Challenging Sameness in Educational Research

• In Event: Rigor and Validity in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
The purpose of this paper is to present a robust presentation of analytic practices in qualitative inquiry. In the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, specifically Process and Reality, he states that creativity is not possible without distinguishing between “passive conditioning” and “active production.” In this paper I will argue that passive conditioning is that which is produced by research that does not rigorously engage with theoretical concepts in order to produce different thinking.

Perspectives or Theoretical Frameworks
This paper is situated in the nexus of Whitehead’s concept of creativity (1978), and Deleuze & Guattari’s (1994) image of thought. Specifically, the author is interested in that which is foreclosed by research masked by conventional notions of rigor and validity. Such conventional notions would have scholars name and anticipate practices and methods of inquiry, thereby foreclosing the possibility of “thought in the act” (Manning & Massumi, 2014).

Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry
Key to St. Pierre’s discussion of post qualitative research is the necessity of a robust grounding in theoretical and philosophical literature. She asserts that “If we [and our students] don’t read the theoretical and philosophical literature, we have nothing much to think with during analysis except normalized discourses that seldom explain the way things are” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 614). The mode of inquiry employed in this paper is that which emerges as a process methodology. Jackson and Mazzei (2012) have described this process methodology as happening in the middle of things, in the threshold, as theoretical concepts and data constitute one another in their analytic practice of thinking with theory. This thinking with theory post qualitative approach begins with a problem in the midst of inquiry leading to different transformations and attunements.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The author will present three case studies that demonstrate “active production” as a process methodology. The cases are situated in very different contexts and produce a rethinking of the “student” in a higher education student success initiative, “data” in a middle school context, and “mapping” in a redrawing of school attendance boundaries.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants
The case studies presented will illustrate new ways of thinking about rigor and validity that support the aims of post qualitative inquiry.

Scientific or scholarly significance
In an effort to challenge sameness, the author concludes that rigorous inquiry is not to know in advance, nor to be bound by method, but to encounter the way concepts produce thought, “much like an improvisational work—it has to be played, and played well, but without a score that tells one precisely what or how it is to be played” (Bell, 2016, p. 1). Such engagement with difficult problems facing educational researchers is consistent with AERA’s broader goal of democratizing evidence, doing so through processual philosophies of connection, movement, and becoming.

Author

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon