Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Baseball_Hit or Miss
The story of the social scientific observer and the baseball game in chapter 6 (starting on pg. 87), led me to wonder about how we can interpret this story into our school. This story was interesting to me because she was going in and gathering data on an activity that she really knew nothing about. I think that we can be guilty of this kind of thinking when we are entering a school. This scientist wanted to understand Americans by learning about baseball but that would be like interpreting students by what they eat. Not all Americans watch baseball and not all students eat the same things. I would think as a scientist and an interpreter she would have wanted to know all she could about something before analyzing it. That would be like us as teachers wanting to interpret our students in our class and not knowing the demographics of where are students come from. Why would anyone want to go into any situation without knowing what they are getting themselves into? I would not want to go to another culture without researching it before I left. Is that the way interpreters do their research?
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1 comment:
First, it's just an example the authors of the text use to illustrate the difficulty in understanding an activity without knowledge of intent, rules, etc.
But do you ask a good question about "research before research". One of the criticisms of interpretivism is it is too subjective -- it's all about one researcher's perspective. How is that even research?
Thus, qualitative researchers have to be on guard against structuring their observations and research questions beforehand, lest their observations simply fit their preconceptions.
If you know the demographics of the classroom beforehand, either as teacher or researcher, then you begin to use your predetermined constructs -- what a "poor student" is and does, for example -- to interpret things, which could get in the way of seeing some other things that are going on.
Excellent post, as it raises a very good question.
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