Jason’s Chapter One Reading Log

Posted by on March 1, 2010 
Filed under Reading logs

Chapter one of the classroom research textbook is stocked full of information. The chapter offers a brief history of research done in the classroom, some methodological insights and perspectives, and numerous detailed definition. It is a very diverse chapter including everything from feminist critiques of positivism, to issues of the academic disconnect with the “real world”, to a list seven principles of teaching. Because we will be coving this chapter in detail this week I would like to focus this reflection on two specific elements of the reading; first, the analogy of the dark archery, and secondly the analogy of the messy swamps.

The archery analogy offers a really good insight into the problematic nature of institutional assessment. We monitor the outcomes of students without focusing on the actual classrooms that they are learning in. We are shooting in the dark, then turning the light on and checking to see how we did afterwards. Maybe we should require that all students be able to recite the mathematical formula used to calculate the trajectory of an arrow, but it would be crazy to turn on the light and look at what is actually going on in the classroom, to actually reward intrinsically motivated teachers that strive to constantly modify their courses and utilize previously successful techniques.

The second analogy that struck me was what I call the swamp analogy. That as social scientist we often get so focused on methodology and sound scientific studies, that we become unable to study any of the pressing issues in front of us. In other words, we are too scientific. The analogy compares being able to study the high hard ground with our precise methodology (in sociology’s case continually striving to prove our discipline’s worth by bureaucratically latching to the scientific method), at the expense of even studying the murky swamp that is most of life. Studying the swamp would cause us to give up our precise scientific instruments and we are not willing to sacrifice them, or the legitimacy they assist us in claiming.

This made me think of a story an older sociology professor told me while I was still an undergraduate. I had asked him why sociologist seemed to write such seemingly understandable ideas in such a jargon laden fashion. He told me that although sociologist study society, they can’t always be counted on to be paying attention to society. He then told me that in the height of the AIDS epidemic (which at the time was being widely used to spread hatred and fear of homosexuals in America) he attended an ASA meeting in San Francisco. The streets were filled with protest, counter protests, religious movements, police, political figures, the sociologists were surrounded by a powerful social movement. He then told me that the conference he attended was titled “Micro and Macro Sociology: Bridging the Gap in Theory and Methodology”.

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