http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/katz/

I checked out Jack Katz's webpage, and found he has drafts of some of his work-in-progress posted under journal articles. While I found this intriguing on its own, I found the "Underground Ethnographers" article of potential practical use.

Becker's points about distinguishing between quantitative and qualitative practies seem straightforward, the 2nd being about the quantity of data collected, and the first, and one I think would be useful for us to discuss in more depth in class, the notion of unit of analysis at which research is describing social characteristics and practices. While Becker suggests we shouldn't give up talking about "variables", abstract and discreet characterizations of people and practices, altogether, his desciption of the distinct practice of qualitative work is strong, "fieldwork makes you aware of the constructed character of "variables"" (p. 56).

I helped with the Brain Awareness Week event yesterday, for which a number of hundreds of kids from area schools came to the HUB to learn about the brain and learning. It was so fun to talk with kids, and teachers and parents, about learning and research on learning. Afterward,
one of the neuroscience grad students I was chatting with talked about a learning sciences in education conference where the motto was "Learning Sciences: Keeping Learning Complex". The group, quanitative experimentalists to the core, thought that sounded ridiculous. "Like, confuse kids more than they already are?" Then we talked about the "construction" of learning in schools, in terms of over-simplifying curricula, born largely out of over-simplified assessment mandates, and their notions of making thinking and learning complex seemed better situated in the realities of young learners. They seemed to like the idea of getting, specifically, very strategic about how to make kids' learning more complex, pretty much in the same sorts of "long, wide, and deep" sorts of learning principles that Phil suggested the LIFE Center is working toward. The point, I think, is that these grad students' perspective on learning was pretty narrowly focused in one sort of learning orientation, until they engaged in a discourse about alternative, or ground-level in a sense, epistemologies of research on learning.