Unanticipated Insights/Challenges in Researching a Multisite Global Course on Engineering Design

• In Event: 56.058 - The Discursive Construction of Learning Opportunities: Developing an Interdisciplinary/Interprofessional Ethnographic Research Agenda for Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Abstract
This study addresses calls for reflexivity and transparency (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Atkinson, 1990) in researching higher educational initiatives when researchers are unable to be physically present in local sites, which usually involves multiple sites, or both virtual and physical spaces. By making transparent the process and decisions involved in analyses undertaken in an ethnographic study of higher education course that took place among multiple sites and met in both virtual and physical spaces, I construct a telling case of the role of an Interactional Ethnographic logic-of-inquiry in supporting the research team in uncovering emic perspectives of multiple local sites.

Objectives & Purposes
This research is a part of four-year, ongoing ethnographic project of a global educational initiative called Non-Distance Education (NDE), which uses information technology to bring multiple classrooms across national settings together for simultaneous lectures and virtual interactions (Author, 2015). This study focuses on an intercultural activity in 2012 NDE course, called Cultural Day 2, in which three national groups of students from China, Taiwan, and US (20 students in each group) interpreted and constructed public presentations of a common assignment uncommonly. Guided by the reflexive turn in social science research, the poster constitutes a telling case, not of the outcomes or findings of the ethnographic project, but rather of the analysis process undertaken to uncover the insiders' perspectives of multiple local sites on local cultural practices.

Methodology & Data
The analyses processes presented make visible how the Interactional Ethnographic logic-of-inquiry constitutes an epistemology for tracing frame clashes and mapping activity backwards and forwards, in and across times, spaces, configurations of actors in particular contexts (Agar, 1994; 2006; Green, Skukauskaite & Baker, 2012; Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). By making visible ways in which different levels of analyses were constructed to examine the relationship between events developing across time, actors, spaces, and contexts, we create an empirical basis for demonstrating the importance of tracing the overtime interactional work of the instructor and students at multiple levels of analytic scale and from multiple points of viewing.

Findings

This study makes visible how, and why, multiple levels of time scale, event cycles, and discursive work were required to construct a warranted account of how the instructor engaged in a recursive process of designing opportunities for learning in and across times, actors and events. This study makes visible the importance of conceptualizing how a multiplicity of texts were drawn on and constructed in this course – written syllabus, virtual projects, powerpoint presentations, cultural artifacts brought by students, people as texts, and the socially accomplished events as texts.

Significance
This study demonstrates how a micro-analysis of the developing discourse and actions is necessary to develop understandings of the situated nature of learning in face-to-face as well as in technology-enabled contexts. Finally, it makes visible how intercultural processes and practices are socially constructed in and through the moment-by-moment and overtime interactions of the instructor with students and students with each other.

Authors

• Yun Dai, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Ang Liu, University of New South Wales

• Stephen Lu, University of Southern California