Finally Getting Clarity, Part I

This week, I've been having a lot of really important realizations about my professional work and scholarship. Can I sum these up?

It's time to wrap up work on the NSC study and move on.

Why?

1. Logistics: I have lost the students' writing, thus I have no more texts. It has now been five years since I interviewed these folks and I am separated by time and distance.
2. Methodology: The study was flawed from the get-go and what I have been dealing with now for several years are the consequences of failed design.

The second piece has been coming to me more and more lately. Two articles, in particular, have helped me to see this. I have begun to subscribe to Research in the Teaching of English and this week I read an article in there to try to get a flavor of the work. I was and am really impressed. The level of rigor and attention to research methods in this article, "One Adolescent's Construction of Native Identity in School (RTE 45.3) is really impressive. Reading this article and seeing the method and the procedures the authors followed has helped me to see the paucity of consideration for method and procedure in my own work. It has shown me how far away my work is from acceptable for publication in a journal like RTE.

And here's the thing: I would like to publish work in a journal like RTE.

The bar is high in such a publication! The work is rigorous with an attention to issues of method and researcher positioning and theoretical framework. Reading this article has helped me to see, fully, the way in which the methods I employed in the NSC study constrained what, ultimately, I could do with the study.

To begin with, my focus was too much on interviewing. No participant observation and no real method for analyzing the texts. I answered my own questions, but the questions were, from a research perspective, I think, the wrong questions. Or, they were questions which I wanted to answer and which I was and have been able to answer, but in terms of using the material for publication, my options are constrained.

What I've come to see is that my study lacked a kind of intentionality. I have data in search of findings. And I am working from limited data in the first place. All of my problems go back to faulty design. I'm having a hard time articulating my sense of how I have failed, but suffice it to say that I feel like I am now trying to draw things out of the data that are not there because, from the outset, I never knew I would be trying to draw those things out. Yes, that gets quite close.