apprenticeship: induction to Research through Praxis of Method

Wolff-Michael Roth

aporias of Learning Research Methods

it is a well-known fact among educators that the epistemologies teachers espouse mediate the learning environments they create (Tobin and McRobbie, 1997).

in my experience, the same can be said for graduate programmes in the social sciences. Thus, on several visits to German and French universities – specifically to research groups focusing on knowing and learning in the natural sciences – i found graduate students engaging in empirical studies without any prior preparation in the ways of how such research might be conducted; much like in the early years of anthropology, these graduate students simply went into the field and conducted their research hoping that what they did would lead to useable and useful outcomes.

The situation in most north american universities is just the opposite. graduate students frequently are required to take several courses in research methods or methodology prior to designing research and collecting data. When they actually attempt to begin their research, these students often do not know where to begin even though they have studied methods texts and done very well in the associated courses (Roth, 2005b). Typically, students in many north american universities say, ‘i want to do a quantitative study,’ ‘My research will be an auto/ethnography,’

or ‘i will do qualitative research,’ without actually knowing what they want to research and why this research might be of interest to anybody.

There are contradictions in both of these approaches, which, because they are so widespread, cannot be relegated to the category of extreme cases; they constitute mainstream approaches to graduate student training in the research methods of the social sciences and humanities. In the first approach, the students generally have a good idea about what they want to research but do not have opportunities to work with practitioners who already enact the required research practices in competent ways. in the second approach, students are overly concerned with method and methodology, and this concern becomes the driver of the research problem. Furthermore, graduate students do experience difficulties enacting research methods – as captured in the notion of a ‘theory–praxis gap’.

in order to try to overcome these problems, i have developed a personal approach described here that i hope will be useful to other researchers. in my teaching and role as supervisor, i have aimed at introducing students to research

method as praxis (Roth, 2005a). My students do research alongside someone else in my research group and learn to write research by writing with the teacher;

the same practitioners have taught graduate classes on research method in a similar way. This approach is solidly grounded in a theoretical framework that conceptualizes knowledge in terms of knowledgeable participation in social practice. in this chapter, i:

articulate cultural-historical activity theory as a framework that explains why the approach is successful in the production and reproduction of scientific communities and individual scholars, and

provide a description of the approach of inducting graduate students into research methods by doing research.

Theoretical Grounding

Many graduate students find themselves in one of two epistemological paradigms when it comes to learning how to do research, including design, data collection, data interpretation and writing: discovery learning or information processing.

In the former paradigm, the graduate students are asked to find out how to appropriately research their chosen phenomenon on their own. Finding or working out the appropriate method is considered to be part of the requirements for getting a graduate degree – the typical advice for budding ethnographers was to find a tribe and then to figure out the what (question) and how (method) of research. in the latter paradigm, methods and methodology courses are provided as vehicles to transfer knowledge to graduate students, who then are asked to apply what they presumably learned. Research studies have shown that in the first approach, students do not progress as far as they can because they generally do not benefit from the practices that a culture already has worked out (Delamont and atkinson, 2001). in the second approach, the problem lies in the fact that knowing is conceptualized apart from doing, so that there is no relationship between how well students do in university courses and how knowledgeable they are in enacting research. in recent years, a number of theoretical frameworks have gained ground, which, though different in their framing, have several underlying commonalities:

a focus on praxis as the relevant site for enacting and researching knowledge,

a corresponding focus on the particulars of the contextual, contingent and distributed aspects of knowing, and

a focus on the mutually constitutive nature of biography and history (for example, holland and lave, 2001).

all of those theories have in common that they are grounded in a structure/agency dialectic – whereby structures enable and constrain the observed actions, but actions are possible only because of available structures of consciousness and world (sewell, 1992).

From the perspective of praxis-oriented theories, doing research is but another form of human agency, characterized by its particular modus operandi. it is a particular mode of scientific production, which mediates cognition, perception and human action through the salient motive, tools, division of labour, community and attendant rules (Engeström, 1987). The research activity system in general and the individual and community of research practice in particular are produced and reproduced in each action oriented toward a goal that contributes to realizing the motive. Because formal learning environments and the world outside school differ with respect to the motive (doing well in a course versus producing publishable research), there normally is a gap between what students can learn in a research methods class and what they need to know when they do research on their own (Roth, 2005b).

in praxis-oriented theories, knowledgeability is understood in terms of activity motives, which means that it is expressed only in praxis itself. More so, numerous sociological studies have shown that what professionals say they have done and what they actually do may be incompatible and with it the competencies displayed in the two situations – praxis and talk about praxis. This has considerable consequences for learning: it is understood in terms of changing participation in a changing culturally mediated praxis (lave, 1993). a number of modes of thinking and doing, often the most vital ones in a particular practice, therefore are appropriated through participation in praxis involving face to face interactions. numerous ethnographic studies show that this also holds for accomplished scientists, who, when failing to reproduce a particular experiment or procedure based on protocols and published articles, tend to visit another laboratory where the relevant practices are already successfully enacted (collins, 2001). if experienced scientists often cannot reproduce a practice based on methods descriptions, how can we expect inexperienced graduate students to do so?

