How will you know that you yourself aren’t just wrapped up in your own nexus? Are there things that you “just know”? Be alert to the ways your own assumptions influence your research lens. Finally, there’s the necessity of looking inward, something teachers don’t usually do when assessing student learning.
The first step is checking how your assumptions shape your interpretations. Look over your reflections or your observations and ask three questions suggested by Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater (2012), p. 87): “What surprised me? What intrigued me? What disturbed me?”
In this exploration, I’ve reframed the three questions to connect to the three core concepts of nexus analysis: historical bodies, interaction orders, and discourses in place.
1. What surprises you? (What are your embodied expectations?) This question reveals challenges to your assumptions and opens an opportunity to revisit and record any changes to your preconceived notions.
2. What intrigues you? (What are you bringing to the interaction order?) This question attends to your interests and your positioning, which shape the focus of your research gaze. How are your personal preferences, power, and tastes shaping what you see? What is being overlooked?
3. What disturbs me? (Which discourses are you circulating?) This question reveals tensions among discourses circulating in your site, and will help you understand your relationship to these discourses. Looking at what disturbs you exposes your own (probably tacit) beliefs within a discourse, and tensions with other discourses make these visible so that you can situate yourself among the swirl of discourses here.