Medios de Comunicación y Recursos Audiovisuales

Bruno Latour (1999) begins his book, Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies, with a vignette detailing a conversation that he had with a scientist while

(1999) recounts his surprise at being asked apprehensively by a scientist, “Do you believe in reality?” (p. 1). To Latour (1999) this question reflected the scientist’s fear that his aim in writing and philosophizing about science was to devalue scientific ways of knowing. Latour (1999) describes his shock in learning that the scientist felt threatened by his research. He had thought that he was, “in it together” with scientists. I retell this story now in order to remind readers unfamiliar with qualitative research that my goal in conducting this research project is to promote students’ engagement with the sciences, not to establish the superiority of qualitative research over quantitative scientific research. With this in mind, I turn now to a description of the ontological and epistemological orientations behind various research paradigms.

Researchers in the social, behavioral and cognitive sciences employ a variety of research paradigms in their work. For example, psycholinguistic researchers completing experimental studies working under the positivist paradigm assume that one reality exists (ontology) and that the “knower is distinct from the known” (Hatch 2002, p. 13). The goal of most positivist research is to make predictions (Glesne, 2011). Glesne (2011) identifies three additional research paradigms: interpretivism (including constructivism and phenomenological research), critical theory, and poststructuralism. Interpretivist research, such as work completed within constructivism, assumes that multiple realities exist and that these realities are co-constructed by the researcher and the participants (Hatch, 2002). Glesne (2011) cites understanding (as opposed to prediction) as the goal of interpretivist research, and she labels ethnography as an interpretivist methodology. However, Ethnography has a long and storied past stemming from its development in the field of anthropology and subsequent use in other fields.

Although early ethnographic work was conducted under positivist or

postpositivist (i.e., reality exists but can never fully be comprehended) assumptions (e.g., Evans-Pritchard, 1937), education researchers today use ethnography in conjunction with other frameworks, including constructivist (e.g., Carlone et al. 2011), critical (e.g., Calabrese Barton, 2001) and poststructuralist (e.g., Duff, 2002) approaches. Thus, an ethnography could be conducted using postpositivist assumptions in which reality can be studied, captured, and understood. In these frameworks, the researcher is distinct from what is being researched. Or, under a constructivist approach, multiple realities are thought to exist and the researcher is inseparable from what is being researched. Glesne (2011) maintains that ethnography conducted under an interpretivist framework assumes that, “reality is socially constructed, complex, and ever changing” (p.8), and that

ethnographers seek to understand or “access others’ interpretations of some social phenomenon” (p. 8). Though interpretive research can document patterns, the goal of doing so is not to make global predictions but rather to show how participants understand and interact with others in their social worlds (Glesne, 2011).

Rymes (2001) provides an example of an interpretivist approach to

microethnography in which she studies language use as a means of revealing what is important to speakers in their local context (in this case, students in an alternative charter high school). Rymes (2001) invokes the notion of coauthorship to explain how discourses are constructed. She claims that, “because speakers are always designing their utterances according to their interlocutors’ reactions, the audience becomes ‘coauthor’ of the speech of any individual” (p. 14). In addition to working from a constructivist position that views discourses as co-constructed by participants, I also acknowledge that in collecting data, I

too am a co-author of these data. My selection of when and what to record, how to record, and the camera angles I selected were part of the data collection process, as were my choices during transcription. For this reason, I refer to data collection also as data construction. Just as participants negotiate power in their interactions, I recognize that my position as researcher afforded me positions of power and powerlessness at different moments over the course of this study.

Chapter 2 (Section 2.1) described power as integral to learning and social identification. Because of this, no use or instance of language is neutral or autonomous (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart-Faris, 2005). Critical research frameworks claim that knowledge is subjective and political (Hatch, 2002), and that race, class, gender and language affect one’s understanding of the world. This study is both

interpretivist (Glesne, 2011) and critical, taking the stance that the patterns of language use that are constructed by participants draw from multiple timescales and also have local meanings and consequences. My definition of critical differs from approaches that

involve participants in the study design (e.g., critical ethnography, Calabrese Barton, 2001). Although most critical studies work towards transforming social structures that systematically marginalize people, critical studies are not necessarily transformative for participants (e.g., Alemán, 2006 and 2009). This study is critical because it seeks to identify barriers to equitable participation in science for one group of language learners even though the participants themselves were not involved in the study design.

