Dave's Book: Chapter 6
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Chapter 6-- Questions and Focus

Questions and question asking are at the heart of the naturalistic inquiry process and the educator as learner idea. T`e questions the inquirer is asking at any given moment determine the focus and direction of the inquiry at that moment. And as Heisenberg (1958) said so long ago about the interrelatedness of the observer and the observed in quantum mechanics, "we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning." (p 57, cited in Knoblauch and Brannon, 1988, pp 17-18) Questions are shaped by and shape all we do and are as inquirers in all dimensions of the naturalistic inquiry process discussed throughout this book and summarized in the figures in Chapter One:

*who the inquirer is, including assumptions about inquiry, learning, and teaching,
*field relations and roles under development,
*information that has been collected and is to be collected,
*analyses, syntheses, and interpretations that have been constructed and are planned,
*any sharing of learning that the inquirer anticipates and is doing, and
*what has been recorded about the inquiry experience to that point in time.

Questions are definitely at the heart of this holomovement process. This chapter will illustrate the claim that who you are as an inquirer powerfully shapes the questions you will ask. Likewise, who you are impacts on the field relations and roles you develop which likewise shape the questions you can ask in a given inquiry situation. In turn, while the questions you ask impact the information you will collect and the interpretations you make of it, the data you have and the analyses you make of them affects the subsequent questions you may ask. Finally, what you write in your fieldnotes and what you consider sharing with others are both shaped by the questions you are asking and the questions are reciprocally formed out of your considerations of audiences for related writings. Inspite of the fact that none of these activities is independent of the others, we will focus in this chapter on the questioning activity.


A School Superintendent's Story

All the stories shared to this point in the book have been at the classroom level. Obviously, teachers and students are fot the only learners in educational settings. A study conducted by Garry McKinnon provides an example of a superintendent as inquirer and learner. Garry's initial question was shaped and modified throughout his study to yield his focus on the central question: "What is the change process in an educational setting." After reading his report in Appendix E: An Example Study by an Administrator, please consider the following analysis of this example in terms of questions and focus as they relate to the rest of the naturalistic inquiry process.

Garry's story provides a backdrop for a discussion of several key points about asking questions and focusing an inquiry. Before he officially began his study, he had been exploring alternatives to what he saw in the schools around him while he certified, began teaching high school, worked as a guidance counselor, a vice-principal, a school principal, a deputy superintendent, and the superintendent, and earned a masters degree. At each stage, he asked new questions and sought answers through his study of the literature and by observing people he was working with in the schools. His focus for the study reported in Appendix E developed after he had been a superintendent for ten years and had begun a doctoral program which led him to "develop an interest in the relationship between learning and teaching and the change process.

Garry began this particular inquiry with a concern about reform within his district. He states in his portrayal of himself, "As superintendent, he spends a significant amount of time in developing relationships with trustees and Department of Education staff. At the same time, he has found it essential to maintain open lines of communication and a positive working relationship with teachers, admininstrators, students, parents, and community members in the school system. ... he has been able to have some influence on educational issues at the provincial level, but he sees a need for a new approach. He has found that much of what is taking place in education in Alberta, is perceived to be beyond the control of the local school jurisdiction. He is concerned that many of his fellow educators have concluded that there are few opportunities for input which have an impact."

In other words, Garry's experiences as a teacher and then as an administrator and a doctoral student studying the thoughtful work of educators at the local level lead him to ask what change was and how he might influence more powerful change in his local district. A review of his audit trail and the more lengthy dissertation version of his study reveals the fact that his questions changed regularly, as did his focus, throughout the life of the inquiry itself. And he ended the study with recommendations for further research which indicated new questions he had developed from a review of his experience conducting this study. This is not unusual for people who are constantly searching for new insights and trying to improve the world around them. It is a natural characteristic of learners.


An Analysis

Garry's experiences illustrate several points that others who want to conduct inquiry as part of their work might consider, particularly as they think of questions they want to ask and as they refine the focus of their inquiry throughout its evolution:

1. A basic assumption of this book is that educators want to do their work better. Garry certainly did and this led him to keep asking new questions as he moved from setting to setting and interacted with the people in the discussion group he formed.

2. It is also assumed that improvement involves learning -- hence the notion of educators as learners. This may be done particularly well through naturalistic inquiry as described in this book but all other ways of learning should be considered as well. Garry is a good example of an administrator who knew he didn't have all the answers and was interested in exploring, wondering, seeking new insights from the people who worked for him. He used a naturalistic approach to obtain information from them but also studied the literature, administered questionnaires, and was trying out an experiment of sorts to see what he could learn from a volunteer group of people from across the district.

3. Educators learn by asking questions and we only get answers to the questions we ask . The questions we ask determine the focus of our inquiries. It should be obvious that if Garry had asked why the people in his district didn't follow a particular change model that could be selected from the literature, he would have learned very different lessons than the ones he learned by asking how they did change and view change. Both questions would have been legitimate but would have lead to very different answers.

4. Questions come from many sources. Garry's came from the literature on change and thoughtfulness, from his many years of experience in the Alberta school systems, from interactions he had with people in the discussion group he assembled for this study, and from his experiences sharing what he was learning with colleagues while writing his dissertation. There are limitless sources of questions and Garry probably accessed even more than this list suggests. Some question sources inquirers might consider as they focus their inquiries are summarized briefly below:
a. The foundational disciplines and traditions that guide educators ask certain questions which should be considered by inquirers. Philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, and others ask critical questions about how people learn, teach and grow which can help an inquirer explore their own educational experiences fruitfully. The literature on change from several fields influenced Garry in his focus for this study.

b. Likewise, questions asked by the various subject matter disciplines in which educators specialize may provide useful guidance. For example, a history teacher might ask how polatical and socio-economic forces in the lives of her students have formed and influenced the students' performance over time. Garry asked questions from the field of change agentry in trying to understand how educators in his district were performing as change agents.

c. Educational theorists and researchers ask questions about learning and teaching in the many journals and handbooks on teaching and teacher education. Often educators believe these sources are irrelevant to their work because they are based on studies done by people who are removed from the classrooms and schools. However, the questions they raise are often based on careful examination of schools and could be a valuable source for field-based inquirers. Garry was particularly sensitive to the views of educational reform theorists in his study.

d. People participating in our studies raise some of the best questions . The students and their parents ask questions through their behavior, if not explicitly. When students are not learning, the implied question is, "What can be done to help me learn?" Businesses and citizens ask questions of the schools increasingly which educators should capitalize upon rather than defend against. Accreditation bodies and other evaluation audiences ask particularly questions about how well educators are performing in relation to their various sets of criteria. Colleagues are constantly asking how to teach or administer better. Any and all of these might be considered as sources for questions in a given study. Garry's study was built squarely around discovering the questions his colleagues were raising about change an schools.

e. Our gwn lives raise questions from many dimensions: Our experiences and background, our awareness of and responsiveness to questions asked from all other sources, our need for change, our theoretical perspectives on how the content we teach is best learned, our beliefs about what can be known and how we can know, about our freedom to ask questions, about the importance of information versus people, about knowledge and knowing, and so on. Garry's brief overview of his own life suggested that his background led him to ask about the importance of change at the indavidual level in the creation of institutional and societal change. His beliefs about the power of the mind and the individual's freedom to change made the questions he asked possible.

5. Naturalistic inquiry often focuses on the questions raised by participants' lived experiences. The naturalistic inquirer is often asking, "What is the nature of this experience from the others' points of view?" or "What is really going on here from the various perspectives of the participants, in contrast to what the literature, my theory, or any established interpretations say is going on?" And these questions imply, "What can I become aware of by listening to others that might help me in my search for how to help them?" For example, some of the questions that have been asked in the examples given in this book have been:

a. What is the right thing to do for Steve (Sid, Cheryl, and Jack asked this in Chapter One)?

b. How do teachers make ethical decisions regarding students (David asked this in Chapter One)?

c. How should candidates be prepared to teach (David and the student teachers asked this in Appendix A)?

d. How can I learn to teach better through journal writing (Marné asked this in Appendix B)?

e. What is going on with Jimmy and how can I help him (Kyleen asked this in Appendix C)?

f. What is going on with change in my district and how can I encourage positive change (Garry asked in this chapter and in Appendix E)?

6. Various interpretive frameworks used within the general naturalistic inquiry approach raise useful questions. This point reinforces the general theme of this book that none of the naturalistic inquiry activities is independent. The analytical, synthetical, and interpretive procedures discussed in Chapter Eight employ particular questions which guide and influence the focus of the study at all stages. Some common and useful interpretive frameworks are:

a. Spradley's (1979, 1980) developmental research sequence, which includes many different questions. He discusses three which should be used at all stages in the sequence:

Spradley also suggests that a study should begin with a very wide descriptive focus and then be narrowed over time with structural and contrast questions focusing on a few selected "domains" or categories of descriptive information. He outlines a procedure for identifying domains called domain analysis, which will be discussed in Chapter Eight. He believes that the domains for focus and further questioning should be selected from all that are identified by asking the following questions:

Spradley notes that almost all social situations in which inquiry might be conducted consist of several elements about which questions ought to be asked to obtain a comprehensive description. These may be asked by an observer during a grand or mini tour of a social setting or they could be asked of interviewees or of documents (artifacts) under study. The use of grand and mini tours will be explored further in Chapter Seven but the key questions asked are these:

Spradley created a matrix of questions using these nine questions in both the columns and the rows of the matrix and asking what questions would be appropriate at the intersections (e.g., what are the physical things (#2) in the physical place (#1), etc.). Other questions from Spradley as well as the many other sources discussed in this chapter could be combined into such a matrix to generate a set of questions that would take any inquirer a lifetime to address.

Garry used some of the ideas from Spradley in conducting his inquiry. He looked for domains and asked the associated descriptive questions. But he did not ask all that were possible in Spradley's matrix. He selected among them according to the other interests that he had in doing the study (e.g., he was not particularly concerned about the physical setting or objects involved but was very concerned about goals and feelings of the people participating in his discussion group.

b. Hunter and Foley (1975) discuss the many different filters people use to sort through information and focus their attention. They identify several questions that are asked differentially across ethnic cultures, claiming that people from certain cultures tend not to ask certain questions that might be very helpful to ask. They note that all of us are selective but in different ways and so one question we should ask ourselves regularly is, "what am I missing?" They suggest that most Westerners focus gn verbal information and ignore the meaning-bearing contextual details surrounding that information (including time, space, and nonverbal information. They identify the following questions to be added to any others you might be asking during an observation or throughout an entire inquiry, just in case they may have some relevance to the experiences you are learning more about:

It isn 't clear that Garry attended to all these details. Given his membership in Western culture, it is likely that he did not, unless he consciously made an effort to do so. It appears from his conclusions and themes that he focused on the verbal information the participants in his group talked about rather than on the nonverbal information they were sharing. That focus still yielded a lot of data to explore. But Hunter and Foley make a good point that much of the contextual details that would help Garry interpret the verbal information had to be processed by him subconsciously as well because he probably didn't make it explicit. That is one approach educators as learners will likely take; but you ought to consider taking explicit note of these details from time to tame as well.

c. Lou Smith (Williams, 1981) begins his study with "foreshadowed problems" as his focus. He is constantly reading and thinking about how to do schooling more effectively in light of whatever experience he is able to have in schools. Whenever he goes into a new setting, he brings with him the accumulation of these thoughts in the form of questions or problems that he wants to ask in the context of a new setting. Thus, the exact set of questions is constantly changing. Garry appears to have been doing somet`ing similar to this, although he probably wasn't doing so as explicitly as Smith does. He used his experiences as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and doctoral student to generate the questions for his dissertation.

d. In contrast to Smith, Rob Walker (Williams, 1981) is not accumulating data across sites but instead asks what he can find that is positive and uplifting about education in any given site. He also asks what role the participants want to assign him, as a means of obtaining insight into their lives and meanings they attach to relationships and events in their lives. Garry did this to some extent too. He invited the teachers and principals in his district to join him in a discussion group and then let them help define his role in the group rather than assert his right as the superintendent to set the agenda. He not only learned more about their own agenda by keeping his quiet, he also learned how they viewed him in this unique role and setting.

e. Tesch (1990) reviews 50 different qualitative analysis techniques she identified in educational, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and other fields and notes that every analytical stance is generated by a theory or a set of questions about the world and people. The list of possibilities is practically endless, as this growing list indicates and as Tesch's analysis shows.

f. Knoblauch and Brannon (1988), Connaly and Clandindin (19??), and others claim that story telling and narrative inquiry are the most appropriate forms of inquiry in which educators might engage. The main question these people seem to be asking in anticipation of telling a story is "What is life like for the person about whom the story is to be told?" They then bring the full power of the story-telling arts to bear on this question and address a myriad of questions such as these identified by Knoblauch and Brannon: "scene, situation, action-in-time," (P 23) and questions about "the phenomenal reality of the classroom [or any educational setting], what it looks like, the objects that define it as a material and social space, how the people in it look, talk, move, relate to each other, the emotional contours of their life together, the things that happen, intellectual exchanges, social understandings and misunderstandings, what the teacher [and other actors] knows, plans, hopes for, and discovers, how different students react, the subtle textures of the teaching experience, the subtle textures of the learning experience." (P 25) These inquirers are most interested in questions associated with giving a voice to the lived experiences of the people they are inquirying into. Garry approached some of the story-telling questions in the portrayal section of his dissertation but none of that shows up in the article version that is found in Appendix E. This kind of question asking takes more time and space to address than most journals in education are used to dedicating. But oral story telling and perhaps electronic journals and literary journals provide hopeful outlets for educators who want to share their stories.

