More on triangulation in research

Kwesi mentioned triangulation of data in his research talk this evening. He and I pointed out that, although the image of a triangle has three corners, triangulation can be done with two or more sources, methods, etc. Here is a link with a bit more detailed information in the concept of triangulation in research.

The metaphor of triangulation comes from trigonometry and surveying, where measuring a side and the two contiguous angles of a triangle can give you all the rest of the information about that triangle.

The importance of observing things from several points of view is illustrated by this optical illusion video -- and this silly video about a magic trick. Things are not necessarily what they appear to be at first glance, and a new point of view is what allows you to see the contradictions that point to the truth!

Some notes from our guest speakers Kwesi and Diana Feb 27

Handy tool for formatted PDFs

Hey folks,

I just wanted to let you know about this tool I just found as it might be useful for you for the coming weeks. When we copy/paste from a PDF, sometimes the text comes out like this

The video-stimulated post interaction

interviews with participants provided complementary data for understanding their

experiences with the language learning system.

rather than the much tidier

The video-stimulated post interaction interviews with participants provided complementary data for understanding their experiences with the language learning system.

because of the line breaks formatting in the original. If you are copying/pasting a lot of text, it can be quite time consuming to fix it all up by connecting the parts of the sentences. However, if you go here you can use this tool to quickly delete the line breaks and then copy/paste the text back into your notes. Easy and free; happy days.

Research ethics tutorial

Every researcher who works with human subjects at UBC is required to complete the online ethics
tutorial called TCPS 2, posted by the Canadian Tri-Councils (i.e., SSHRC -- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; NSERC -- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and CIHR -- Canadian Institutes of Health Research).

The tutorial takes approximately 3 hours to complete. We will start working on it in class tonight, and complete it over the next week or two. You will need to work on your own personal completion of the tutorial, but I suggest that you will learn more by working collaboratively with one or two partners from your reading circle -- which is how we will begin today in class.

Here is the link to the tutorial. Once you complete the tutorial, you will receive a certificate of successful completion, which you should post to your blog before the end of our course.

FYI, here is a link to a historical timeline of cases related to the development of research ethics. This one is largely US based, but the events listed had reverberations in Canada too.

As you go through the ethics tutorial, keep notes on a blog post about your own impressions, ideas and thoughts about the examples given and the ethical issues raised for researchers. We will discuss these as we go along.

Homework readings for our March 6 class

This week, we will be reading the opening chapters of three UBC Masters theses to get the feel of the
ways that research theoretical grounding and methodology can be written.

1) Alayne Armstrong, Group flow in small groups of middle school mathematics students. Please read pp. 5 - 49.

2) Wang Yifei, Designing chatbot interfaces for language learning: Ethnographic research into affect and users' experiences. Please read pp. 1-53.

3) Jacyntha England, Histories of forgetting, geographies of remembering: Exploring processes of witnessing and performing in senior secondary humanities classroom(s). Please read pp. 1-42.

Your blog writing prompts:
• What surprised you about this thesis writing?
• What are three ideas you can take away from this to bring to your own research writing?

Our two guest speakers for our March 6 class: John Ames and Toni Lazarova

Here are our wonderful guests for our upcoming class!

John Ames: My first Masters degree specialized in Literature and Science of the Late-Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, focusing on how scientific trends in English and French circles of thinkers, such as Erasmus Darwin (C. Darwin's grandfather) and numerous French Philosophe scientists, influenced 1st and 2nd generation Romantic literature, such as that of John Thelwall, William Wordsworth, Percy & Mary Shelley, and John Keats.

In becoming a teacher I quickly became attracted to problems in special education research, embarking on a second Masters' degree in the field that continues to this day as a PhD student. During my Masters I was a Research Assistant for The Libretti of Learning: Portraits of Journeys to Operatic Accomplishment, examining how opera singers overcame learning disabilities through opera instruction: research that sparked my interest to this day.

Building upon my interests in community- and place-based learning and evolutionary roots of human emotional articulation, my PhD research looks at how multimodal arts-based methods, especially children's “muzik-theatre,” may promote literacy in writing and reading for students with learning disabilities.

One of my collective public aims is to create classroom adaptable training methods that will teach children the elements of creating their own short operas from conception to completion, thus promoting emotional growth through narrative development. It is my hope that through facilitating this method -- adapting one representational signing system to another -- greater cognitive understanding of writing and reading will generalize to learners.



