Video Research in the Learning Sciences

Ricki Goldman, Roy Pea, Brigid Barron, Sharon J. Derry, Ricki Goldman, Roy Pea, Brigid Barron, Sharon J. Derry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780805853599
• eBook ISBN: 9781135604042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Video Research in the Learning Sciences is a comprehensive exploration of key theoretical, methodological, and technological advances concerning uses of digital video-as-data in the learning sciences as a way of knowing about learning, teaching, and educational processes. The aim of the contributors, a community of scholars using video in their own work, is to help usher in video scholarship and supportive technologies, and to mentor video scholars, so that video research will meet its maximum potential to contribute to the growing knowledge base about teaching and learning.

This volume contributes deeply to both to the science of learning through in-depth video studies of human interaction in learning environments—whether classrooms or other contexts—and to the uses of video for creating descriptive, explanatory, or expository accounts of learning and teaching. It is designed around four themes—each with a cornerstone chapter that introduces and synthesizes the cluster of chapters related to it:

• Theoretical frameworks for video research;
• Video research on peer, family, and informal learning;
• Video research on classroom and teacher learning; and
• Video collaboratories and technological futures.

Video Research in the Learning Sciences is intended for researchers, university faculty, teacher educators, and graduate students in education, and for anyone interested in how knowledge is expanded using video-based technologies for inquiries about learning and teaching.

Visit the Web site affiliated with this book: www.videoresearch.org

Part One
Theoretical Frameworks

1
Video Representations and the Perspectivity Framework: Epistemology, Ethnography, Evaluation, and Ethics

Ricki Goldman
New York University

Introduction

In the first collected volume of essays on the use of visual representations in the social sciences, Principles of Visual Anthropology edited by Paul Hockings in 1973, Margaret Mead remarks that the “hazards of bias, both in those who film from their own particular cultural framework and in those who see their own filmed culture through distorting lenses, could be compensated for … by the corrective of different culturally based viewpoints” (p. 8). Having pioneered the use of visual anthropology with cyberneticist Gregory Bateson in the late 1930s, her article challenges anthropologists to change their research practice. Her fear was that cultures would disappear with the spread of modernity and that valuable knowledge of cultural performance in worlds still untouched by industrialization would be lost forever:

Those who have been the loudest in their demand for “scientific” work have been least willing to use instruments that would do for anthropology what instrumentation has done for other sciences—refine and expand the areas of accurate observation. (p. 10)

The practice of anthropology and the study of education have several overlapping similarities—both are grounded in what people say and do when they are in the act of thinking, making, and creating. Both have a history of valuing “outcomes”—artifacts or material representations that demonstrate achievement and advancement. In both practices, there are communities of practice that point out the perils of valuing outcomes more than processes. And, both anthropologists and educators have moved from notions of the grand narrative to a focus on local, situated knowledge (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1996; Geertz, 1983).

Both disciplines also face an important complexity that Mead could not have foreseen in 1973—how the use of networked visual data, tools, and methods enable researchers not only to reflect more deeply on their observations, but also on the entire research process that has moved away from the solitary researcher to the community with multiple stakeholders. Within the global community, it is no longer possible to describe others as being part of a scientific endeavor without addressing what is commonly referred to as the crisis of representation—the dilemma we face when we try to represent others and ourselves as we crisscross boundaries of gender, race, identity, culture, time, and location. We now take a more reflective and ethical look at what is involved in the scientific investigation of human meaning making. As researchers of learning, we now use video, text, and sound as elements that are put together in ways that resemble the collage movement in mid-20th century art. For example, a free web tool called a wiki becomes a community space for community members to represent their own voices in ways that were not possible when Mead first studied the Samoans. Video, text, and sounds are now pixels that can be manipulated, sized, shaped, segmented, layered, not streams of moving images from one filmmaker’s perspective. