As we have had so little class time, I see more, or perhaps I have created, the analogy/overlap between what we read in Becker Ch. 1, the three articles we read the week earlier, and our blog responses to prompts about two of those articles. One of Becker’s main points in Ch. 1 is that good writing emerges from many drafts and finally, great editing. Writing is an organic process of formulating and reformulating ideas until we articulate them coherently and clearly. We often begin confused about the points we want to make and how to make them. Editing is a different process and another set of skills. We are not good at editing our own writing, but other people are. We need to seek those people out, expose our writing to them, and allow them to edit our creations until, finally, the audience is clear about what we intend to say. The two processes are in tension and should not be mixed. The two processes are essential to producing well formulated ideas, arguments and points. We hide our writing from others, and we hide our ideas IN our writing. We fear being naked because others will notice our fat and hairy areas. They do and no matter how kindly they point out the imperfections, it always hurts a little bit. Here’s the analogy: As there is tension between writing and editing, there is tension between teacher and educational researcher. We need BOTH. Our tendency is to hide our vulnerability from the other in criticism and denigration (I fear I am not smart enough to do research, but I will say to you that you are unable to connect with people and understand what happens in the trenches and thus you are a researcher. I fear I am out of practice and unable to effectively teach, but I say to you that your small experience as a teacher is not on par with the significant research I do).
The two processes (teaching and research) are in tension and are essential to producing well-formulated inquiry and research that leads to meaningful conclusions and reasonable recommendations about practice. The two processes are in tension and essential to meaningful, generalizable teaching habits and practice that help us transform good ideas into sound theoretical framework and testable models.
Teacher and researcher must make themselves vulnerable to each other, expose what they are writing and doing, acknowledge it is a draft, and once ideas and experiences and arguments are clear, allow the editors in the room to slash the detritus and haul it away. The result? Whatever we do (practice) or theorize, test and conclude (research) is seen or read with greater clarity and consistency, and as what and how we intended.
The criticisms of educational research outlined in the first chapter of Pring are valid, especially from the viewpoint of funding agencies. If research is paid for, it is natural to believe that the investors are interested in getting some sort of return in their investment. In education, that is most likely improved test scores or classroom practices that lead to some sort of measurable positive outcome. This is why research evaluation is so valuable. In an age where funds are increasingly scarce, it is of paramount importance that a study (especially an intervention/experiment) is validated through evaluation of its effects. As was mentioned last week, it is difficult to see the value of much of the research that I read when it is not feasible for it to be effectively used in a real-world classroom.
As a student in the Educational Psychology track, reading Pring’s first two chapters was an exercise in conflict. On the one hand, Pring seems to make a heroic effort to extricate the term “educational research” from the social sciences. This is even more abundantly clear from the subtitle of the third chapter. On the other hand, much of his discussion about how to define the language used to describe education and research was tied to social, cultural, and political contexts, which seems to weave the social sciences back into the picture. I feel that “educational research” cannot be undertaken without the explicit acknowledgment of the cultural context, be it the family, the school, or the country, in which the research takes place. Taking context into account can either mean stipulating, as Pring states, or it can mean ignoring it completely by making the assumption that all of the stakeholders in the research have an implicit understanding of what the context is. There seems to be no true way to separate “education” from “social sciences.” This is why I am happy sitting on my little educational psychology bridge.
Becker is a fast read, full of obvious but useful advice that is worthy of turning into a book. I initially found his tone to be a tad snobbish: the tenured professor with 30 years of experience telling the novice how easy it is to sit down and write. Indeed, life affords a different view from the perch of success. Down here in the trenches, we must follow the conventions of our tradition if we want to get ahead.
Becker finally won me over with examples and explanations of crazy things people do when faced with the task of writing. I admit to being guilty of a few of those things myself. For instance, I use jargon when more straight forward language will do. The ESL teacher in me defends this behavior as my way of getting acquainted with new vocabulary. “Let’s use the word in a sentence.” Truthfully, I admit that I have used big words to impress others—tenured professors, colleagues, even family—in an attempt to sound smart. I can blame the indoctrination process of grad school, but I agree with Becker that it’s probably more about insecurity. Hmm.
