Reducing the social: thinking differently about small-scale research Tamsin Haggis University of...
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Reducing the social: thinking differently about small-scale
research
Tamsin HaggisUniversity 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– links to other
studies/generalisation
• Relationship to theory• Using quotes
(‘authenticity’)• Role of the researcher
cross-sectional abstraction
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 (post-structuralists)– ‘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 contextThe 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 contextThe 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
cross-sectional 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
1 Differences between things
2 Original contexts3 What’s not deemed to be
‘key’ 4 Time and process 5 The impossibility of
discerning causality
cross-sectional abstraction
theme
narratives
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
Theme relating to adults in a post-92 university
Each adult has their ‘own’ set of contexts
Conceptualising context
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