Before moving to a discussion of the setting and research methods employed in this study, I address two common criticisms of qualitative research: lack of

value of the ontological and epistemological positions of this study. The criticisms stem from attempts to apply positivist notions of reality (that there is one reality and that it can be described) to research conducted using other frameworks that view realities as

multiple and never fully describable.

One criticism of qualitative research rests on the claim that the results of such work are not generalizable (Duff, 2008). However, this criticism fails to recognize the strengths of qualitative case study and ethnographic research. Ethnographic research can reveal the social and linguistic processes that explain variation within groups. Let us imagine a quasi-experimental study aimed at determining the effectiveness of a particular type of instruction. In this scenario a researcher seeks to compare two groups of students with respect to their performance on a particular assessment as a result of two different instructional treatments. The experiences of individuals become reduced to numbers that represent their performance on a task, presumably as a result of some treatment (in this case, type of instruction). If the performances of the students in the two, treatment groups result in a statistically significant difference in mean scores on the assessment, the

researcher may conclude that a particular type of instruction was effective in promoting the intended results. Crucially, the assumption is that this type of instruction would yield similar results for the population of subjects who participated in the study (e.g., college freshman in their first semester of foreign language study). In this case generalizability to other contexts is the goal of the research project.

If we imagine that an administrator in a university language program reads the results of this study and adopts a policy that requires language instructors to use the type of instruction described in this study, the stakeholders in this context are likely to develop

questions that cannot be answered by using a purely positivist orientation. For example, why do some of our students struggle with this instructional practice more than others? How are different teachers implementing this type of instruction in their classrooms and what are the local consequences of these differences? How does this type of instruction impact learners’ development of identities as speakers of the target language? In this scenario, the tools to address these questions in ways that are meaningful for these stakeholders would come from qualitative research. The resulting descriptions of local phenomena would be useful to people in other settings who were also using this type of instruction. In this way, case studies seek to provide in depth explanations of what is true for some, not what is true of the many (Merriam, 1998, as cited in Duff, 2008).

Critics of qualitative research also misunderstand the importance of subjectivity. According to Stake (1995, as cited in Duff, 2008), “subjectivity is not seen as a failing needing to be eliminated but as an essential element of understanding” (p. 56). The notion of participant-observation is built on the recognition that researchers must become partial subjects of the community that they are studying in order to access emic knowledge. What does it mean to be objective when one works from the premise that there are multiple realities that can never be fully understood? What is gained from embracing subjectivity?

Heath (1983) used ethnography as an instructional method with a science teacher and a set of young learners who had historically earned low scores on district science assessments. Heath (1983) helped the students and teacher to engage in their own ethnographic study of the local farming community, which led them to produce a hybrid text that discussed the farming history and local knowledge of science in the community

alongside descriptions of biological phenomena in scientific terms. On a subsequent science assessment all of the students who participated in the project scored at or above grade level. The ethnographic research that led Heath (1983) to engage in this project was subjective, as was the student research. Heath and Street (2008) caution novice

ethnographers to avoid “why” questions and instead favor “what is happening” questions. Heath and Street (2008) remind novices that, “the goals of the social sciences, including anthropology, do not conform to the interests of forgone conclusions based in faith and value judgments about what is true, wonderful, or good, or what is false, ugly, or evil” (p. 35). Though ethnographers are data collection instruments, their role is not to actively attach values to the actions of the participants whom they study.

In the following section of this dissertation I detail some of the methods that ethnographers use to safeguard the production of their data so that they represent the perspectives of participants in addition to the perspectives of the researcher and so that researchers’ biases are made explicit. Finally, it is important to note that objectivity is a socially and linguistically constructed stance (as discussed previously in Section 2.3.2). It is important to remember that these are cultural products as opposed to universal truths. All research is subjective because, “using personal judgment in making research

decisions, framing studies based on earlier research, and drawing interpretations and conclusions are involved in all research” (Duff, 2008, p. 55).