I did take issue with Becker’s theory that these crazy writing behaviors have origins in how we learned to write. I checked the book’s date of publication and noticed it was 1986 / 2007. I agree that, in 1986, undergrads were writing privately, often churning out first drafts as a final product. However, by 2007, I think this trend had changed. Technology played/plays a big part in that change, providing opportunities for public writing and collaborating. Take this class blog as an example. Whatever we may think about social media, they provide ways for people to get out of their private writing mode and be public. Google applications are another example of public writing and collaboration. Bravo for some ways technology has actually helped us.
Turning back to class discussions on the tensions and “lowly status” of our discipline, with its “soft, applied” epistemology, I want to add to our point that human knowledge is created through the focused lens of a discipline, whatever that may be. That small bit we choose to illuminate as truth is, therefore, necessarily incomplete and contestable. How could it be otherwise? Whether a contrived laboratory experiment or a field study, we only see one sliver of a larger picture. I am reminded of the blind men describing the elephant: our concocted truths are always coming from a perspective. We are always already in the world we seek to explain. We are always already looking through a lens. In this respect, I say all disciplines are “marshy.” Education is not unique in its marshy-ness. Perhaps it’s our ability to understand our terrain that makes us different.
My thoughts are overshadowed by the evocative Clifford West lecture at the Siegel Center last night. Dr. West blasted us with his “Socratic message” of a human ontology: being human means we are part of wholeness. We share a collective history. We all come from someone, and that someone shaped who we are. Who we are and what we do to fill the space and time before death is what’s important. He talked of the need to focus on our existential relationships with each other and to acknowledge our human-ness.
For me, education research is a way to get at our existential relationships and human-ness (a point made in class more than a few times). Our soft, applied knowledge aims to bring about new understandings of what it means to be human in the endeavor of teaching and learning. Being human is messy, ugly, violent, beautiful, soft, hard, applied, pure, and who knows what else. Indeed, it’s a marsh! Acknowledging the marsh and its marshy-ness is my goal.
Geez, I feel like I’ve written a manifesto. Dr. West’s lecture truly moved me. Thanks for letting me be public—and part of the wholeness—with my thoughts.
We’ve spent the past two weeks in class discussing what we think we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Becker in chapter one seems to be describing the same questions of identify in scholarly writing. As Labaree insists that teachers are not prepared for educational research, in a similar manner, Becker asserts that life and scholarship before graduate school have not prepared us for writing about research. When he expresses concerns over the “pluralistic ignorance” of sociological writers, it addresses the supposed lowly status of social sciences and educational researchers that Labaree complains about. Becker’s descriptions of the naïve and unformed nature of undergraduate writing and the need for collaboration, editing, re-writing, and consideration of audience bring to mind Richardson’s discussion of stewardship in our discipline.
First of all, who is Clifford West? He must be Cornell's brother, or his big dog. Anyway, I am probably going to look at this from a different angle, as I am anticipating doing throughout this semester. In Chapter 1, Becker describes the community of that first class in which people who thought they knew each other pretty well actually had no idea of each others' work habits and writing (p. 5). I think this also describes our class pretty well. We all know each other pretty well, yet when it comes to our work (and likely other factors that influence our philosophy of education), we do not know each other. This is why I think having discussions like we do each class session - no matter the topic - is productive. We can learn about each others' thinking and writing and begin to understand that there is no such thing as One Right Way.
I also think back to the book entitled Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck. As writers, and also researchers, we are afraid of making such assertions that "A causes B" (p. 8). While I think there are many reasons that lead to this fact, one of them is we are afraid of being told that we are vulnerable and are afraid of being told we are wrong. If research displays that A does cause B, then make the statement. Of course, there are likely many variables at play in A causing B, which should also be presented, but we should not be afraid of presenting our research or writing for others in fear of it being criticized. If we - as well as the field - desire to grow, we must not be afraid of opposition.
I think that the most humorous component of what I read in Becker is that I was procrastinating sitting down to write this blog. I was finding everything and anything else to do except write this. I get what Becker was stating in regards to being fearful of others reading your work. I applaud the text and am happy to hear that others fear this as well. However, I do think that some of the information is a bit outdated, as I was always taught to write drafted work, from middle school onward. Peers were always reading what I wrote and commenting on it.
