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to Spring Innovator Research: From the Outside, From the Inside
Deborah Ball on researching from the outside:
“Researchers bring questions into a classroom, sit on its periphery, or move into its flow. They watch and talk with teachers. They sit near and listen to students. Equipped with theories, questions, and yellow-lined pads, they seek as outsiders to understand, analyze, and explain what goes on there. As participant-observers, they inherit an inherently ambiguous role of outsider trying to understand inside. On one hand, their outside perspectives as psychologists, anthropologists, or simply adult nonmembers of the context, offer them perspective that insiders lack. As outsiders, they can see and hear things that insiders take for granted. On the other hand, as outsiders they cannot completely understand local meanings, language norms, and practices. They miss nuances, make faulty connections, and inappropriately infer motives. They ask questions of their own making, questions insiders might not think to pose. But also they miss questions that lie at the heart of the puzzles of practice.”
Deborah Ball on researching from the inside:
“Studying teaching from the first-person perspective offers a special
kind of personal inside view that is difficult to gain through even close participant
observation. Because teaching and learning are deeply personal—that
is, they are in fundamental ways relational and about persons—approaches
to scholarship that use the personal as a resource offer the possibility of
insights that are more difficult to gain from an outsider’s perspective. Some
aspects of experience are inarticulable; the chasm between what we know and
what we can say is variable, but rarely closed. Limited in what can be
asked or explained across any interpersonal divide, a challenge for the inside
perspective is how the inarticulable can be represented, probed, and ultimately
examined. Ironically, such scholarship depends also on a kind of distance
between the researcher and the context and problems of study. How does
the first-person researcher create the conversation with herself that makes
it possible to excavate, name, and analyze aspects of experience unseen to
the outsider?
“Disciplined
inquiry relies inherently on both faith and doubt: The researcher needs to
listen and watch sympathetically, assuming that people in the setting make
sense, but must also notice strange or discontinuous events or phenomena. If
the researcher remains entirely inside the experience, the critical edge needed
for analysis is difficult to establish; what remains may be more narrative
than research.
“Because research methodology is so often fraught with imperatives to separate the self from the inquiry, we need to develop disciplined methods that deliberately use the self as a tool to construct insights, perspectives, and knowledge that expand our capacity to know (Krieger, 1991). At the same time we need to guard against the tendency toward the personal on the basis of some kind of basic appeal, or worse, naïve ideas about what constitutes knowledge. That it is asserted from the first person perspective cannot make it automatically true.
Ball, D. L. (2000) Working on the inside: Using one’s own practice as a site for studying mathematics teaching and learning. In Kelly, A. & Lesh, R. (Eds) Handbook of research design in mathematics and science education (pp. 365-402). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
