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skoolboy's Platinum Law of Educational Research
eduwonkette's "Iron Law of Qualitative Research in Education" is that the number of participants in the study should exceed the number of authors on the paper. Ha-ha, very funny, but the subtext is that (a) we cannot learn anything of value from studies that have small sample sizes; (b) qualitative research often has small samples; (c) therefore, we can't learn very much from qualitative research. Eduwonkette would protest that that's not what she's saying at all—"qualitative research is critical to educational research and policy," and I know that she does believe this. But poking fun at a paper reporting qualitative data without explaining why does her readers, and those who believe that qualitative research can be of great value, a disservice. I'd like to upgrade eduwonkette's Iron Law to skoolboy's Platinum Law of Educational Research: Poorly designed and conceived research is poorly designed and conceived research, regardless of the sample size.
I'll leave a defense of research using small samples for another day, and focus on why I think that the paper eduwonkette drew to our attention is poorly designed and conceived. I don't want to go on too long about this—there's a lot more to say than will hold the attention of casual readers—but here's the gist. The authors claim that teaching for social justice evokes a range of emotions in novice teachers, and they seek to understand the strategies that teachers use to navigate their emotional responses, and the implications of those strategies for their self-understandings and practices. I found the concept of socially just teaching confusing, but I'll accept the possibility that there are teacher education programs and novice teachers that are committed to the idea of teaching in ways that promote the life chances of members of marginalized groups in society, such as the poor and racial/ethnic minorities. In this paper, teaching for social justice is taken for granted as a good thing, which I know vexes some readers here, and the study seeks to build on previous work on emotions and emotional navigation in teaching. It's not news that teachers often express ambivalence about their work, and that they might struggle with how to respond to feelings of ambivalence.
The authors introduce the term critical emotional praxis to characterize the role of emotions in socially just teaching. This is not an analytic term emerging from their analysis of data on how teachers manage emotions in their work; rather it is a normative term—that is, a term that describes what the authors think the role of emotions in teaching for social justice should be. In their view, critical emotional praxis involves understanding the role of emotions in engaging with unequal power relations in classrooms and society; acknowledges the interplay between a teacher's local context and her emotional responses; and moves from a theoretical understanding of emotion to a practical set of relationships and teaching practices that promote teaching for social justice. I find this concept to be of minimal value for research purposes, since it has no apparent relationship with observations of teachers' practices and emotional states.
The purpose of the study is to describe how a novice teacher seeking to teach for social justice navigates her ambivalent emotions. The authors don't offer an explanation of why a case study of a single teacher is appropriate to address the questions they pose about emotional navigation in teaching. In this particular study, one of the authors observed the teacher for 80 minutes per day during the final 9-week period of her first year of teaching, and interviewed the teacher six times for two to three hours at a clip. The teacher's department chair and 10 students were interviewed as well. A year later, an author interviewed the teacher once for three hours, and did two more 80-minute classroom observations. Although the authors acknowledge some of the problems associated with the fact that the subject of the study was a former student of one of the authors, a teacher educator who taught her about socially just teaching, these problems are not adequately addressed in the research design.
What are some of the key findings of the research? One pertains to the teacher's mode of response to her emotions. The teacher, Sara, began seeing a professional counselor in December of her second year of teaching. She also enrolled in a course on nonviolent communication, and began sponsoring her school's forensics team. These three concrete modes of response, the authors contend, gave her insight into her self and emotions, and provided concrete strategies for relaxing, having fun, and balancing her feelings of sadness stemming from her observations of social injustice. With what consequences? She quit teaching, leaving her school and volunteering at an orphanage and school in a developing country.
What's wrong with this picture? I think the authors lacked a theory of when novice teachers might develop feelings of ambivalence and seek out strategies for coping with them. In this study, most of the action took place in the teacher's second year of teaching, and the primary source of data on these strategies is a retrospective interview conducted at the end of the second year. Therefore, the authors missed most of the action, and can only provide a bare-bones understanding of even this one case. Moreover, the fact that this teacher left the field of teaching raises serious questions about whether this case can inform teacher education in the ways that the authors hope. One reading of the results is that the teacher's leaving of the field is prima facie evidence that her strategies for coping with the feelings of ambivalence associated with seeking to teach for social justice didn't work; and although we can certainly learn from strategies that don't work, a study that shows strategies that do work would likely be more valuable.