I greatly enjoyed the description of how the students took apart the professor’s written work. It was a nice exemplification of how many (I am still not convinced all) do not write well initially. I have also noticed during my one year in the graduate program, the encouragement of creating writing groups (if I only had the time to join one), my professors talking about colleagues reading their work, and the involvement of others in what you do and to make your voice clearer.
Like Susan Watson (Yes, I read some prior to writing this; again, I think that this illustrates my fear of being read.) I am guilty of writing very lengthy sentences with formal and I gather from what Becker said ‘wordy’ grammar to impress others. (I use “the way in which” instead of “how” when I teach my ESL students in writing, for they often struggle with the meaning of “how” but can grasp “the way in which”…At least that is my excuse.) On our first day of class, I was going to tell everyone how to get rid of the preposition at the end of the sentence, but I refrained. I have gotten better at being brief and getting to the point thanks to one very honest professor from last year. I learned a lot as I would read and re-read thinking, “Is this necessary?”
I suppose if I had to make a connection between what Becker wrote and what we have discussed in class thus far, it would be that we have to hone in on our writing and make it precise. Perhaps more ‘exactness’ in how we write may make our ‘profession’ and the research which it entails more respectable. (I think that another classmate, maybe Penny, mentioned this as well.) If we are seen as “less”, then our writing needs to be the best to be respected.
The overlap I see between Becker and our class discussions so far is how academic writing is frequently redundant, pretentious, and/or non-committal (e.g. making BS qualifications). I think that gets at some of the criticisms of education research outlined in the first chapter of Pring such as inaccessibility and irrelevance. I read an article recently that said lay people consider the findings of educational research to be too uncertain to be useful. Going back to my first blog post, when I talked about my initial perceptions of research last year- I remember being frustrated with all the caveats at the end of every study I read. I would think, “Why can’t you just say ‘this was shown to be effective’, without all of the ‘but’s’?” Addressing some of the problems with academic writing that Becker points out *would go a long way* to improve the perception of academic writing with people outside of the academy.
*In the spirit of Becker I left out the word ‘probably’ from my claim :-)
As we have had so little class time, I see more, or perhaps I have created, the analogy/overlap between what we read in Becker Ch. 1, the three articles we read the week earlier, and our blog responses to prompts about two of those articles.
ReplyDeleteOne of Becker’s main points in Ch. 1 is that good writing emerges from many drafts and finally, great editing.
Writing is an organic process of formulating and reformulating ideas until we articulate them coherently and clearly. We often begin confused about the points we want to make and how to make them.
Editing is a different process and another set of skills. We are not good at editing our own writing, but other people are. We need to seek those people out, expose our writing to them, and allow them to edit our creations until, finally, the audience is clear about what we intend to say.
The two processes are in tension and should not be mixed. The two processes are essential to producing well formulated ideas, arguments and points.
We hide our writing from others, and we hide our ideas IN our writing. We fear being naked because others will notice our fat and hairy areas. They do and no matter how kindly they point out the imperfections, it always hurts a little bit.
Here’s the analogy: As there is tension between writing and editing, there is tension between teacher and educational researcher. We need BOTH. Our tendency is to hide our vulnerability from the other in criticism and denigration (I fear I am not smart enough to do research, but I will say to you that you are unable to connect with people and understand what happens in the trenches and thus you are a researcher. I fear I am out of practice and unable to effectively teach, but I say to you that your small experience as a teacher is not on par with the significant research I do).
The two processes (teaching and research) are in tension and are essential to producing well-formulated inquiry and research that leads to meaningful conclusions and reasonable recommendations about practice. The two processes are in tension and essential to meaningful, generalizable teaching habits and practice that help us transform good ideas into sound theoretical framework and testable models.
Teacher and researcher must make themselves vulnerable to each other, expose what they are writing and doing, acknowledge it is a draft, and once ideas and experiences and arguments are clear, allow the editors in the room to slash the detritus and haul it away. The result? Whatever we do (practice) or theorize, test and conclude (research) is seen or read with greater clarity and consistency, and as what and how we intended.
