all the classroom's a stage

While not the point of the work, I found Vygotsky’s cautions against empiricism early on in the article to be interesting.  Perhaps because it’s something that has been on my mind lately.  I’ve spent the early part of my career working on relatively large-scale quantitative research projects. They’ve been almost exclusively quantitative with a qualitative coding scheme thrown into an observation window here and some interviews thrown into a data collection timepoint there so to speak. During my first semester of this program, I feel a bit out of my depth methodologically, but have been starting to wonder if, as Vygotsky put it so well, quantitative research is in some ways “only scratching the surface” of what comprises the everyday experiences of children, parents and teachers and how those everyday experiences moderate so much of what takes place in the classroom.  Certainly general realities are captured using some of the quantitative instruments at our disposal and examining demographic factors, but what feels to be lacking is that same “specificity” that Vygotsky points out as a fatal flaw in the psychotechnical investigations of the actor.  There is a certain immeasurability to the chaos of social, demographic, cultural, and random-experience factors that converge and manifest in complex and interesting ways in classroom settings.

Similar to the actor and any production, to really be understood, the classroom and the players therein must be considered in the full complexity of their cultural and historical condition.  Similar to the actor, the various interlocutors comprising schools and classrooms bring the whole state of mental development (in their various stages and chapters) and of the epoch and their class experience to school settings.  Much of the research I’ve seen (which likely isn’t enough for it to be appropriate to make these claims) understands these notions intellectually, and accounts for social and cultural factors on the surface, but there is often a disconnect from really delving deeply into how the accumulated every day experiences of young children manifest themselves and affect classroom climate, peer interactions, collaboration, practice, the practicability of interventions and general instruction, the type of strain or challenges this places on practitioners, etc..  It’s darkly comedic in a way because it is so simple--of course classrooms are little boxes filled with people and all of the learning and development and baggage they’ve accumulated to that point when they walk through the threshold of the doorway and sit down at their desks.  We seem to all understand this intellectually, but from my view I see a gap in much of the scholarship between understanding and really applying, exploring, and engaging with this reality.  Some of the best teachers I’ve seen know this reality all too well.    They play with it and account for it in just about everything they do in the classroom from the way they group children, to who they’re following up and checking in with after regular school hours.  We could learn from this.  Administrators and policy makers especially could learn from this too.

The purpose of this brief post is not to shoot down quantitative research, or to dive down the rabbit hole of exploring why our system of education has become so metrics obsessed.  It is I guess to further explore the broader conclusion that Vygotsky has been shepherding me toward all semester, which is in applied research and in practice, it is deeply important to consider the accumulated everyday sociocultural experiences of students/ research participants in order to account for the cultural and historical epoch in which learning and development are taking place, and to understand that like the stage, the classroom is merely a manifestation of these unities converging on a 25’x25’ square room with a few windows.

I need to learn more about conducting mixed methods research.