A group of faculty, who have either been through the Nexen Scholars program or have conducted a SoTL project, are working as a Community of Practice this year to support ourselves in furthering our SoTL work.  For those who are interested but can’t make our meetings, we’ll post brief summaries here.

As a group, we decided that one of our goals was to explore different methodologies in order to expand our perspectives on what kinds of research questions can be asked in SoTL.  At our second meeting on Oct 18, Michelle gave us a nice “big picture” summary of qualitative research which included examples, interests, disciplines, and common terms and features.  I particularly enjoyed how she summed up her presentation as follows:

Empirical Qualitative – the truth is out there
Naturalistic Descriptive – rich description, researcher needs to be keenly observant
Interpretive the context is the story
Critical Theory – interested in power, emancipatory goals
Post-modern, Post-Structuralist – the jazz of qualitative research

Thanks Michelle!

We had such a great discussion that we didn’t quite get to discussing data analysis yet, so to get ready for our next meeting, Michelle has suggested this reading:

Title:  Analyzing Qualitative Data
Author(s):  Margaret D. LeCompte
Source:  Theory into Practice, Vol. 39, No. 3, Getting Good Qualitative Data to Improve Educational Practice  (Summer, 2000), pp. 146-154
Publisher(s): Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/1477546

See you next week, Friday Nov 1, at 2:00 in T195.