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