g. My basic approach is to experience the setting as richly as possible, asking myself what is going on from as many perspectives as I have time, relationships, resources, and interest to consider. I know that I will never ask all the possible questions and that whatever questions I do ask will lead ee in directions that facilitate some follow-up questions and discourage the asking of others. I know too that who I am and my experiences play a major role in what questions I select among the millions of possibilities.

7. Each inquiring educator must thoughtfully ask their own questions in any given situation. There are lots of theories of education that suggest certain questions as being the essential ones. And there are probably an infinite number of excellent questions that have never been conceptualized, let alone asked. So, this book cannot tell you the key questions to ask in every situation. We can only make the point that asking good questions is central to good learning and to good naturalistic inquiry.

It is also apparent that any given inquirer cannot be asking all possible questions at once. As humans, we have to focus our attention on one question at a time or we don't get answers to any questions. And whatever questions we focus on restrict the asking of other questions, especially as we pursue questions to deeper levels. However, an assumption of naturalistic inquiry is that all questions are connected wholistically and answering of any one question has implications for any and all other questions that may be raised.

To be a learner, particularly a learning educator, is to be continually searching for better and better questions to ask and to do our best to answer those questions within the frame we find ourselves. The best product of such questionning and answer-seeking will be better questions, in addition to our tentative answers. And the context in which those questions and answers are created and explored needs to be clearly documented too. Details about what questions were asked and why those were the best questions the asker could come up with at the time should be recorded (in an audit trail) so the readers and inquirer can interpret more thoughtfully the questions and answers.

Ideally, the questions asked would be couched in terms of the experiential context of the inquirer. That context would include all the other naturalistic inquiry activities and products discussed throughout this book using the holomovement metaphor: the literature read, the problems most immediately or powerfully faced, the resources available, the relationships and roles that seem most relevant, the anticipated sharing of learnings with others, the information collection procedures available, the analysis, synthesis, and interpretation frameworks being considered, the philosophical stances being taken, etc.

Obviously, the context of any given question-asking activity for any given inquirer is infinite. And no one is likely to be aware of all the contextual details that yielded the questions they are asking. But the more qou can say about these details in your fieldnotes and any writeing you generate will help others and you better understand and interpret the answers you come up with during your study.


Additional Readings
Hunter and Foley (1976). Doing Anthropology, New York: Harper and Row.

Knoblauch, C. H. and Brannon, L. (1988). Knowing our knowledge. A phenomenological basis for teacher research. Chaper 2 in Audits of meaning, a festschrift in honor of Ann E. Berthoff by Smith, L. Z. (Ed.), Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

McKinnon, D. G. (1992). A naturalistic inquiry into educational change. Unpublished dissertation, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT.

Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview , Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant Observation , Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Williams, D. D. (1981). Understanding the work of naturalistic researchers, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder, CG.

Questions for Consideration

1. Do you agree that different people will ask different questions in any given inquiry situation? What are the implications of your answer?

2. How do the questions you ask influence your learning?

3. How does your background context influence the questions you ask?

4. If your background influences the questions you ask and your questions influence your learning, does your background determine your learning?

5. How is question asking different for educators as inquirers in contrast to educators who do not see themselves in this way? In contrast to professional naturalistic inquirers who are not educators?

6. What are your reactions to the claims made in this chapter regarding the importance of question asking?
Suggested Activities

1. Identify and write down questions you have in your work situation right now and questions from both within your setting (from people and events or problems there) and from without (from t`e literature and other experiences you have had) that you might like to address in your ongoing inquiry. Review this chapter to see if any other potential questions are provoked.

2. Explore how these questions could influence your learning (or lack thereof) and what you plan to do about that.

3. Clarify your focus for the inquiry you are doing as of right now, with the understanding that it can change dramatically.

4. Write in your fieldnotes a description at this point in your study of the questions you are asking and the context you are operating under that helped lead you to ask those questions. Address the following:

* What was your initial question that got you into this inquiry situation?
* What other questions have come up?
* How did these questions come up?
* What questions, if any, have you decided not to consider in this study?
* Why?
* What are some of the contextual details in your life that you think have lead you to ask these questions in this inquiry?

5. What questions, if any, did this chapter raise for you?



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