●  Opening Exercise: Definition of terms.

○      Break students into groups of 2-3 and have groups write definitions of the following terms on the board:

■  Culture

■      Social systems

●  Brief lecture, introducing Anthropology and Sociology as roots of contemporary qualitative inquiry in education. Draw from students’ definitions of culture and social systems to differentiate and connect between the aims of Anthropology and Sociology.  

○  Pre-Activity slides: https://sites.google.com/view/qual-historicalthinking/home

●  Recommended Sources:

○      Cooley, A. (2013). Qualitative research in education: the origins, debates, and politics of creating knowledge. Educational Studies, 49(3), 247–247.

○      Bogdan, R. & S. Biklen (2010). Foundations of Qualitative Research in Education In W. Luttrell (Eds.) Qualitative educational research: readings in reflexive methodology and transformative practice (pp. 21-44). Routledge.

○      King, C. (2019). Gods of the upper air: How a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century. Doubleday.

Break students into 4 groups:

o   Margaret Mead

o   Ernest Burgess

o   W.E.B Du Bois

o   Abraham Flexner

 Within groups, students look individually at materials (see materials page) for their assigned researchers.

o   Students spend 5 minutes looking at the range of materials under their assigned researcher. Each student then selects one piece of material for their researcher. They are instructed to choose something that shows something about the research process—about how their researcher conducted their study.

o    Students complete a “look form” for the piece that they chose: https://forms.gle/SDyvQYaUw6NWB4bu9

o   After all students complete the form, they share the material they chose with their group members.

o   Faculty member circulates in the room, listening in as students talk in groups or work individually.

Discussion for Understanding: Faculty member projects student responses to the look form on the board, talking through questions, responses, etc.

o   What are you seeing?

o   What are you wondering about?

o   What decisions do you see the researchers making?

Faculty member writes a list of decisions on the board, situating those decisions within the major stages of the research process (design, data collection, analysis, presentation).

Discussion for Research Practice: Faculty member facilitates whole class discussion of the researcher’s relationship to their participants. Using the following questions and mapping students’ responses on the board.

o   What can you see about the researchers’ relationships with their participants?

o   What research practices do you see here that you would want to apply in your work? Why?

o   What research practices would you not want to employ? Why?

Closing Reflection: Students do 5-minute free-write. What did this exercise show you about the process of doing qualitative research?

Implications for Educational Research: Building on students’ responses re: what they would do differently, discuss how the field of education agrees. Discuss how the field has changed over time and the development of reflective practices in research that have supported that growth.

o   Educational Research as a Field

• (Often) located in schools of education

• Educational researchers draw from multiple disciplines: Psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and many more.

• Research designed and produced by educators:

·   Gloria Ladson-Billings: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

·   Deborah Lowenberg Ball: Investigation in Mathematics Education

·   Lee Shulman: Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Standpoint: Introduce the concept of the researcher’s “standpoint”; defined as the researcher’s prior, socioculturally constructed knowledge and beliefs that they bring to the research process (LeCompte & Schensul, 2010; Peshkin, 1988).