The upshot of such considerations is that to learn research method one has to participate in research praxis – which is the very site where graduate students in science learn research method and develop identities as scientists (Roth and Bowen, 2001). it is not surprising then that in his well-known workshop on the practice of reflexive sociology, Pierre Bourdieu (1992) states that there is no way to acquire research practices other than to make students experience it in practical operation or to experience how the scientific habitus realizes itself in the face of practical choices and dilemmas. Here, it is not sufficient to observe someone else doing research – for, as in watching sports on television, little is learned that allows observers to be competent practitioners themselves. Rather, newcomers have to enact research praxis so that they can find in their actions the relevance of the instructions they have received or read.

Praxis of Graduate Training

My own graduate students, therefore, begin to do research as soon as they enter their programme and my research group, both at the Ma and Phd levels. They generally are supported through some project for which i received funding so that through their research, the students realize the project and their theses. in the course of their two or three years, respectively, they produce a minimum of three and six international conference papers/research articles, respectively – and this independent of any prior skill that they might come with when they first enter my laboratory. They learn to do research by doing research: they learn to do interviews by first watching me and then increasingly taking over. They learn to analyse data by analysing data with me and then increasingly taking on the analysis themselves.

They also learn to write research articles by writing them with me, again requiring a lot of corrections and rewriting on my part until at the end of their programme, they are highly competent in writing research articles themselves.

Collecting data sources

To assist my students to develop data source collection practices, i spend some time with them in the field. For example, in the ethnographic study of a fish hatchery, a doctoral student and a research assistant began accompanying me after i had already established contact, achieved entry and received consent, and had begun data collection. The two were to take the project over from me. initially, they followed me around in the site and sat quietly at the table during the first interviews. later, they observed on their own, only occasionally touching base with me during the day when they had a question. in interviews, they began to ask questions all the while leaving me with the main responsibility of moving ahead.

increasingly, however, they took on more and more of the questioning until they conducted interviews on their own. a second doctoral student, whose thesis was almost entirely focused on the hatchery, learned to do ethnographic fieldwork in general, and interviewing more specifically, as he participated with others more experienced in these methods.

The hatchery was far away from our university, so that we decided to stay for periods of time. in the evenings, all members of the team met to discuss the events of the day. We wrote research notes before and after these evening meetings, and shared them with the others. in this way, the new researchers became aware of the phenomena that they had not been aware of before or they discovered that something they had observed had a particular relevance to the ongoing data collection.

These meetings also served as a means to reflect on our research practices.

Such reflection is a necessary component of the praxis approach, for learning to do research in general and to collect data in particular by doing what someone else does is limiting because it does not articulate the reasons for acting this or that way. on the other hand, the experience of collecting data was necessary for

the new researchers to reflect about the relevant aspect of research methods in the first place. That is, jointly collecting data and reflecting on data collection in the evening allowed these new researchers to learn by thoroughly practical means and by elaborating their practical understanding through critical reflection, which led to explanations of and for their actions.

having established a research group, i often no longer have to accompany new students into the field. Other participants in my group have developed sufficient competencies and become mentors of newcomers. Thus, in an ongoing project, a masters student, who had already spent five years within an environmentalist group, two of which as researcher for her Ma study, inducted a new doctoral student to the site where he, too, would conduct his research. he learned to write research notes from the institutionally junior person and conducted his first study under her auspices. Two years later, another Ma student wanted to work on a project involving the environmental group; this time, the Phd student inducted the new person to the field site, observation and interview methods. In turn, the new MA student became the mentor in the field site of an even more recent doctoral student. in this way of operating, the institutional status of a person reveals little about who is the teacher/mentor and who is the learner. Thus, one of my current graduate students had begun right after completing her undergraduate degree, a double major in anthropology and biology. after two years of working for me, and before beginning an interdisciplinary masters programme, she had developed such tremendous competencies that she came to mentor and induct doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows.

