Reading Janet Emig the distance of thirty five years, I can't help but wonder about the reach of case study. Tanya's question/response to Laura's blog has prompted my late night musings when I should be planning my 105 class instead of yammering on my blog.
Case study writing research may seem like a quaint method to us at the distance of thirty-five years, but it's really not. Case study is still a bread and butter approach in social science research, and, in some ways, in writing research as well. Case studies are the stuff of popular psychology books, too; we're raised on the stuff. Case study is the basis for comparison, for theorizing about applications, for understanding concrete details of limited cases. Case study is currently used quite a bit in writing program administration research: a program is studied as a model for others to think about and theorize about and work for/against. Syracuse's writing program gets used/cited in this way frequently: our program is a model for other ind. writing programs or ones that are striking out to become independent.
Of course, case study is full of problems: reliability, generalizability, bias, you name it.
Yet think of case study in practical terms. Case study is a way to deal with all the giant problems of trying to do a wide-scale study. Let's face it, time and resources are limited. Case study is a way to try to understand a complex set of circumstances in real and concrete ways. Case study can be exploratory, reflective, and a way to examine patterns.
Yet let's face it: Emig's study had a lot of artificial components. What would it have been like to do a case study of the students negotiating their "real writing demands" in the high school classroom vs. researcher-imposed ones? It's easy to pick holes and think about gaps. In fact, Emig herself points out a lot of the gaps and is willing to be reflexive.
Well, some might say, we're post-process now. We don't need to go back and try to re-do this research or revisit it. This is just an interesting artifact. Well, it is, and it isn't. How people make meaning in writing still involves their processes of making meaning. What has perhaps changed is the idea/hope/belief that we can find the right way to intervene in those processes. But what seems to still be operative is the idea that those processes are often individualized with some collective components and yet adapted to different contexts.
More tomorrow...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
The piece made for some interesting carryover discussion in 732, where we're in the invention stage of collaborative research on students' writing from texts. Mostly the concern had to do with sample size, with the selection of research participants, and with Emig's opaque reasons for choosing the student whose work was showcased. Nice convergence between the two classes.
There are some great contemporary case studies at the Harvard Project Zero Website, one in particular that I'm pretty enamored with, that studies studio arts classes. This was done in 2005 and is pretty valuable. I figure that as long as we want to figure out how to link expertise to abilities, competencies and skills, the case study approach is a valuable one. You should say more about what you mean about "what has perhaps changed is the right way..." I'd like to hear about that. There's no way around the fact that teacher's intervene between abilities and expertise. I have begun to think of writing instruction-- whether its the academic essay or multimodal texts-- in the same way scholars who wonder about the efficacy of art instruction. The question is not necessarily whether teaching art leads to better work in other domains (It's not, after all a question we ask about sports, though some people try to make the claim that sports does provide kids with abilities that carry over). The question is whether art has value in its own right. Does writing-- academic essay writing or web writing or whatever-- have value in its own right? AS long as it does, and we persist in exploring what good looks like and how its defined, case studies are indispensable. In fact, what we lack are more of them, of the longitudinal kind, that Sternberg did. And people going back to the archive of protocol analysis with new ideas in mind. In fact, it's a good, old process idea to treat your classes as one enormous case study.
Post a Comment