Driving the Paradigm: (Failing to Teach) Methodological Ambiguity, Fluidity, and Resistance in Qualitative Research

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

Abstract

According to Hammersley (2011) it is high time qualitative researchers challenge the paradigm-driven assumption “that any enquiry must begin by specifying the methodological framework adopted and must stay within its limits” (p. 41). Koro-Ljungberg and colleagues (2009) ask:
…what is gained and what is lost by engaging in (e)pistemological consistency and increased (e)pistemological awareness. How can the paradoxes and tensions we encounter as we design our research studies encourage and enable us to stretch, permeate, or redefine the boundaries among (e)pistemologies and methodologies? (p. 697)

Provoked, I experiment with these ideas in my qualitative classrooms. In my fantasies, these classes become utopian spaces of informed epistemological ambiguity. Rather than paradigm-driven, we drive the paradigms, playing with them like my four-year-old plays with toy cars, observing what happens when they crash, fall apart, and recombine with other toys to make something different – a purple-flying-cat-car -- the possibility of doing research differently. My purpose is to describe how this fantasy is thwarted, reflecting on constructed moments-in-the-classroom as my data sources.

Paradigms Essentialized: Thwart I

First day of Qualitative Research I, 18 doctoral students discuss what they believe about research. “I’ve always liked math. That makes me a post-positivist. I’ve been dreading your class.” “I’m a teacher and a constructionist/constructivist. I believe that reality is subjective. I hate standardized testing.” “I’m not a numbers person. I’ll be doing a qualitative dissertation.”

How is it that students come to my class with these methodological ‘I am’ statements? Where do they learn to take up research paradigms as identities? I pretend to get angry: “If you take anything from this class it should be this: You are not a research paradigm!” Hoy (2005) describes critical resistance as “…resistance not to the constraining principals per se, but to one’s attachment to them insofar as they constitute one’s identity” (p. 100). In my fantasy classroom students engage in paradigm-driven identity politics, critically resisting research identities.

Other Thwarts
In this paper I explore other thwarts to my utopian vision of a qualitative classroom -- how my fantasy evaporates when paradigms become real, take on a life of their own (Paradigms Ontologized); when methodological talk becomes all about paradigms (Paradigms Fettishized); and when students have yet to grasp major conceptual differences between paradigms (Paradigms Misunderstood).

My exploration elucidates the features of a utopian paradigm-driving classroom and includes strategies I have or would like to use to ‘thwart the thwarts.’ This is, I believe, a significant inquiry that exemplifies the challenges of teaching qualitative research with multiple epistemologies in mind. Yet I am wary of the faschist power required, even in a humble qualitative classroom, to impose a utopian vision and am conscious of Derrida’s (2000) mistrust of utopia: “In certain contexts, utopia, the word in any case, is all too easily associated with the dream, with demobilisation, with an impossibility that urges renouncement instead of action” (p. 8).

I conclude by embracing thwarts as essential to working toward ‘the dream’ and wonder, how will I fail next time?

Author

• Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, University of South Florida