An email I once received from a graduate student at Stanford:<\/p>\n
“There was also some talk last week about starting a Qualitative Methods Special Interest Group (haha almost wrote support group<\/strong>)\u2026\u201d [emphasis mine]<\/p>\n Support group indeed. I will send a shout-out on Twitter to the person who comes up with the best name for such a group. Use #qualsupportgroup 3…2…1….GO!<\/p>\n Okay, in all seriousness, for\u00a0many of us trained in qualitative and critical traditions in social sciences, the quantitative moment we are seeing in higher education is unsettling.<\/p>\n I recently gave a talk with Jesse Stommel at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute<\/a>. We\u00a0talked about emergence and how making space for emergence and complexity in education is exciting and needed more than ever. The pressures of accountability, combined with continued policy moves and budget cuts, are creating an increasingly untenable environment for the pleasure of learning, the openness and exploration that comes with viewing “education as a practice of freedom<\/a>,” (bell hooks) rather than a practice of calculating \u201cvalue.\u201d<\/p>\n I spoke for a bit about how the accountability movement and emphasis on \u201cevidence-based teaching\u201d has had the effect of 1) narrowing our views of what learning is, thus ignoring more humanistic, holistic, critical, and speculative approaches to learning; and 2) narrowing our views of what learning looks like and what counts as valid research on learning, thus ignoring more humanistic, holistic, critical, and speculative approaches (stay tuned for a paper from Jen Ross<\/a>\u00a0on speculative research methods and not-yetness!). Maggie Maclure<\/a> calls the push for evidence-based education \u201canimated by the desire for certainty, willing to sacrifice complexity and diversity for \u2018harder\u2019 evidence and the global tournament of standards.\u201d\u00a0The push for \u201charder evidence\u201d often pushes out the kinds of learning and evidence that come from post-structural, phenomenological, and critical approaches. For example, the Evidence-Based Teachers Network<\/a> proclaims that studies on teaching and learning involving few students, no comparison groups, or only one teacher constitute poor evidence. After all, randomized controlled experiments are the \u201cgold standard\u201d\u2014why would we accept anything else?<\/p>\n We lose a lot with the \u201cgold standard\u201d perspective. What about learning that is mildly informed by course topic but is essential to a human being\u2019s view of how to be a contributor in a public sphere? What about learning that is more tied to a person\u2019s identity that to curriculum standards? What about learning that is the result of a mentoring relationship that helps a learner to find the drive to pursue an educated life rather than an education? What about the learning that happens when the chemistry of a particular class leads to places of learning a teacher could never predict? Does this learning not matter? Does it not matter because it does not \u201ccount\u201d (in a gold-standard-only kind of way) as learning?<\/p>\n Ken Morrison says<\/a> the evidence focus pushes researchers and teachers “to atomize phenomena into measurable variables and then to focus only on certain of these [which] is to miss synergies and the significance of the whole.” What gets missed in learning an education when we refuse to acknowledge learning that is not imminently measurable? What happens to learning when all we acknowledge is that which is imminently measurable? As Gardner Campbell (2014) argues<\/a>, the push toward evidence does not necessarily result in responsible action or marked improvements in learning, instead it rewards narrow conceptions of what it means to be a good student, \u2018marching toward compliance and away from more elusive and disruptive concepts like curiosity or wonder\u2019.<\/p>\n Why does this matter? Because we have people like Kevin Carey telling people whose decisions (and funds) impact the future of education that our schools are failing because we have not been able to produce true \u201cevidence\u201d of what he thinks education should look like. And Carey is just a\u00a0mouthpiece for a much broader movement questioning the value of education and calling for more \u201cevidence\u201d to prove its value (see A Nation at Risk<\/a>, for example). As Jan Morse says, \u201cEvidence is not just something that is out there. Evidence has to be produced, constructed, represented. Furthermore, the politics of evidence cannot be separated from the ethics of evidence\u201d (cited in Norman Denzin\u2019s The Qualitative Manifesto<\/a>). Jan McArthur notes<\/a> that the politics of evidence are tied to the politics of complexity reduction, which is when we try to remove ambiguities, complexities, and indeterminants from our understanding of a social phenomenon for the purposes of what she calls \u201cwicked clarity.\u201d In educational research, approaches that rely only on tidy conceptions of what learning is and looks like because they are rooted in views that negate anything that is not captured by experimental research trials, are potentially sweeping under the rug messy but essential social issues like systematic inequities and the role of diverse lived experiences in learning.<\/p>\n Here is where qualitative and critical lenses can help. Not because the answer is \u201cno standards—it\u2019s a free for all\u201d or \u201creplace all empirical research with qualitative.\u201d C\u2019mon people. Upon hearing my views on learning and research, a man sitting next to me on a plane last week (a retired & now consulting K12 administrator) said, \u201cI spent my whole career trying to get teachers to write specific outcomes and now you\u2019re telling me I should have let it be a free for all?\u201d It\u2019s easy to take a polarized approach\u2014the hard work is figuring out how to bring these perspectives and approaches to the same table and value equally what each brings.<\/p>\n It does not have to be an either\/or. It doesn\u2019t have to be all qualitative or all quantitative. It does not have to be qualitative only in service of adding layers of description to empirical research. It can be qualitative leading the way to our asking better questions, developing empathy, and deeply understanding what matters in education.<\/p>\n Qualitative and critical lenses remind us that humans are involved in education and their lived experiences matter. Qualitative and critical lenses remind us that there is no such thing as value-free learning or research. All inquiry is value-laden, and these lenses acknowledge how power, identity, performance, bodies, culture, and biases play into every part of the process, into every research question, every sample, every algorithm, every interpretation. And qualitative and critical lenses recognize that everything is situated in contexts and bodies, and context and bodies matter<\/a>\u00a0(Audrey Watters and Tressie McMillan Cottom).<\/p>\n The week Jesse and I gave the talk to #digped<\/a>, and in a funny convergence of events, EDUCAUSE released a video about measuring\u00a0learning<\/a> in which I make a statement about the \u201cmagic\u201d of learning. I\u2019ll admit that I somewhat question my phrasing of learning as \u201cmagic;\u201d perhaps with more consideration I would have said \u201cmagical.\u201d I keep asking myself, \u201cwhat was I trying to say? What would I want people to take away aside from a catch phrase about learning?\u201d I think it\u2019s that we are losing the wonder of learning. Maybe it\u2019s not magic, but can be unexpected, unpredictable, wild, transformative, liberatory, life-changing, and freeing. Qualitative approaches can help us to understand and care for that kind of learning.<\/p>\n That matters.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An email I once received from a graduate student at Stanford: “There was also some talk last week…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-2","category-teaching-and-learning","content-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":916,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions\/916"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}