Crossing anxious borders: teaching across the quantitative–qualitative ‘divide’

Abstract

This paper is about teaching and learning across the so‐called quantitative–qualitative divide in light of current debates in the US about the definition and quality of educational research. It draws on the author’s research and teaching experiences, her role in the redesign of qualitative methods coursework and participation in a school‐wide effort to improve doctoral training at Harvard Graduate School of Education. The paper explores institutional, cultural and psychological reasons for why the quantitative–qualitative divide persists, including researchers’ own anxieties. It is argued that epistemological tensions in educational research should be sustained and embraced rather than resolved in favor of one side over the other, as is too often the case. The author identifies how qualitative research departs from the quantitative model, placing distinct demands upon students who are learning the craft, and offers suggestions for what might help the process.

Notes

1. ‘Institutional ethnography’ is a theoretical/methodological practice identified by sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987, 1990a, b, 1998). It aims to make visible everyday experiences and practices that take place in an institutional structure and to show how these are connected to social relations outside the setting that are not fully visible. It focuses on people’s various attempts to navigate what she calls ‘ruling regimes’ and starts from the viewpoint of those who are active in it. It is tied to, but also critical of the fieldwork tradition in social science. See Griffith and Smith (2005) for an exemplary study of this kind.

2. Indeed, preparing educational leaders to ‘bridge the divide between practice and research’ was the organizing principle for a proposed ‘HGSE (Harvard Graduate School of Education) vision for the doctorate in education’ (May 10, 2004), that among other things, proposed a set of core courses and research methods requirements. Our committee spent considerable time debating about which research methods courses would ensure that all doctoral students are ‘rigorously prepared with the inquiry and methodological skills needed to be critical consumers of the professional and research literatures and to produce research‐based useable knowledge for educators’.

3. I am most familiar with these two disciplines because I was trained as a sociologist and enjoyed a joint appointment in the departments of sociology and cultural anthropology for ten years at Duke University.

4. Panel members included Lee Shulman, Carnegie Foundation, Virginia Richardson, University of Michigan; David Berliner, Arizona State University; Margaret Eisenhart, University of Colorado at Boulder and Chris Golde, Carnegie Foundation. The Carnegie report pointed out that education is the only discipline that does not believe it is producing a research scholar.

5. I am indebted to James Holland for this joke, among many other insights that he has provided over the years.

6. The commitment to research and write in the interest of social change is hardly new and carries with it a bequest from turn‐of‐the‐century American sociologists like Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois and Robert Park, from whose work educational researchers can surely benefit.

7. I thank John Willet for this metaphor.

8. I thank for John Willett for this insight.

9. Indeed, George Spindler (2000), a founding father of educational ethnography, writes that the concept of ‘ethnography’ as a methodology within anthropology is relatively recent, and that before the 1970s ethnography was simply what anthropologists did, and not a set of codified practices.

10. I recommend Howard Becker’s (1993) article, ‘How I learned what a crock was’ (available at http://home.earthlink.net/∼hsbecker/crocks.html) and of course his classic, Boys in white (1976) where the appendix describes the research process.