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I thought I'd give this blog a proper send-off with an official final entry, instead of abandoning it outright without another peep. Overall, it has been useful for me to chronicle my experiences and reflections here over the course of the semester. I still have a lot of questions when it comes to research design, but I'll figure out the answers along the way. Thank you for following along!

Week 13

I will be using mixed methods during my research about the use of business and marketing rhetoric and how it may or may not influence the domain of the Writing Center. One of the methods I would like to use is interview. Because I first experienced my “felt difficulty” while working at a university in Ohio, I decided to send some pilot questions to professionals intimately connected with that University's Writing Center and its functions. As I develop this project further to include more writing centers, if need be, I will interview additional directors and other staff members, particularly if they have been in the field for a long time. My conversations with these former directors are ongoing. I have submitted IRB materials, so until I receive approval, I cannot formally interview these professionals or use their responses in my research, but their answers to my pilot questions were interesting and helpful. Because the project itself is ongoing as well, I hope I will be able to continue to seek their guidance and expertise. To begin the conversation, I e-mailed them the following questions:

1. When you started your career directing the writing center, what were some of your educational goals and why?
2. According to your research interests included in your faculty profile, you're interested in critical pedagogy theory. Were the educational goals for the writing center shaped by certain pedagogical theories? If so, which ones? If not, why?
3. Have those goals changed during the course of your tenure? If they have, explain what changes took place and why.
4. In 2011, the president of the university started to use the term “customer” when referring to students in his weekly newsletter to the campus community. Has the rhetoric of the president changed your mission statement for the writing center? If so, in what ways? If not, have you considered employing similar terminology in the writing center? Why or why not?

Any feedback on these questions and/or potential additions would be helpful at this stage. I have not included the answers to these questions because I don't want to potentially conduct myself unethically. I have not gone through and edited, nor have I asked either of them to clarify or expand. I have only thanked them for offering their perspectives during the beginning stages of this project. I have been checking on my IRB status for about a week (as of 4/7/14). Until I receive approval, I will not proceed. In the mean time, I will continue to gather text-based data and go through secondary research. The text-based data will be analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis as a method. The pilot research I've undertaken has been the human subject part of the research.

Week 12

While reading Marshall and Rossman for this week, I thought about my own struggles to map-out and determine the scope of the project I'm proposing this semester. I know that looking at how marketing discourse affects interactions in the writing center will be a huge undertaking that will take a few years to really understand, study, and write about, especially if I plan to incorporate some grounded theory into this research, but how do I define the technical perimeters of my research so that everything runs smoothly and efficiently? I'm used to only taking myself and chosen texts and secondary research into consideration, because I come from a literature background. The expectations of this research are much different and less isolated.

I know that I will be relying a lot on secondary research for this project as well, but because I will be conducting interviews, etc, I know that I will have to be mindful of many other factors that come into play. I actually do not know what my budget concerns should be, or what personnel to consult, for instance, other than fellow writing center administrators and tutors. And because I foresee this project as a potential dissertation topic, I know that I will have to consider factors such as personal costs. Thus, I find myself becoming increasingly overwhelmed. I feel as though I have to be prepared to account for every variable, each obstacle, and be quick to come up with a Plan B if things fall through.

There's also the matter of considering connections or lack thereof between myself and my human participants. While reading Barton, I find myself questioning my "closeness" to the project and the participants; I'm also thinking about some of my CITI training and issues of convenient populations. I'm interested in writing center pedagogy and first-year composition studies, but how much does my interest stem from an intimacy with those communities and the problems they face? Naturally, that's a leading question; it's easy for anyone to become interested in doing research in areas with which they are intimate. But while reading for this week, I've thought about how collaborative research is potentially problematic. In other words, in what ways can we safe-guard ourselves against navel-gazing and doing research that affords us the opportunity to self-congratulate? Part of that anxiety comes from my identity as a newbie researcher. I am uncomfortable and, frankly, scared. I want to do research that is exciting to me and to the field. How distant should I be from the topic in order for there to still be excitement, along with rigor? The correspondence between the two learners at the end of Chapter 9 in Marshall and Rossman was actually refreshing to read for some of these reasons. Issues of time and narrowing the focus of research questions are problems I've been encountering. I'm still struggling with knowing "my place" as well as whether what I'm asking is worthwhile and researchable.

With regards to King's questions of ethics and closeness, I suppose I struggle with some of those dynamics as well: for instance, I appreciate his ah-ha moment on page 485, that the researcher tends to have "dialectical relationship" with one's research. I feel very close to my research interests, as if they are a part of me, and I have no clue whether that's a "dangerous" prospect, although I do tend to think that we can't help but become intimately involved; that intimacy begins and ends during different stages of one's research, but I think it's impossible to conduct worthwhile research while also being completely detached. One has to at least be in constant dialogue with one's topics, participants, etc, in order to get anything meaningful out of the exchange. How close is too close, however? That is the main question. I know with a reasonable amount of certainty that a Vulcan-like absence of emotion does not inherently make a researcher's undertakings more ethical. But what about the flip-side; how can a researcher prevent himself or herself from getting too attached, especially with regards to long-term studies?

I know that this entry had more questions than usual; I guess the readings brought up more questions than answers for me. These matters will probably continue to be interesting to me as I continue my research journey.