form. The sanskrit (?) is ‘bardo’, meaning a space in between, where life emerges but cannot be grasped or fixed by words. And yet there are words, and yet we use categories, words, terms, forms to speak of the invisible. Trinh: “form is attained to address the formless”.

Trinh invoked traditional Asian arts several times as examples of a seeing that is a form of witnessing, a seeing that arises in the middle. For example, painters in ancient China spent lifetimes painting the same landscape, the same objects. And the reason for this was not for the accumulation of expertise of knowing about the object, but in order to develop their capacity for seeing. The instance of seeing the object was an enactment of awareness, of witnessing, of a certain kind of seeing.

Well, I’m obviously a fan of Trinh’s.  We approached her after the talk to say hi and how much we llllove her writing. She was incredibly gracious.

tactile alphabet- Florence et al. (2004)

Florence et al. (2004) examined the effect of using the modality of touch (haptic modality) for teaching young children to read.

Reading acquisition is thought to depend upon acquiring knowledge of phonological and orthographic representations and making connections between the two. But the authors believe that learning the letter-sound correspondences is not ‘implicit’, and that the connection needs in some cases to be highlighted and augmented through other sensory modalities such as touch. The authors use a teaching technique developed by Fernald (1943) called the ‘multisensory trace’ which involves tracing a written word with an index finger while pronouncing the word and looking at it.

The study tested 3 treatments: letters were explored visually and haptically (by tracing foam letter forms in the context of words, so the letters were traced in the order of their spelling), or letters were explored only visually, or letters were explored visually but in a sequential manner. Results showed significant increase in performance measures (pseudoword decoding test and letter recognition test) for the visual and haptic group.

Definition of orthography from wikipedia:

The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.) Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós (“correct”) and γράφειν gráphein (“to write”). Orthography is distinct from typography.

Orthography describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used, and the rules about how to write these symbols. Depending on the nature of the writing system, the rules may include punctuation, spelling and capitalization.

Readings for E19.3311

Readings for April 9, 2008:

Chapters 30 and 31 from Handbook of Qualitative Research
Click here to download Chapter 30
Click here to download Chapter 31

Patti Lather, on Validity
Click here to download

Ricki Goldman-Segall on Configurational Validity
Click Here to download