Key passages:
“Methodology” definition: “…the motivations for and possible implications of … methods…” (1).
“What are people doing? How are they doing it? And why are they doing it this way?” (1).
“…the conversations contained here maintain a shared understanding of research as situated, systematic, and reflective investigation of literate activity with the goal of deepening our understanding of why, how, when, where, and what writers write” (2).
“Method” definition: “…what the researchers do and how they do it–the methods or practices researchers engage in as they identify research topics, design strategies for collecting, managing, and interpreting the collected data, and determine how to represent their findings” (2).
(This volume focuses on methodology?) (3) “Where were the reflective, generalist, edited collections that captured the methodological innovations within the field of writing studies?”
“…posits methods and methodologies as heuristics…” (5)
The importance of space and time (place/history) inform the organization. That’s interesting. (5)
I can imagine the first section (Journet and Rohan) will be useful to me. As Harker has pointed out, I tend to downplay and discount my personal experience. He says I shouldn’t do that. Perhaps this can help me understand how to situation my experience purposely within my argument.
I will need to pay particular attention to Selfe and Hawisher, I think, as my research will likely involve those “reading my research”–fellow instructors. Also Haas, Takyoshi and Carr’s work focusing on visual/textual mixing for analysis… my research will, too.
The second section is directly relevant to my work: “Some research in this section focuses on studies of writing that have pedagogical development as their primary goal” (6). None of the research topics listed, though, seem to align with my intentions.
Useful in the third section likely: “Mike Palmquist, Joan Mullin, and Glenn Blalock demonstrate through activity analysis the challenges and potential benefits they discovered from their efforts to create web-based communities for writing research” (7).
And oh how I long for collaboration! (8) Thinking of collaboration possibilities as including participants in a study helps me erase a bit of this vision I have of research as being isolating.
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