My name is Toni Lazarova and I have been a highschool teacher in North Vancouver for the past 6 years. I have taught a variety of subjects, including Foods, Textiles, Fashion Design, Yearbook, and Learning Assistance. I have also held some roles as a teacher leader, including Department Head and Pro D committee, and I have been a club sponsor (Interact, Sewing for a cause, Yearbook, Fruit and Vegetable Delivery, Girls club etc.) I hold a degree in Food, Nutrition and Health, Education and a masters in Curriculum and Pedagogy from UBC. My interests include creating innovative new ways of teaching the curriculum, garden based education and many others.

The Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER)- Jennette, Hui, JingYu

The ABER provides a mechanism for academic scholars to conduct researches from an artistic approach. It is widely used in the interdisciplinary studies. Different from traditional methodology, it enables the researchers to apply their artistic skills to engage studies in various ways including art making, musical performances, poetry, visual products, critical dialogues and other artistic format.

The ABER helps artists, researchers, and teachers to foster a better understanding about the complexities in teaching and learning with incorporation of social transformation and interventions. It could be done in diverse settings either formal or informal. ABER is an effective way to allow scholars to engage deep conversations to integrate their own conscious awareness in order to create a new understanding about their work and the world they live in.

Poetic Inquiry

"The International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry brings together international poets and scholars from diverse contexts and interdisciplinary fields to share their work. Presentations are offered in various formats."

The first symposium was held in Vancouver, BC in 2007, by the Faculty of Education of the University of British Columbia. The first speaker of the first symposium explains poetry "as a way to know the world, as a way to be and become in the world." There has been a symposium bi-annually in different cities around the world (mainly in Canada so far)! The symposium offers an opportunity to learn about how poetic inquiry can be used in many genres and fields of study, as well as how poetic inquiry is understood and applied across different cultures and educational backgrounds.

Sean Wiebe is a contributor to the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, and wrote a research paper called Poetic Inquiry: A Fierce, Tender, and Mischievous Relationship with Lived Experience

This paper aims to explore:

1. How the richness of lived experience can be sustained in poetic inquiry 
2. The terms fierce, tender, and mischievous as qualities of engagement that are often exemplified in the ways poetic inquirers live and work. 

Some of the main ideas are:

1. Examining Rapport and Hartill’s (2012) article. To review: E.g.: Poetic inquiry as a powerful way of engaging the world. What makes poetic inquiry powerful? And what the most suitable analytical methods are. 
2. Learning how the terms fierce, tender, and mischievous might have potential for enriching the discussion of poetic inquiry that are more methodological 

We also learned that in practice poetic inquiry was used within the Inside Age Care, which is an organization that helps people to realize the elders' living condition. They used the photo voice methodology as well as the poetic inquiry. Some photo and poetry exhibitions were organized by the organization. According to the article Poetic Inquiry: Creating poems from interviews with residents, the The author believed that “ special, dramatic language of poetry enables an imaginative and empathetic identification, drawing the audience into each residents’ uniquely intimate world.”

A/R/Tography

Performative inquiry:

• Using theatre as the basis for researching and understanding issues; e.g. culture or traumatic ideas etc. 
• Performances used to understand the issue so as to better provide resources / supports necessary to uncover hidden / traumatic issues.

Music as Inquiry

• Danny Bakan wrote a dissertation at UBC (2014) looking at “how songs and stories about songwriting can serve as a means for theorizing new ways of conducting research in music education”. He uses the term a bricolaged métissage approach; this seems like a term needs quite a bit of investigating! Looking identity of musicians through their music can give insight into their own creative process; an inquiry into lived creative experience with song as the “method, results, and interpretation of research”

Our two guest speakers for our Feb. 27 class!

Here are the bios supplied by our wonderful guest speakers for our Feb. 27 class:

Diana Ihnatovych is a PhD student in Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education. Her academic career in music performance and pedagogy, choreography, and literature, combined with her passion for nature, sustainability, holistic medicine and nutrition led her to pursue inter-disciplinary research in music and sustainability. Volunteering with the UBC Intergenerational Landed Learning on the Farm and witnessing the challenges that children experience in relation to nature became the driving force behind her research question: ‘How will the integration of music into elementary environmental education enhance the process of learning about nature and sustainable living, and influence students’ perceptions and attitudes toward our planet’s eco-system?’ Examining the connections between music and nature to advance practices in environmental education through the lenses of a/r/tography and autoethnography will facilitate exploration and discovery of new connections and prospects between music and nature.

