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The Search for Meaning in Educational ResearchAcademic Exchange Quarterly Fall 2004: Volume 8, Issue 3 The Quest forMeaning in Educational ResearchDeborah Court , Bar-Ilan University, Israel Deborah Court researches educational cultures in Israel and abroad. She teaches qualitative researchmethods and curriculum evaluation at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. AbstractThis article explores different senses of theconcept of meaning in educational research, presenting ‘meaning’ as personal(the researcher’s quest for meaning through research), contextual (meaning inrelation to linguistics and culture) and shared (through communication),offering illustrative examples from the literature and from her own work. Why Do We Perform Educational Research? When I was finishing my undergraduate degree inanthropology thirty years ago, the professor of our cultural anthropologycourse gave us a provocative assignment for our final paper. We were supposedto ask, and attempt to answer, one of the great, unanswered questions incultural anthropology. Flirting with youthful cynicism on the one hand, andbeginning a genuine search for meaning on the other, I entitled my paper, “Oneof the great, unanswered questions in cultural anthropology: Why are we doingthis?” The details of my answer are long forgotten in the dustbin of essayhistory, but the gist of it was an attempt to find human significance in thedescription and analysis of cultures. Looking back, I blush at the naivepresumption that I could answer such a question, but the question itself, “whyare we doing this?” has recurred, sometimes at a hum and sometimes at a roar,for most of my professional life. Why, collectively, dowe perform educational research? At first glance the answers seem clear. Wewant to learn about effective programs and teaching methods to help studentslearn. We want to discover relationships between variables in educationalsettings to plan interventions. We want to understand cultural contexts ofschools to create schools that embody justice and reduce prejudice andinequality. From the individual researcher’s perspective weinvestigate topics about which we are curious or passionate; as well, we doresearch because it is an integral part of the academic role and a centralfactor in academic promotion. We may sometimes be paid or co-opted to doresearch in a setting that we did not choose out of personal-professionalinterest, but I think examination of most researchers’ work over years ordecades will offer substantial revelation of what is important to those people.A researcher’s voyage may be long, the seas calm or stormy, the tides ofcircumstance insistent, but the journey is driven at least in part by the windsof ontological longing. Individually and collectively, we do educational researchas part of a quest for meaning. Meaning is Personal Most difficult to define, what might be called ontologicalmeaning involves the individual quest to find and make meaning in the dailyactivities of one’s life. It is the quest to answer the individual form of thequestion posed in my forgotten essay. Why am I doing this? Why am Iliving my life this way, taking this path and not some other? It may be auseful kind of reflection for a researcher to examine the motivations andturning points in his or her career trajectory. In my own case, since I came tolive in Israelmy quest for meaning has become sharper, more urgent, the motivation for doingresearch more keenly focused. Moving from crisis to tragedy to crisis in thistiny country, I want my work to mean something, to me, to my grandchildren, toothers. For the first time, I am an outsider, trying to find my way in, ratherthan a native taking so much for granted. When I lived in Canadamy concerns were related but different; in a less intense setting I soughtthrough research to understand teachers’ knowledge and the nature of schoolculture. Now I ask, what happens in schools in this region? How do we teachabout violence and non-violence, about respect, courage and difficultdecisions? What is the role of schools in this regard, and can schoolscounteract other influences? At every stage human beings seek to animate thedetails of their lives with spirit, with connection. Amidst busy, sometimesstressful, sometimes mundane professional lives, perhaps fitfully butinexorably, we strive to place ourselves and our work in a context of meaning.We strive towards meaning like plants towards the sun. Viktor Frankl, whosought survival during his years in Auschwitz andmeaning in the years after, wrote that “Man’s search for meaning is the primarymotivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctualdrives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can befulfilled by him alone: only