Finally Getting Clarity, Part II

For whatever reason, the feedback from RTE on my article has prompted me to return to my dissertation project. What was the reason?

I went back initially to find Merriam and Cafferella because my sense is that they could help me with the "marginal"/"mainstream" dichotomy I set up in that article. I think that in doing so, I may have been rereading my methods section and rediscovered Lytle, whose framework I used in the dissertation to frame my own work.

And this has been an illuminating morning, today, of revisiting Lytle. Here's what I'm learning:

1. Lytle is interested primarily in what she refers to, in various ways, as "less-than-literate" adults.
2. Lytle is interested in adult literacy programs (e.g. individually oriented, community-based, and family).
3. Lytle is making two moves in this piece: a) criticizing what was, at that time, the dominant lens for understanding literacy development, what she calls a "linear and decontextualized" approach, b) proposing a new conceptual framework for understanding "four interrelated dimensions of literacy development over time" (386).
4. Lytle is also arguing for participant involvement in studies of literacy development--"new relationships between adult learners and their own knowledge and literacy, and between researchers and the researched" (401).

Things I now realize:

1. When I was designing my study, I had this framework, but this framework may be intended for or work better for literacy researchers who are more embedded in literacy programs, more visible, more collaborative with local teachers and students and who are interacting with them on a longer term basis. Afterall, what she's interested in ultimately, with regard to the conceptual framework, is change. She wants to know what adults' beliefs, practices, processes, and plans are with the hope that these can be not just understood, but also changed, modified, improved (I think, I could be wrong). In each of the four sections, she talks about how to document change with regard to each dimension. So, she is interested in more than just describing the current state of affairs, but also documenting change with regard to each dimension over time. I never envisioned such work.
2. These four dimensions, she says, are "interrelated"--thus, one cannot really just "drop" one of the dimensions as I said I was going to do in my dissertation (Reading and Writing Processes). They are interrelated and so work together. This has me wondering--why did no one ask me about this? Did Tom ever even read Lytle's article? Was he familiar with her framework? Did anyone point out to me that I was attempting to or intending to use a framework for something that it was not really intended for? Did anyone point out that, if Lytle says these dimensions are interrelated, I can't exactly drop one off without undermining the entire framework?
3. Rather than construct research protocols organized around Lytle's four dimensions--and this is so painfully obvious to me now!--I went off on my own and used Brandt's life questioning strategies. This is an amazing fuck-up and misstep. Lytle was looking for certain kinds of things and I can now imagine devising questions based around her four categories. Instead, I created an entirely different set of categories and protocol questions drawing on Brandt's work. My study is an odd mixture of Brandt's work and Lytle's--it is both and neither.
4. In the Lytle article, there is BOTH a method AND a theory. She grounds this work in Street's "ideological model" of literacy "in which practices differ from group to group within a society as well as from society to society (381). She takes pains, early on, to distinguish these two theories of literacy--the decontextualized skills/cognitive knowledge approach from the socio/cultural embedded/situated approach.

In sum, after reading Lytle article, I just can't really believe what I am seeing. I can't believe that I got away with this and that no one advised me. I can say now, clearly, that the last five years of pain have all been a result of getting this project wrong at the beginning. And the fact is--people allowed me to get it wrong. This is the most frustrating part. The data has proven quite rich and I still feel as though there are places I can go with what I have, but faulty design has certainly caused me a lot of pain. And faulty design is a problem that is only partially my fault. No one was watching...