“I believe inquiry should be provocative, risky, stunning, astounding. It should take our breath away with its daring. It should challenge our foundational assumptions and transform the world. We must, even so, be vigilant in analyzing the consequences of human invention and the structures it endlessly creates." Elizabeth St. Pierre
Research Areas
Educational Technology
I study the uses of technology in education, including blogs, video games, video production, protocols for online learning, and blended learning. With each of these technologies, I focus on learning with technology and classroom integration. Qualitative Research Qualitative researchers typically employ observations, interviews, and document analysis. For my dissertation, I conducted a virtual ethnography, which means that I used the methods mentioned, but entirely in an online environment. Qualitative research is well suited to explore an issue deeply or to understand a complex situation, such as why parents/teachers are responding to a BYOD initiative in a certain way. Cultural Foundations The field of Cultural Studies is the lens through which I study Educational Technology. Cultural Studies, as a field, keeps issues of power in society in the fore. It includes fields such as Gender Studies and Disability Studies. While I study Educational Technology using qualitative inquiry, I also study both as cultural phenomena and pay close attention to the ways in which these technologies and methodologies are participating in and/or disrupting normative power arrangements. |
DissertationSummary of Dissertation Research
Blogs are a new media with new possibilities for subjectivity and agency, especially for socially and historically marginalized groups such as women, particularly as women are also marginalized in the arena of technology. It is important, then, to take a look at the ways in which women are utilizing blogs in order to understand how this new media’s possibilities are coming to fruition and/or how they may be reinscribing the same sorts of inequalities that exist in other spaces. In my dissertation, I used a virtual ethnographic approach (Hine, 2000) to explore a small sample of the blogs of one subsection of women, one of which I am a part and with whom I have experience, graduate students. This method was carefully selected to explore subjectivity, agency and learning of women, as well as the implications for qualitative research in a virtual environment. This study followed and built upon Hine’s principals for a virtual ethnography, which include investigating the remaking of space, exploring boundaries, strategic relevance over faithful representation, among others. I interviewed women, observed their virtual spaces, invited and incited them to experiment with those spaces and dialogued about our experiences. I did not seek to generalize the experience of women blogging in graduate school, rather I sought to look carefully at a few of these types of blogs to investigate how women work with/in this new media to experience the world and their place in it. And so, my main research questions were:
Critical media literacy is one way to describe an expanded understanding of literacy, one that includes tools of the media and a reflection upon those tools and the processes surrounding their engagement. As women in graduate school blog, it becomes apparent that they are negotiating the use of their blogs and their production as women, graduate students, and bloggers (among other things) in critical ways (reflecting upon these technologies and undercutting constructs of the feminine even as they embody them). How can this type of literacy be made explicit, furthered and brought into formal educational environments so as to dissolve some of the boundaries between formal and informal learning? It was through writing that I was able to hit upon the notion of a potentializing space for the feminine on blogs, though I leave with more questions than answers. Rather than finding the “big” and “transgressive” spaces for agency that I may have hoped for at the outset, I instead found myself and my participants negotiating the tensions between transgression and more livable spaces of the feminine in these new digital environments. Rather than a massive and profoundly transformative space, the blog instead appears to allow for many tiny transgressions. In these small movements, women are able to negotiate and to have agency in a way that is less fantastic, but more doable. This resituates my critical work and, ultimately the possibility of political work, in spaces such as these. Small changes that we can all live with, can still do work. |