The problem with this paper is that the intellectual payoff is nowhere near commensurate with the amount of space it took up in a major journal—45 journal pages, from start to finish. I agree with eduwonkette that it doesn't reflect well on the field of education research to have papers which make marginal contributions taking up so much airtime, and the time I spent reading this paper is lost forever—time that I could have spent in other, more valuable ways, like updating my Facebook page or grading papers.
But: the take-away message here is not that a study with a small sample—even an N of 1!—cannot contribute new knowledge to the field of educational research. It's that a badly designed and executed study won't contribute much. And bad design and execution have to do with a lot more than sample size.
I'll leave a defense of research using small samples for another day, and focus on why I think that the paper eduwonkette drew to our attention is poorly designed and conceived. I don't want to go on too long about this—there's a lot more to say than will hold the attention of casual readers—but here's the gist. The authors claim that teaching for social justice evokes a range of emotions in novice teachers, and they seek to understand the strategies that teachers use to navigate their emotional responses, and the implications of those strategies for their self-understandings and practices. I found the concept of socially just teaching confusing, but I'll accept the possibility that there are teacher education programs and novice teachers that are committed to the idea of teaching in ways that promote the life chances of members of marginalized groups in society, such as the poor and racial/ethnic minorities. In this paper, teaching for social justice is taken for granted as a good thing, which I know vexes some readers here, and the study seeks to build on previous work on emotions and emotional navigation in teaching. It's not news that teachers often express ambivalence about their work, and that they might struggle with how to respond to feelings of ambivalence.
The authors introduce the term critical emotional praxis to characterize the role of emotions in socially just teaching. This is not an analytic term emerging from their analysis of data on how teachers manage emotions in their work; rather it is a normative term—that is, a term that describes what the authors think the role of emotions in teaching for social justice should be. In their view, critical emotional praxis involves understanding the role of emotions in engaging with unequal power relations in classrooms and society; acknowledges the interplay between a teacher's local context and her emotional responses; and moves from a theoretical understanding of emotion to a practical set of relationships and teaching practices that promote teaching for social justice. I find this concept to be of minimal value for research purposes, since it has no apparent relationship with observations of teachers' practices and emotional states.
The purpose of the study is to describe how a novice teacher seeking to teach for social justice navigates her ambivalent emotions. The authors don't offer an explanation of why a case study of a single teacher is appropriate to address the questions they pose about emotional navigation in teaching. In this particular study, one of the authors observed the teacher for 80 minutes per day during the final 9-week period of her first year of teaching, and interviewed the teacher six times for two to three hours at a clip. The teacher's department chair and 10 students were interviewed as well. A year later, an author interviewed the teacher once for three hours, and did two more 80-minute classroom observations. Although the authors acknowledge some of the problems associated with the fact that the subject of the study was a former student of one of the authors, a teacher educator who taught her about socially just teaching, these problems are not adequately addressed in the research design.
What are some of the key findings of the research? One pertains to the teacher's mode of response to her emotions. The teacher, Sara, began seeing a professional counselor in December of her second year of teaching. She also enrolled in a course on nonviolent communication, and began sponsoring her school's forensics team. These three concrete modes of response, the authors contend, gave her insight into her self and emotions, and provided concrete strategies for relaxing, having fun, and balancing her feelings of sadness stemming from her observations of social injustice. With what consequences? She quit teaching, leaving her school and volunteering at an orphanage and school in a developing country.
What's wrong with this picture? I think the authors lacked a theory of when novice teachers might develop feelings of ambivalence and seek out strategies for coping with them. In this study, most of the action took place in the teacher's second year of teaching, and the primary source of data on these strategies is a retrospective interview conducted at the end of the second year. Therefore, the authors missed most of the action, and can only provide a bare-bones understanding of even this one case. Moreover, the fact that this teacher left the field of teaching raises serious questions about whether this case can inform teacher education in the ways that the authors hope. One reading of the results is that the teacher's leaving of the field is prima facie evidence that her strategies for coping with the feelings of ambivalence associated with seeking to teach for social justice didn't work; and although we can certainly learn from strategies that don't work, a study that shows strategies that do work would likely be more valuable.
