On Seeking a Middle Ground in Teaching Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: 49.075 - Teaching Qualitative Inquiry in the Era of the Big Tent: Fantasies, Failures, and Futures

Abstract

This paper reflects on the author’s endeavors to teach qualitative research methods in ways that promote dialogue across paradigmatic and disciplinary difference. Drawing on phenomenologist Alfred Schutz’s ideas on “intersubjectivity” and “transcendence”, the author discusses how we might think about breakdowns in understanding and difficulties in facilitating boundary crossings in classroom encounters with theoretical and paradigmatic difference.
Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) was intensely interested in examining how intersubjectivity is accomplished by members of society, and with Luckmann (1983) talked about the “boundaries of the life-world” that people encounter which involve “little”, “medium” and “great” transcendencies”. Using these ideas, the author examines approaches to questions that teachers of qualitative inquiry might use to examine paradigmatic and theoretical difference.
Schutz (1996, p. 150) suggested that one way of finding a middle ground among people from different groups was to ask different sorts of questions. Drawing on Schutz (1996), this paper examines how we might ask different kinds of questions in teaching qualitative inquiry. In addition to such fundamental questions as: “What do we the members of this class, understand by X?” where “X” represent concepts and topics —such as “evidence”,” data”, “quality”, and the kinds of research questions that might be asked about the social world, we might also examine:
• What do I – as a positioned social subject in my present context – understand by X?
• What alternative understandings of X might I – as a positioned social subject– imagine by taking advantage of a different theoretical standpoint?
• What is my interpretation of X? How does this compare to the interpretation by members of my community of practice (e.g., discipline)? How does this compare to the interpretation by researchers using Y perspective? (where Y takes a position different than my own)
• How are various interpretations of X institutionalized through publication practices; disciplinary norms, funding and so forth?
This paper uses the author’s self-reflections in addition to naturally occurring data (student reflections, course evaluations and asynchronous discussions of readings) from an IRB-approved self-study of qualitative coursework.
Barad (Dolphijn & Tuin, 2012, pp. 49-50) argues that “critique is all too often…. a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something down – another scholar, another feminist, a discipline, an approach et cetera.” This paper examines how an instructor might seek a “middle ground” in the teaching of qualitative inquiry informed by multiple theoretical perspectives, with a view to facilitating respectful and ethical dialogue that does not dismiss difference, but rather encourages students to transcend little and medium boundaries and accomplish intersubjective understanding via imagining other ways of thinking.
The field of qualitative inquiry is characterized by difference and innovation. Scholars who aim to convey to students an approach that encourages and accepts difference under a “Big-Tent” perspective of qualitative inquiry are faced with opportunities, contradictions and controversies. This paper considers ways in which teachers of qualitative research might facilitate discussions about theoretical and paradigmatic difference that are ethical, respectful, and attend to the details of others’ points of views.

Author

• Kathryn J. Roulston, University of Georgia