The Opportunities and Challenges of Teaching Thinking in Qualitative Research

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

Abstract

Qualitative researchers argue that doctoral students need a variety of complex and contradictory theories to think with in order to design and carry out research that addresses the ethical, political, and cultural issues that arise throughout their individual studies (Metz, 2001; Pallas, 2001; St. Pierre, 2011). In an educational research context that privileges positivist inquiry and presumes a straightforward, linear research process, it can be particularly challenging to teach students how to think and enact research as a continuously theorized process (St. Pierre, 2011). Luttrell (2010) maintains that students are either not afforded the time to read social theory during their doctoral programs, or they are not exposed to a wide enough range of it. Rather, they read survey texts that present a broad ‘qualitative continuum’ (positivism-interpretive-critical-postmodern-poststructural) but do not detail how researchers think with theory as they make methodological decisions throughout a study (e.g., Creswell, 2007). That widely critiqued separation (e.g., Lather, 2006; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014) can “leave aspiring educational researchers with the impression that their sole concern is to appropriately align their research questions with their methods” (Luttrell, 2010, p. 3) without having to consider how theory informs every methodological decision. It also poses a number of problems for teaching qualitative inquiry as a philosophically informed process because professors must find ways not only to make complex thinking visible for students but also to actively challenge students to complicate their own understandings of what qualitative inquiry can be.
In this paper, we describe our struggles with how to teach theoretical thinking as integral to qualitative research regardless of paradigm. Drawing upon our collaborative and cross-paradigmatic work in various iterations (Bridges-Rhoads, Hughes, & Van Cleave, under review; Bridges-Rhoads & Van Cleave, 2013; Hughes & Bridges-Rhoads, 2013; Van Cleave & Bridges-Rhoads, 2013), we focus on tools we have found useful for helping students make sense of and make visible the thinking that happens when qualitative researchers read, write, and talk about theory in relation to research. Specifically, we use phenomenological (e.g., Heidegger, 1962/2002; van Manen, 2011) and poststructural (e.g., Foucault, 1969/1977; Derrida, 1967/1974) theories to examine how disciplinary structures in academic writing (e.g., single authorship, citation, methodological transparency) operate as if they are atheoretical and value-free, limiting opportunities for students to practice writing as a theoretically-informed part of qualitative inquiry. Based on analysis of writing we produced throughout our respective dissertation studies then, we explore the opportunities and challenges that behind-the-scenes writing poses for working within our paradigms, for making our theoretically informed thinking visible, and for articulating how theory produces qualitative research methodology. We explore how we integrate such models into our teaching with varied success to help students say “yes to the messiness” (Lather, 2006, p. 48) that characterizes qualitative inquiry and challenge students to theorize every aspect of their studies. Engaging students in that tension allows them to make and remake the field of qualitative inquiry to respond to the increasingly diverse and inequitable contexts of United States public education (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011).

Authors

• Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, Georgia State University

• Jessica Van Cleave, Mars Hill University

• Hilary E. Hughes, University of Georgia - Athens