I’m a What? (Day 1 Reflection)

Here we go again!  Three weeks of mind and vocabulary expansion, confusion, frustration, light-dawning moments, and finally (hopefully) basking in the glorious sunshine of feeling more illuminated intellectually than I do today. 

I have to say that day one was simultaneously both exciting and a little intimidating.  The excitement stems from new concepts of research methodologies that will aid in giving me direction on how to proceed in pursuing my intended thesis.  The intimidation arose from an inability to formulate a mental picture of what everything is supposed to look like in the end, and the realization that there is no one picture to be had.  As the research I intend to do is going to be my research and to a degree a reflection of myself, I recognize that there will not be a prototype available for what my end result will be save my own.  The open-endedness of this (qualitative) approach excites me as it leaves endless possibilities.  Then again, the possibility of going down the wrong road into some form of research darkness also exists.  But from what I can tell early on, if I find myself on that road I can always turn back towards where things went awry and take a different road. 

I found the concept of an ecological assessment model intriguing.  I had never contemplated that my writing style, nuances, and ability may have its roots in not just my in-school experience but also my life outside of it.  This made a lot of sense to me as earlier this spring I sent a copy of a paper I wrote for Dr. Leah Fowler to my parents as the topic interested them.  What was rewarding for me, and surprising to my immigrant parents who often find themselves in a permanently suspended state between English and Dutch, was that an academic paper I received full marks for was completely understandable and readable to them.  I recognized at the time, and much more so from reading about the ecological model, that my writing style and ability stems from my growing up in a world where everything I had to write in the various levels of my schooling was growing (necessarily) academically but was always affected by my use of, for lack of a better term, basic English due to my upbringing in an immigrant household.  As I look back at these experiences longitudinally, I today view them in a different, more ecological, perspective of growth and experience.  That being said, I also recognize the inherent difficulty that exists for ecologically assessing such information: it takes a lot of time to do properly.  In my case, I am looking at a lifetime of development. 

I also embarked on reading the first chapter of Creswell’s Research Design (2014) and though it was more of a summary and overview of what the book is about, was able to recognize where I may fit into the world of research.  Before reading the descriptions of the four worldviews presented by Creswell, I simply starred the bullets I found myself most oriented towards.  What came of this, and reading the more detailed descriptions on the following pages, was the recognition that I am not very Positivist/Post-positivist or Transformative.  I lean much more towards Constructivism and Pragmatism.  As I read these sections in detail, I attempted to attach the qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method designs to each and happily did so correctly before reading their descriptions.  At the end of the day (literally as it is 11.24 pm), I have a new view of myself than when I got up this morning: I am most likely a qualitative researcher with Constructivist and Pragmatic leanings all the while being affected by my Christian worldview. 

This ought to make for an interesting next few years as my desire is to look at how faith-based schools will fit into a changing, more secularized, educational landscape than we’ve seen in the West’s historical memory.