Class notes, S O6

Teachers,

Some questions that arose during our class this past Saturday.  Look for a set of posts related to the articles in the next few days.  Please share your thoughts, if they add to the learning.

Thanks.

article critiques

• What is the conversation in this area?  What are the current norms, expectation and accepted methodologies and evidentiary criteria?
• To whom is the research directed?  What are the expectations of readers of this journal?  How difficult is it to get published in this journal?  How does that level of ease or difficult affect the standards of evidence?
• What can I learn about this area?  How can the research change my assumptions, schema and understandings?
• I am reviewing the idea or the research on the idea?
• Is the research deductive (does it start with a belief and find evidence for that belief)?  Is the research inductive (does it start with the evidence and ground up to a more general theory about the collected data)?  Is the author an analyst of the data or an advocate for an idea?
• Do authors attempt to generalize their findings (universally true, true for all regardless of any context)?
• Do the authors attempt to prove/validate a theory or do they intend an exploration of a phenomenon?
• Do the authors attempt to make a policy recommendation or do they advise more research?  Does the population of participants support their intent?

data gathering

• Attention matters; how narrowly should I focus?  What do I miss?
• How much control do I have over my focus and attention?  How can I become more aware of what I am aware? How do I know I know what I know?
• Humans are pattern detectors; is what we perceive really there?  What do we ignore, miss, make invisible in order to detect that pattern?
• Do we detect a pattern because our identity demands it?  Are we willing to allow our worlds to be rocked?
• How do find the balance between focusing on the context and investigating the margins?
• How do we make the invisible visible?
• What assumptions do we make about another's experience?  To what extent do I attempt to position-take with that other person in order to understand their experience?
• What is working for me?  Why do I think so?  In other words, it 'works' to do what?

Bracey, chapters 1 and 2 for S O20

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"Position-taking" - the empathic and active self-distancing of our own feelings to see through the experience of another.  If, as van Manen claims, we are "fated to never be transparent to ourselves" and we need to "make thoughtful sense of the meaning the child's experience has for the child as well as for our adult view," how can we tell when our efforts at position-taking result in a confabulation of the other's point of view or a confirmation of what we expect and want the other's point of view to be?

John  Lloyd, tedtalk on the Invisible

Jonathan Haidt, on intuition and reasoning (from the NYTimes, S O7): "We effortlessly and intuitively “see that” something is true, and then we work to find justifications, or “reasons why,” which we can give to others.  Both processes are crucial for understanding belief and persuasion. ... And intuitions are rarely stronger than when they are part of our partisan identities ... But I never said that reasons were irrelevant. I said that they were no match for intuition, and that they were usually a servant of one’s own intuitions. Therefore, if you want to persuade someone, talk to the elephant first. Trigger the right intuitions first. "