then does it achieve a significance which willsatisfy his own will to meaning” (1984, p.121). While this struggle andthis will are individual, meaning is not found in some existential vacuum, butin relation to others. Meaning is Contextual Linguistic meaning is the relation betweenmeaning and language. Persons acting in a context use words in order to nameobjects and activities and to express thoughts; in order to communicate. Wecommunicate our thoughts, ideas, intentions and feelings to others throughspeech and writing. Speech necessarily represents thought imperfectly. Vygotsky (1962) wrote that metaphorically, “A thought maybe compared to a cloud shedding a shower of words. Precisely because thoughtdoes not have its automatic counterpart in words, the transition from thoughtto word leads through meaning” (p.150). He further states that to understand other people’s speech we need tounderstand not only their words but their motivation. This comes about throughknowing, and especially through being a part of, the context in which another’swords are spoken. Polanyi (1962, pp.57-58) calls the kind of meaning that a context itself possesses existential;words (together with more complex entities such as concepts and theories) usedin a cultural context have what Polanyi calls denotativeor representative meaning. Wittgenstein, in his PhilosophicalInvestigations (1953) makes it clear that language has no absolute meaning;the meaning of a word is found in its use. Dictionary definitions give ageneral set of accepted usages of a word, but nuances, subtle variations andcolloquialisms may be understood only ‘in play’. According to Wittgenstein, thecontext of culture and activity within which a word is spoken, the ‘languagegame’ within which it is played, dictate its meaning in that setting. Closely related to linguistic meaning is conceptualmeaning, the tacit understanding of concepts amongst participants in aculture, and upon which cultural knowledge is based. As Polanyiwrites, “In learning to speak, every child accepts a culture constructed on thepremises of the traditional interpretation of the universe, rooted in the idiomof the group to which it was born, and every intellectual effort of theeducated mind will be made within that frame of reference” (1962, p.112). Thisimportant idea has many ramifications for educational research. One example of the contextualityof meaning can be found in the notions of professional and organizationalculture. These are metaphoric senses of the term ‘culture’ (Alvesson,1993). In this metaphoric way we speak of the different cultures of the schooland the university. This conception has helped to shed light on some of themisunderstandings between teachers and researchers over central concepts like‘knowledge’ (Kliebard, 1993; Page, Samson &Crockett, 1998), and led to serious attempts to map and define these differentmeanings in order to facilitate mutual understanding (Hiebert,Gallimore & Stigler, 2002). Conceptions of knowledge, like linguistic andconceptual meaning, are both personal and contextually based. In recent yearssome educational researchers have focused on epistemological meaning. Thiswork has helped us understand how students’ views about what constitutesknowledge, and the boundaries between knowledge and belief, affect theirlearning (Alexander & Dochy, 1995; Alexander,Murphy, Guian & Murphy, 1998), as well as howteachers’ beliefs about knowledge affect their teaching. Whether a teacher seesknowledge as absolute or as constructed and reasoned, for instance, willprofoundly affect the way that teacher teaches (Brownlee, 2001; Tsai, 2002). Context in Qualitative and QuantitativeResearch The notion of context is extremely important foreducational researchers, who must pay attention both to contextual factors andto supra-contextual theoretical concepts and standardized variables.Quantitative and qualitative researchers face somewhat different challenges inthis regard. Ethnographers need to capture and interpret whatthey hear and see in the field within the frame of reference of theparticipants. When ethnographic findings are disseminated, researchers must bevigilant in providing ‘rich description’(Geertz, 1973) of the context so as to convey as muchas possible about the participants’ world. Finally ethnographers must, at leastto some extent, ‘translate’ significant field references into theoretical termsin order to position findings in relation to previous research. If we do notattend carefully to participants’ meanings within their cultural context, werisk misunderstanding and misrepresenting them and producing inaccurateresults. Quantitative researchers, on the other hand, needto design measures of constructs like anxiety, intelligence or satisfaction inorder to provide accurate and relevant statistical