The criticisms of educational research outlined in the first chapter of Pring are valid, especially from the viewpoint of funding agencies. If research is paid for, it is natural to believe that the investors are interested in getting some sort of return in their investment. In education, that is most likely improved test scores or classroom practices that lead to some sort of measurable positive outcome. This is why research evaluation is so valuable. In an age where funds are increasingly scarce, it is of paramount importance that a study (especially an intervention/experiment) is validated through evaluation of its effects. As was mentioned last week, it is difficult to see the value of much of the research that I read when it is not feasible for it to be effectively used in a real-world classroom.
ReplyDeleteAs a student in the Educational Psychology track, reading Pring’s first two chapters was an exercise in conflict. On the one hand, Pring seems to make a heroic effort to extricate the term “educational research” from the social sciences. This is even more abundantly clear from the subtitle of the third chapter. On the other hand, much of his discussion about how to define the language used to describe education and research was tied to social, cultural, and political contexts, which seems to weave the social sciences back into the picture. I feel that “educational research” cannot be undertaken without the explicit acknowledgment of the cultural context, be it the family, the school, or the country, in which the research takes place. Taking context into account can either mean stipulating, as Pring states, or it can mean ignoring it completely by making the assumption that all of the stakeholders in the research have an implicit understanding of what the context is. There seems to be no true way to separate “education” from “social sciences.” This is why I am happy sitting on my little educational psychology bridge.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBecker is a fast read, full of obvious but useful advice that is worthy of turning into a book. I initially found his tone to be a tad snobbish: the tenured professor with 30 years of experience telling the novice how easy it is to sit down and write. Indeed, life affords a different view from the perch of success. Down here in the trenches, we must follow the conventions of our tradition if we want to get ahead.
ReplyDeleteBecker finally won me over with examples and explanations of crazy things people do when faced with the task of writing. I admit to being guilty of a few of those things myself. For instance, I use jargon when more straight forward language will do. The ESL teacher in me defends this behavior as my way of getting acquainted with new vocabulary. “Let’s use the word in a sentence.” Truthfully, I admit that I have used big words to impress others—tenured professors, colleagues, even family—in an attempt to sound smart. I can blame the indoctrination process of grad school, but I agree with Becker that it’s probably more about insecurity. Hmm.
I did take issue with Becker’s theory that these crazy writing behaviors have origins in how we learned to write. I checked the book’s date of publication and noticed it was 1986 / 2007. I agree that, in 1986, undergrads were writing privately, often churning out first drafts as a final product. However, by 2007, I think this trend had changed. Technology played/plays a big part in that change, providing opportunities for public writing and collaborating. Take this class blog as an example. Whatever we may think about social media, they provide ways for people to get out of their private writing mode and be public. Google applications are another example of public writing and collaboration. Bravo for some ways technology has actually helped us.
Turning back to class discussions on the tensions and “lowly status” of our discipline, with its “soft, applied” epistemology, I want to add to our point that human knowledge is created through the focused lens of a discipline, whatever that may be. That small bit we choose to illuminate as truth is, therefore, necessarily incomplete and contestable. How could it be otherwise? Whether a contrived laboratory experiment or a field study, we only see one sliver of a larger picture. I am reminded of the blind men describing the elephant: our concocted truths are always coming from a perspective. We are always already in the world we seek to explain. We are always already looking through a lens. In this respect, I say all disciplines are “marshy.” Education is not unique in its marshy-ness. Perhaps it’s our ability to understand our terrain that makes us different.
My thoughts are overshadowed by the evocative Clifford West lecture at the Siegel Center last night. Dr. West blasted us with his “Socratic message” of a human ontology: being human means we are part of wholeness. We share a collective history. We all come from someone, and that someone shaped who we are. Who we are and what we do to fill the space and time before death is what’s important. He talked of the need to focus on our existential relationships with each other and to acknowledge our human-ness.
For me, education research is a way to get at our existential relationships and human-ness (a point made in class more than a few times). Our soft, applied knowledge aims to bring about new understandings of what it means to be human in the endeavor of teaching and learning. Being human is messy, ugly, violent, beautiful, soft, hard, applied, pure, and who knows what else. Indeed, it’s a marsh! Acknowledging the marsh and its marshy-ness is my goal.
Geez, I feel like I’ve written a manifesto. Dr. West’s lecture truly moved me. Thanks for letting me be public—and part of the wholeness—with my thoughts.
Darn it. It's Cornell West. Forgive my dumb mistake!