The problem with this paper is that the intellectual payoff is nowhere near commensurate with the amount of space it took up in a major journal—45 journal pages, from start to finish. I agree with eduwonkette that it doesn't reflect well on the field of education research to have papers which make marginal contributions taking up so much airtime, and the time I spent reading this paper is lost forever—time that I could have spent in other, more valuable ways, like updating my Facebook page or grading papers.
But: the take-away message here is not that a study with a small sample—even an N of 1!—cannot contribute new knowledge to the field of educational research. It's that a badly designed and executed study won't contribute much. And bad design and execution have to do with a lot more than sample size.
I'm happy to accept the smackdown on all of your points but one - the sample size of 1 person.
Maybe I am just thinking about the wrong topics - can you give me some examples of research questions that could be answered with a sample size of 1?
I'm assuming that you're not talking about single-case experimental designs using quantitative analyses, which your nerdy IES friends are so fond of.
One form of question that a single case can address takes the form, "Does the phenomenon X exist in the world?" A single case study can serve as an "existence proof," although it might not be the most efficient design for doing so.
I worry, though, that casting this as a matter of "research questions that could be answered" is overly narrow, because generating research questions via a case study is a perfectly honorable form of research. It only takes a single case to create some intellectual tension between what we think we know and what we might like to know.
Personal favorites of single-case studies of individuals: David K. Cohen's classic "Mrs. Oublier" study of instructional reform in California, and Deborah Loewenberg Ball's studies of her own practice as an elementary math teacher.
But you are talking about case studies of individuals, and not the broader array of single case studies, aren't you? Because there's a much longer list of case studies of schools, reforms, etc. at our beck and call.
The Platinum & Iron Laws are not mutually exclusive. I agree with both, with one qualification: like the Platinum Law, the Iron Law applies to both qualitative & quantitative research. To put my prejudice out in the open, I am a number-cruncher, but I recognize the value of good qualitative research. I do not, however, care much for what I call "personal history as research." Too many of those "studies" belong under the heading of essays rather than research.
Yes on hypothesis generation - but maybe the follow-up study is what belongs in the journal, not the study attempting to generate hypotheses.
Yes, my concern is with study of individuals, who I would guess are more idiosyncratic than organizations - though many of the same issues can be raised.
I like the Oublier (Outlier?) study too, but wouldn't it have been even better if he had two other teachers? How hard is it to study three teachers?
"Yes on hypothesis generation - but maybe the follow-up study is what belongs in the journal, not the study attempting to generate hypotheses."
Great point eduwonkette. The study of outliers is an area that could use more attention especially in Ed Research but i really don't think a theory generated from study of one person is a real theory. There has to be more to why this study is so small.
I could even see three separate studies conducted by three separate research teams but using concurrent methodology as a valid contribution to the field. Of course then we might talk even more about the researchers and less about the research. Hmmm maybe I should re-do this study for my dissertation? Nah I don't think it would fly... Our school is trying to gain credibility not lose it.
I think this discussion of a study of a single individual is a bit of a red herring. A case study is a study of a single case of some phenomenon, and the phenomenon isn't the individual. The study we've been talking about, as flawed as it is, is a study of a case of a teacher managing her emotions while attempting to engage in socially just teaching. There is a venerable tradition of case study research in the social sciences, and lots of thoughtful writing about how to set the boundaries of a case.
Would a study of three cases be better than a study of a single case? Everything else being equal, sure, but everything else rarely is, as there are inevitable tradeoffs that are rooted in the limits to researcher time and energy. Studying three teachers not very intensively over the course of a year versus studying one teacher very intensively? That's a tradeoff, and it's hard to tell in advance which design is better.
I will say, however, building on something that eduwonkette noted in an earlier post, that the more diverse the phenomenon that a researcher is studying, the more desirable it is to have multiple cases of that phenomenon to study. If we think that teachers have diverse ways of negotiating a response to the emotion work of teaching -- and I think we do think this -- then we should sample more cases of this phenomenon. This is another very serious limitation to the AERJ study under discussion.