results. This could meandesigning context-sensitive instruments for research in a particular setting,or it could mean designing instruments that can produce meaningful andcomparable results over many different contexts. A well-known example of thiskind of challenge is the Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment’s PISA (Program ofInternational Student Assessment) testing, which every three years testsstudents in industrialized countries (OECD, 2001, 2002). The year 2000 tests,despite measuring students in such diverse countries as the United States, Korea,Israel and Peru,produced comparable results because the tests were designed to assess literacy(not specific content knowledge) in reading, mathematics and science. Themeaning of these results and the comparisons between them stand on the qualityof the measures used and the extent to which the test designers succeeded increating questions which were relevant to students in different culturalcontexts. The PISAexample also shows the interaction between qualitative and quantitativeresearch. In Israel,whose results in all three tested areas were quite low, researchers andeducators are now trying to understand the contextual factors at work in theIsraeli education system in order to interpret the statistical results and planprograms for improvement. Some kinds of analytic work are not so directlycontext-dependent, but are based on logic of a kind generally shared acrosscultures. Mathematics offers the prime example of this shared logic. Analyticalclaims, like those made in mathematics, are verified through logic andagreed-upon rules. When we examine meaning as the validation of truth claimsour focus is on the kinds of evidence offered as support for analytical,empirical and value claims. (Wilson, 1968, pp. 82-90). In educational researchwe are most concerned with empirical and value claims. Empirical claims areverified through the accumulation of appropriate and sufficient evidence in theworld of experience; value claims (as opposed to statements of preference orattitude, which are not ‘true’ or ‘untrue’), while much more difficult toverify, also have an empirical basis. In general, to have meaning a statementmust be true. But what is true? The kind of evidence needed to validate thetruth of the empirical claim, “There are ten apples on the table” is differentthan the kind of the evidence needed to validate the value claim, “Apples arebetter than oranges”. Better how, first of all? Tastier (this is preference)?More nutritious (in terms of which nutrients, and for whom)? Giving a morecost- effective balance between production costs, nutrition and shelf life? We need empirical evidence to validate anempirical claim. This is a simple exercise in the case of a statement like“There are ten apples on the table”, but a complex enterprise indeed when theclaim is that treatment or program X causes Y. Obviously the researchramifications of the search for empirical meaning include meticulous,systematic and repeated accumulation, analysis and interpretation ofappropriate kinds of empirical evidence. Value claims, such as those we make in programevaluation and evaluation of students, are based on a shared set of criteriaand accumulated empirical evidence. In education we might say thatconstructivist science teaching is the best approach, that we shouldteach non-violent ways of conflict resolution, or that it is right toinclude a reflective component in teacher education. Underlying all of thesestatements is some shared set of criteria about what is valuable. If it isright or worthwhile to include a reflective component in teacher education, itis because we have generally agreed that we want teachers to reflect on theirexperience, rather than, or in addition to, learning methods and theoriesthrough practice, repetition and memorization. Having generally agreed uponthese valued traits and this notion of knowledge development we then, throughresearch, accumulate considerable evidence about teachers’ learning, until wereach a point where we can verify that including a reflective component inteacher education does lead to the development of these valued traits. To summarize these last ideas, meaning asverification of truth claims involves logic and methods which may not bestrongly contextual, but the values underlying such claims, and the motivationfor researching certain questions, do spring from context. Meaning is Shared Obviously these different senses of meaning areinterdependent. My personal desire to find meaning in my work leads me to doeducational research, usually into questions that touch my life in some way. Itry to delve into the context and culture of those I study, in order tounderstand their meanings rather than imposing my own. I try to make visible tomy students and to those I