DeleteWe’ve spent the past two weeks in class discussing what we think we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Becker in chapter one seems to be describing the same questions of identify in scholarly writing. As Labaree insists that teachers are not prepared for educational research, in a similar manner, Becker asserts that life and scholarship before graduate school have not prepared us for writing about research. When he expresses concerns over the “pluralistic ignorance” of sociological writers, it addresses the supposed lowly status of social sciences and educational researchers that Labaree complains about. Becker’s descriptions of the naïve and unformed nature of undergraduate writing and the need for collaboration, editing, re-writing, and consideration of audience bring to mind Richardson’s discussion of stewardship in our discipline.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, who is Clifford West? He must be Cornell's brother, or his big dog. Anyway, I am probably going to look at this from a different angle, as I am anticipating doing throughout this semester. In Chapter 1, Becker describes the community of that first class in which people who thought they knew each other pretty well actually had no idea of each others' work habits and writing (p. 5). I think this also describes our class pretty well. We all know each other pretty well, yet when it comes to our work (and likely other factors that influence our philosophy of education), we do not know each other. This is why I think having discussions like we do each class session - no matter the topic - is productive. We can learn about each others' thinking and writing and begin to understand that there is no such thing as One Right Way.
ReplyDeleteI also think back to the book entitled Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck. As writers, and also researchers, we are afraid of making such assertions that "A causes B" (p. 8). While I think there are many reasons that lead to this fact, one of them is we are afraid of being told that we are vulnerable and are afraid of being told we are wrong. If research displays that A does cause B, then make the statement. Of course, there are likely many variables at play in A causing B, which should also be presented, but we should not be afraid of presenting our research or writing for others in fear of it being criticized. If we - as well as the field - desire to grow, we must not be afraid of opposition.
Susan Dudley here
ReplyDeleteI think that the most humorous component of what I read in Becker is that I was procrastinating sitting down to write this blog. I was finding everything and anything else to do except write this. I get what Becker was stating in regards to being fearful of others reading your work. I applaud the text and am happy to hear that others fear this as well. However, I do think that some of the information is a bit outdated, as I was always taught to write drafted work, from middle school onward. Peers were always reading what I wrote and commenting on it.
I greatly enjoyed the description of how the students took apart the professor’s written work. It was a nice exemplification of how many (I am still not convinced all) do not write well initially. I have also noticed during my one year in the graduate program, the encouragement of creating writing groups (if I only had the time to join one), my professors talking about colleagues reading their work, and the involvement of others in what you do and to make your voice clearer.
Like Susan Watson (Yes, I read some prior to writing this; again, I think that this illustrates my fear of being read.) I am guilty of writing very lengthy sentences with formal and I gather from what Becker said ‘wordy’ grammar to impress others. (I use “the way in which” instead of “how” when I teach my ESL students in writing, for they often struggle with the meaning of “how” but can grasp “the way in which”…At least that is my excuse.) On our first day of class, I was going to tell everyone how to get rid of the preposition at the end of the sentence, but I refrained. I have gotten better at being brief and getting to the point thanks to one very honest professor from last year. I learned a lot as I would read and re-read thinking, “Is this necessary?”
I suppose if I had to make a connection between what Becker wrote and what we have discussed in class thus far, it would be that we have to hone in on our writing and make it precise. Perhaps more ‘exactness’ in how we write may make our ‘profession’ and the research which it entails more respectable. (I think that another classmate, maybe Penny, mentioned this as well.) If we are seen as “less”, then our writing needs to be the best to be respected.
The overlap I see between Becker and our class discussions so far is how academic writing is frequently redundant, pretentious, and/or non-committal (e.g. making BS qualifications). I think that gets at some of the criticisms of education research outlined in the first chapter of Pring such as inaccessibility and irrelevance. I read an article recently that said lay people consider the findings of educational research to be too uncertain to be useful. Going back to my first blog post, when I talked about my initial perceptions of research last year- I remember being frustrated with all the caveats at the end of every study I read. I would think, “Why can’t you just say ‘this was shown to be effective’, without all of the ‘but’s’?” Addressing some of the problems with academic writing that Becker points out *would go a long way* to improve the perception of academic writing with people outside of the academy.
ReplyDelete*In the spirit of Becker I left out the word ‘probably’ from my claim :-)