Wednesday, November 5, 2008
PS
Besides introspection I was going to suggest interviewing our friends and classmates for their feelings and ideas about the subject. This can help us generate more hypotheses. And besides just focusing on people with 'low' motivation or engagement (with a particular subject, or across the board), it would be useful to study people at all levels of engagement with their education, for purposes of comparison.
Our class project on 'senioritis': motivation and engagement with learning
What a rich and useful topic we generated in class today... I'm pleased to say I can put myself fully behind it. I have a wide variety of my own introspections to share, which I'm going to allow to incubate a little longer. It's definitely useful for all of us to contemplate this introspectively and share what we find.
Although almost no research methods textbooks acknowledge this, all research involves a lot of introspection. We have to introspect to determine what we find important, and to reflect on what ways of approaching it might be most useful. And even when we look for empirical "external" data, we are still in a sense introspecting, because we have no way of apprehending any kind of sense perception without consulting our consciousness. This is psychology and all science's "dirty little secret." And psychology doesn't like this term introspection because for the most part, like I always repeat, psychology is one of the most stubbornly modernist fields in all of the academic enterprise. While the hard sciences we think we are emulating have moved on from strict determinism, psychology still seems locked on this goal of seeking mechanical "laws of behavior," even though the supposedly more "rule bound," molecular components of systems don't even operate in strictly deterministic ways. There is a big difference between probabilism and determinism!
But now I've gone off on a tangent, an important one, but back to the point. The introspection is really a wonderful and necessary thing even though the textbooks don't talk about it. Psychology rejected this term back when an early approach to psychology (Wundt's structuralism) was discarded. (Psychology seems to have a history of discarding its schools of thought and any language associated with it entirely, instead of selectively retaining useful elements while ignoring what is less useful in a paradigm). I think this is why research methods texts don't teach you to introspect about your research topic.
That, and it sounds too much like 'philosophy,' which every science, especially early on, has to distinguish itself from. But of course, it's a false distinction, because any science is basically just philosophy -plus- some relatively more structured, 'rigorous,' 'empirical' observation. Just don't buy into the hype that empirical observation is foolproof. That's scientific propaganda and well known to be outdated. Many factors affect our observation, not least our expectations, our sensory apparatus, and any techonological apparatus we use to aid perception. Even in physics, these factors can all change the observation - in other words reality is not just fixed or out there waiting for us to discover it, but is being actively shaped by the consciousnesses and apparatus that are observing it.
If you are interested in further thinking about the foundations of knowledge, try Robert Anton Wilson's "Quantum Psychology," a book which I'm about half through. But which corresponds to thoughts which I've had for most of my adult life.
For the record, this won't correspond with the assumptions that many psychological researchers hold. (However, I've as yet never heard or read any sort of useful rebuttal to it). Blah blah blah, graduate school, etc. Look, on this subject of graduate school. This seems to always get brought in in some of my discussions at Eastern as if "what I'm supposed to know for graduate school" is the highest authority in the land.
Look, I came here from teaching in a place with a graduate school, teaching at both levels. Having been through a graduate school. And I can tell you that while these people may have access to certain resources (i.e. power), that by no means makes their views on anything more correct. It just gives them the ability to enforce a greater level of conformity to their views. In my experience, that is often an indicator that there are things terribly awry with their systems of thought. Power has a way of making people lazy in their thinking, because it makes them take their assumptions for granted. After all, if working on those assumptions gained one power, one has vested interest in not questioning those assumptions, and obscuring the fact that they are indeed debatable assumptions. They need to become seen as unquestionable facts so that those holding their various amounts of power can maintain without having to adapt.
That's one reason why I've actively tried to avoid accruing any more power than is minimally useful (although I'm certain I can get by with much less, and am trying to learn how to every day).
OK, I haven't said anything about student motivation, so while I've taken up a lot of space I've left that field open to be sown with your thoughts!
CJA
Although almost no research methods textbooks acknowledge this, all research involves a lot of introspection. We have to introspect to determine what we find important, and to reflect on what ways of approaching it might be most useful. And even when we look for empirical "external" data, we are still in a sense introspecting, because we have no way of apprehending any kind of sense perception without consulting our consciousness. This is psychology and all science's "dirty little secret." And psychology doesn't like this term introspection because for the most part, like I always repeat, psychology is one of the most stubbornly modernist fields in all of the academic enterprise. While the hard sciences we think we are emulating have moved on from strict determinism, psychology still seems locked on this goal of seeking mechanical "laws of behavior," even though the supposedly more "rule bound," molecular components of systems don't even operate in strictly deterministic ways. There is a big difference between probabilism and determinism!
But now I've gone off on a tangent, an important one, but back to the point. The introspection is really a wonderful and necessary thing even though the textbooks don't talk about it. Psychology rejected this term back when an early approach to psychology (Wundt's structuralism) was discarded. (Psychology seems to have a history of discarding its schools of thought and any language associated with it entirely, instead of selectively retaining useful elements while ignoring what is less useful in a paradigm). I think this is why research methods texts don't teach you to introspect about your research topic.
That, and it sounds too much like 'philosophy,' which every science, especially early on, has to distinguish itself from. But of course, it's a false distinction, because any science is basically just philosophy -plus- some relatively more structured, 'rigorous,' 'empirical' observation. Just don't buy into the hype that empirical observation is foolproof. That's scientific propaganda and well known to be outdated. Many factors affect our observation, not least our expectations, our sensory apparatus, and any techonological apparatus we use to aid perception. Even in physics, these factors can all change the observation - in other words reality is not just fixed or out there waiting for us to discover it, but is being actively shaped by the consciousnesses and apparatus that are observing it.
If you are interested in further thinking about the foundations of knowledge, try Robert Anton Wilson's "Quantum Psychology," a book which I'm about half through. But which corresponds to thoughts which I've had for most of my adult life.
For the record, this won't correspond with the assumptions that many psychological researchers hold. (However, I've as yet never heard or read any sort of useful rebuttal to it). Blah blah blah, graduate school, etc. Look, on this subject of graduate school. This seems to always get brought in in some of my discussions at Eastern as if "what I'm supposed to know for graduate school" is the highest authority in the land.
Look, I came here from teaching in a place with a graduate school, teaching at both levels. Having been through a graduate school. And I can tell you that while these people may have access to certain resources (i.e. power), that by no means makes their views on anything more correct. It just gives them the ability to enforce a greater level of conformity to their views. In my experience, that is often an indicator that there are things terribly awry with their systems of thought. Power has a way of making people lazy in their thinking, because it makes them take their assumptions for granted. After all, if working on those assumptions gained one power, one has vested interest in not questioning those assumptions, and obscuring the fact that they are indeed debatable assumptions. They need to become seen as unquestionable facts so that those holding their various amounts of power can maintain without having to adapt.
That's one reason why I've actively tried to avoid accruing any more power than is minimally useful (although I'm certain I can get by with much less, and am trying to learn how to every day).
OK, I haven't said anything about student motivation, so while I've taken up a lot of space I've left that field open to be sown with your thoughts!
CJA
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