Looking into A/R/Tography, Poetic Inquiry and Arts Based Educational Research (ABER)

UBC is known world-wide as a centre for arts-based educational research approaches, including
A/R/Tography, Poetic Inquiry and ABER.

Today, we will look into these approaches so that you are familiar with what they entail, and how they might potentially contribute to your own thinking about your graduate research.

Here are links to some helpful websites:

A/R/Tography -- what it means, how it is practiced, examples of graduate work and other pieces, resource links

ABER Special Interest Group (SIG) at the American Educational Research Association (AERA)

Poetic Inquiry: symposium site,
article by Sean Wiebe on the nature of poetic inquiry,
and an example of research into elder care via poetic inquiry

How to submit your midway paper (and your final paper)

Please email your paper to me as an attachment. I don't need a hard copy, and you don't have to post your paper to your blog.

If at all possible, I recommend exchanging your paper with a reading buddy from our class. You can comment on the 'big picture' of your classmate's paper, as well as helping them catch typos or grammatical errors. Peer review is generally very helpful if you can organize it in the time given!

Our new reading circle groups as of Feb. 13!

Homework: Interesting interviews to analyze in terms of questioning techniques

• This week (Feb. 13-20), please listen to your interview twice, to get familiar with it. You are not expected to do any blogging about it this week as you will be busy finishing your midway paper.
• Next week (Feb. 20-27), please complete this homework assignment by transcribing the interviewer's questions and commenting on your blog as directed below!

1) Interview with Wade Davis and Peter Gzowski (18:00) 

Do zombies exist? If so, how can they be explained scientifically? Those are some questions UBC ethnobotanist Wade Davis set out to answer when he began his field work in Haiti in the early 1980s. This research led to his fascinating 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. In this 1986 interview with CBC's Peter Gzowski, Davis explains how certain drugs, combined with Haiti's cultural beliefs, can create what appears to be a zombie -- someone who rises from the dead and walks around in a trance-like state.

2)  Fighting hate with friendship: One Exalted Cyclops at a time (14:20)
CBC Radio's Piya Chattopadhyay's 2018 interview with Afro American musician Daryl Davis and ex-KKK member Scott Shepherd -- about Davis' work in bringing hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members around to leaving the racist organization.

3) Richard Fidler's Australian Broadcasting Company interview with Ira Glass from PBS This American Life -- on his secrets behind doing great radio interviews in the style of his show. (Listen from 4:12 - 21:12)


Have each member of your Reading Circle choose a different one of these interviews to listen to. As you listen, transcribe all the interviewer's questions and comments ONLY (not the interviewee's answers).

Then write a blog entry that considers the nature of these questions. How could you categorize them? Which questions were pre-planned? Which ones flowed from the interviewer's listening and interacting with the interviewee? Which were not even questions at all? What position or stance did the interviewer take at various points in the interview? What were the interviewer's aims at various points? Try re-listening to see if you can make sense of the development of the interview and changes in its 'flow'.

In this assignment, you may want to take some of these ideas into account:

• The researcher's views of the nature of their research (technical, controversial, action-oriented, practice-oriented, critical/emancipatory ….)
• The researcher's position relative to participants (distant and removed, or close and connected to participant's lives)
• The researcher's direction of gaze (inward to self, or outward to others)
• Purpose (professional, personal or useful to participants/community)
• Intended audience 
• Agency (passive or engaged in making change, etc.)
• What is the flow of the interview? How does the interviewer follow up on ideas, fold back to earlier topics, etc.?

Some interviewing guidelines

Interviewing question types

Teacher questioning coding sheet for education research

Our guest speaker for our Feb. 20 class at Waves Coffee, 900 Howe Street @ Smithe downtown

Our guest speaker for our Feb. 20 class will be Language and Literacy Education (LLED) PhD candidate Margaret McKeon.

Margaret is an outdoor educator, poet and doctoral candidate in language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia. A person of Euro-settler ancestry, for her research she is creating poetry and stories about land relationship and colonialism.

I am studying how 20 Grade Three students, my writing group and my book group respond to the reading of specific books by children's author Tomie de Paola.  I want to find out if there are similarities to the kind of responses that occur intergenerationally in order to better understand why books written originally for children have significance for adults as well, so that we may appreciate the impact that stories have on our lives regardless of our ages.


The article I chose is:  Learning from children reading books: transactional theory and the teaching of literature.  Galda, Lee, Journal of Children's Literature, 39 (2), pp. 5-13, 2013.