meet as a researcher my own meanings, based as theyare in my own history. I work from the linguistic, conceptual andepistemological structures that I have acquired as a Canadian, a teacher, anacademic and researcher, and an immigrant to a different country and culture.My goal is not only to satisfy my own quest for meaning, but to learn fromthose I come to know in the context of research, and to communicate in termsthat are authentic, accurate and understandable to my colleagues and others.Meaning, finally, is shared. In Martin Buber’sanalysis, “The fundamental fact of human existence is neither the individual assuch nor the aggregate as such. Each, considered by itself, is a mightyabstraction. The individual is a fact of existence in so far as he steps into aliving relation with other individuals. The aggregate is a fact of existence inso far as it is built up of living units of relation. The fundamental fact ofexistence is man with man” (1971, p.244). What does this mean in terms of educationalresearch? At its most basic level, perhaps only that each of us remember toraise our heads above the waters of pressure, stress, competition, ego andhabit, to ask ourselves how we are utilizing our own unique situation and setof talents to contribute in some way to knowledge, understanding andcommunication. This kind of grounding connects us both with the still, smallvoice of Buber’s I, and with the thouof our research subjects, colleagues and students. Meaning is personal, butpersonal meaning is realized through connection with other travelers on theroad. In terms of the conduct of our research, it meanscare, honesty, rigor, time and patience, with our methods of data collectionand analysis, our interpretations and our language. These things apply equally,though with differing details, to radical post-modernist feminist researchersand to positivist statisticians. Why are we doing this, after all? Surely itis to fulfill our individual strivings for meaning through contributing to andconnecting with diverse communities of researchers, teachers and learners, andwith the disenfranchised. The quest for meaning is like a lamp, illuminatingthe passages and turning points as we make our way through complex and diversesettings, questions, methods and bodies of knowledge. References Alexander,P.A. & Dochy, F.J.R.C.(1995). Conceptions of knowledge and beliefs: A comparison across variouscultural and educational communities. American Educational Research Journal,32, 413-442.Alexander,P.A., Murphy, P.K., Guan, J. & Murphy, P.A.(1998). How students and teachers in Singaporeand the united Statesconceptualize knowledge and beliefs: Positioning learning withinepistemological frameworks. Learning and Instruction, 8(2), 97-116. Alvesson, M. (1993). Cultural perspectives onorganizations. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge UniversityPress.Brownlee,J. (2001). Knowing and learning in teacher education: A theoretical frameworkof core and peripheral epistemological beliefs. Asia-Pacific Journal ofTeacher Education and Development 4(1), 131-155.Buber, M. (1971). Between man and man. Trans. R.G. Smith. London:Collins. First published 1947.Carspecken, P.F. (1996).Criticalethnography in educational research. New Yorkand London: Routledge.Frankl, V. (1984). Man’s search for meaning. NY: Washington Square Press.Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Toward aninterpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays (pp.3-30).NY: Basic Books.Hiebert, J., Gallimore, R. &Stigler, J. (1992). A knowledge base for the teaching profession: What would itlook like and how can we get one? Educational Researcher, 31(5), 3 – 15.Kliebard, H. (1993). What is a knowledge base, and who woulduse it if we had one? Review of Educational Research 63, 295 – 303.OECD(2001). Knowledge and skills for life: First results of PISA 2000. OECD(2002). Literacy skills for the world of tomorrow. Further results from PISA2000: Executive summary. Retrieved Oct. 30, 2003, fromhttp://www.pisa.oecd.org/pisa/read.htm.Page,R., Samson, Y. & Crockett, M. (1998). Reporting ethnography to informants. HarvardEducational Review 68(3), 299 – 333.Polanyi, M (1962). Personal knowledge: Towards apost-critical philosophy. Chicago:University of ChicagoPress.Tsai,C. (2002). Nested epistemologies: Science teachers’ beliefs of teaching,learning and science. International Journal of Science Education 24(8),771-783.Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language. Trans.E. Hanfmann& G. Vakar. Mass: MIT Press.Wilson,J. (1968). Language and the pursuit of truth. Cambridge:Cambridge UniversityPress.Wittgenstein,L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Trans. G.E.M.Anscombe. Oxford:Oxford UniversityPress.geovisit(); |
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