Inquiry #24

What’s NOT Moving?

Perhaps you have experienced a surprising, assumption-challenging, mind-blowing “nexus moment” that caused you to reconsider the ordinary activities that you’ve experienced in everyday life. Adopting a change-orientation to research starts with challenging our own assumptions about what counts as research, learning, and literacy. For example, if we assume that research is an emergent process where transformation is commonplace rather than a surprising rarity, we would look for “stuck places,” evidence of moments when converging forces keep things from moving along.

One implication of this shift in perspective is the need to expand conventional representations of time and space to track patterns of activity as flows. For example, many transcripts are organized by time stamps, slicing up time into utterances or turns of talk. Conventions for print transcripts represent this slicing up of time by organizing the data vertically in lines of text, speaker identified first, followed by words and bracketed action or scene description. A video clip represents a temporal strip of activity that segments space as well as time through the camera’s framing. In this way, video data present an already-framed construction of the participants’ experience. But using computerized video analysis tools, it’s possible to consider a wider sampling of space—that is, a flow in a multi-centered spatial orientation—by syncing data from multiple camera angles to provide a combination of perspectives that broaden our view or enable comparisons of spatial segments at the same moment.