Analysing data sources

in my laboratory, graduate students learn to analyse data by participating in collective data analysis sessions. The sessions work like this. someone in the research group brings some data source he or she has collected, which could be a videotape, transcript, audio recording or any other material artefact from the field. We make the artefact available using a computer and video projector. After the owner of the data source has provided some background about the origin and context of the materials, we watch, listen to or read the materials presented. as soon as someone wants to make an interpretive comment, the owner of the data source stops the display. The person presents his or her comments, which may then lead to a discussion. during the discussion, and as a way of substantiating the divergent analyses that are put forth, the data source is replayed as often as needed.

These meetings are rich sources of ideas for how to frame the data sources, which theoretical frameworks apply, the nature of relevant theoretical constructs, possible categorizations, etc. Thus, we usually do not get beyond a few seconds or minutes into a videotape before a two-hour meeting has come to its end. once participants feel that nothing else of substantive nature is to be added, the data source owner continues presenting materials.

To allow the data owner to participate in the discussion without having to worry about taking notes, we videotape each data analysis session. The data source owner then takes this secondary tape and extracts from it relevant categorizations and ideas. he or she usually moves to test the categories in the remainder of the entire set of data sources, which therefore constitutes the beginning of a grounded theory.

new members in the research group participate in the sessions, contributing and subsequently reflecting on others’ and their own contributions. If they are the data owners, they also have a set of diverging interpretations that they can test and play against one another in their personal search for sense and meaning. Because the members of my research group are engaged in very different studies, very different interpretative methods come to be enacted during the collective analysis.

Thus, video-based interaction, discourse, conversation and narrative analysis are but some of the forms new members in my research group would encounter on a regular basis.

Writing research

in most graduate programmes, the masters or doctoral thesis is viewed as evidence that students are capable of and have demonstrated research competence. Writing research thereby appears after the training period. There is a contradiction, however, in that many graduate students find it next to impossible to publish the results of their research. This shows that they have not yet developed the required competencies that would allow them successfully to enact this last phase of a research project. i believe that the writing phase is an integral part of becoming a researcher. My goal is that after someone has received an Ma or Phd degree, they can conduct and write research on their own. in the meantime, i participate to a decreasing degree in their writing for publication. here is how it works.

after having submitted their data sources to collective analysis – sometimes this will be repeatedly with the materials from a particular study – the graduate students continue the analysis, confirming and disconfirming hypothesized categories and writing draft analyses. at the same time, they engage in intensive reading of articles from the journal that they have tentatively chosen in which to publish their work. This prepares them for the genres of writing research acceptable to the audiences of the chosen journal. eventually, the students come to a point where they know the claims that they want to present and defend in a particular article. i ask them to write something resembling an abstract focusing entirely on the claims and then i work with them to identify exactly what the stated purpose of the article will be.

once students submit their drafts to me, i go beyond simply commenting and outlining what works and what does not work. i actually add and change some of the writing so that they see how something might be presented. our standard practice is to use a tracking feature so that students can follow the changes made and, if necessary, ask about why a particular change has been made. generally, i

do not rework the entire article but focus on one part, rework it to some extent, and then ask the student to work through the remainder following my example.

in the next round, i work on the revised section, again reworking parts of it and requesting further reworking to be done. in this way, we work through each section, allowing the student to rework section after section based on concrete contextualized examples of writing this, their own piece. in my reworking, i do not impose my own style but strive to rewrite in the manner of the student. My goal is to complete the writing so that the students feel that the article is theirs although they know it is not entirely theirs.

in my experience – especially with non-english speaking graduate students – I may rewrite as much as 95 per cent of an MA student’s first article; their third article requires a lot less change. at the end of a person’s doctoral study, having worked with me on a minimum of six publications, students write quality research articles almost entirely on their own. Writing together, as with collectively collecting data sources and doing data analysis, provides opportunities for tacit and explicit modes of instruction, and for reflection on the praxis of writing.

Research methods courses

Teaching research through working closely with students is evidently easier with a small number of students in a research group, where new students also learn from more senior students and postdoctoral fellows that are part of the community. Readers may think that the model is impossible when teaching classes and seminars. But this is not entirely the case. For the past 17 years, i have been teaching introductory quantitative and qualitative research methods. consistent with my emerging conceptual framework in cultural–historical activity theory, i introduce students to and develop their skilful engagement with research through authentic tasks. students design and conduct research in groups, which, because

In document Mark Garner, Claire Wagner, Barbara Kawulich Teaching Research Methods in the Social Sciences (1).pdf (Page 132-140)