On Literacy, Qualitative Research… and Pizza!
Contributor: Raúl Alberto Mora, Ph.D. — LSLP Chair
Before we get to the thick of the title of our maiden entry in The LSLP Legion Post, a bit of context: LSLP, in its 5th anniversary, is in the midst of a reloading phase. Our first cadre of preservice teachers has come of age, three will graduate this month and we expect the others to do so within the year. In this process of reloading, we are returning to the fundamentals of our craft, both in literacy and qualitative research. Today’s account is the result of one of our sessions.
As part of our reloading process, the two research teams that comprise our Student Research Group (Urban Literacies and Gaming Literacies) are engaged in lively discussions about qualitative research. We are using two books for this purpose: John Creswell’s 30 Essential Skills for the Qualitative Researcher and Johnny Saldaña’s Fundamentals of Qualitative Research. We are taking our time to read the chapters in small increments (most of our new researchers are in the first three semesters of their English-Spanish Education major, still developing their communicative competence in English), but making sure they all bring lots of questions to enhance the discussion.
Today, as is the case every Monday, the Gaming Literacies team (also called #TeamLaV — LaV being our concept of Language-as-Victory) met to discuss our current reading of the first chapter of Saldaña’s book. One question triggered the metaphor mentioned in the title, somewhere along the lines of “how much data is too much data?” This prompted my metaphor that “qualitative research is like pizza.” Now, I have been prone to using metaphors to teach about research (such as the “build a plane you can fly and land” to describe research design) and it is not the first time I use pizza as a metaphor:
Now, what prompted me to equate qualitative research to pizza? Well, allow me to retort: Qualitative research is an endeavor that is, above all, hands-on, like eating pizza, as Boromir explains:
Eating pizza is, more often than not, a messy endeavor. One’s hands will get dirty and greasy in the process… just like qualitative research! Qualitative researchers must get deep in the field of study to make good sense of them. In the case of our research, that means for example walking the city, going to restaurants and malls, looking for graffiti, shopping windows or tattoos, or engaging with videogames. Qualitative research (in particular ethnographic research) cannot be made from afar. Only in walking, in shadowing, in listening to others, in recording images do we begin to understand social and educational phenomena.
Back to the pizza metaphor, to really enjoy pizza, one must be ready to leave a messy table, to take the risk of getting one’s shirt stained or the occasional tomato sauce bits in our fingers. To do qualitative research well, researchers must accept that they are an important part of the process and that the research enterprise, despite the cleanliness of the conference presentation or the journal article, has moments of chaos and madness. Qualitative research is not supposed to be neat, but that is what makes is so fascinating! Our hands will be greasy and dirty, but that’s part of the overall experience.
The other link between research and pizza is best summarized in the famous quote,
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH PIZZA!
True, one sometimes may feel as if the amount of data collected was overwhelming (and I am sure my graduate students have some thoughts on this matter), but data surplus is a far better problem than data deficit. As I told my team today, one should try to collect as much data as possible, even if one never gets to use it all. After all, there may very well be such thing as too little data and research studies may suffer from it.
Are there better metaphors for qualitative research than pizza? Very likely. I am sure that the great Kung-Fu masters of the field have their own examples. In my case, the metaphor served its purpose and my team left the meeting with a strong baseline understanding of what it means to do qualitative research. And that is good enough for me as a research mentor! After all, good pizza always leaves you happy and wanting for more… just like well-done research should!