LINK:  UBC Library, Search Collections/UBC library search, General inquiry, Transactional Theory, Article # 5.

Reader- response theory and transactional theory are closely aligned.  Lee Galda is a distinguished scholar in her field and it is her article that interests me most.  This paper reflects on Galda's 45 years of teaching and research and "argues that practice based on transactional theory is essential for the effective teaching of literature".

The models for her work were Gordon Pradl and John Mayer in literature and response, Bee Cullinan in children's literature and James Britton (Language and Learning, 1970) and Louse Rosenblatt (1978,1995).  They decided her course as a continuing teacher, professor and researcher.

Rosenblatt focused on how readers responded to literature somewhere on the continuum of efferent and aesthetic stances.  There is a transaction with another's words (story/text) that provides the reader with meaning.  There is no right or wrong fixed answer--it is through individual experiences and knowledge that the language of the text is understood.  Rosenblatt calls that transaction the "poem". 
Galda used that terms as well.

In the last paragraph of her paper Galda states, "If we support readers as they read aesthetically, evoking their own poems, and allow them time to think, write and talk about their experiences, reading a powerful book can become an event that just might change the world, one reader at a time".

Galda was a visiting professor at UBC the summer of 1989 and she was my professor for my first course in my master's degree.  I learned first-hand the impact reader-response/transactional theory could have on my teaching practice.  My teaching life was never the same!

Joining a conversation already in progress: Getting started with your literature review

The academic literature review is a way of getting familiar with the work that has already been done in your area of research -- as way to avoid 'reinventing the canoe'!

You can think of it as a way of joining a (research) conversation already in progress. It's a good idea when joining a conversation to listen in for a while and find out what progress others have made -- then to add your ideas in relation to what has gone before and what is ongoing now.

The UBC Library offers this helpful resource for starting your lit review. The Library also holds
regular lit review workshops for students, listed on the site linked here.

From the Library resources, here is a link to a database search worksheet that may be useful in the initial stages of refining your search through the literature.

In class today, we will try out a method known as 'backward and forward reference chaining', which is described here:

"Check out the citations in the reference lists of major studies. Examine what later studies have cited significant studies in these lists by searching".
I like to think of this method as 'roots and fruits': what are the roots of a particular research study (from its reference list), what are the roots of those roots, and what has sprung up based on this particular study (from its citations).

Our guest speaker next week (Feb.13): Dr. Tathali Urueta

Tathali will be our first education research guest speaker on February 13. Here is a description of her work, written while she was still completing her doctoral thesis research:

Garden Based Learning – Dr. Tathali Urueta

 

During the last SyMETRI meeting I shared my research and how my Biology and Science Education background have guided and inspired my current research. Here it is a brief description of my research:


My doctoral dissertation is a qualitative case study that aims to contribute to the existing Garden-based learning literature (GBL) in bridging the gaps between the practice and the theory of GBL as well as to contribute to the sustainability of school gardens and GBL projects. My study focuses in the long-term recollections that urban multicultural elementary school students derive from their personal and collective experiences as participants in a one-year intergenerational garden-based learning project: “The Intergenerational Landed Learning on the Farm for the Environment Project” and how does this learning experience support the development of practice-linked identities that are the identities that people come to take on, construct and embrace that are linked to participation in particular social and cultural practices.


The theoretical underpinnings of my study are rooted in current discourses in science education literature that understand science education as a cultural, cross-age, cross-class, and cross-disciplinary phenomenon, garden-based learning literature, identity theory, and the new sociology of childhood discourse.

Homework for our Feb. 13 class

1) Draft a research/ inquiry question:

Post to your blog a draft research question in the form: 

"I am studying ............. because I want to find out who/ how/ why .................. in order to better understand how/ why/ what ....................... so that we will know more about ...........................".

Consider Topic -- Question -- Rationale -- Significance in relation to your question. At this early stage, you may be able to address two, three or all four of these factors.

Use the resources posted on our blog to guide your construction of your draft question.

2) Find a reading in your own area of interest:

Find and read a recent (2010 -->) article in your personal area of interest, related to your draft research question.

Share a link to your article on your blog.Write a blog post by Sunday at noon, and comment on your reading group's posts by Monday evening in the usual way!

Resources for tonight's class: Developing research questions

Booth (1995) From topics to questions to problems in research

Framing a research area

Framing a research question: worksheet

Marshall & Rossman (2011) Chart of the 'qualitative continuum', from arts to sciences

Vignettes for designing research questions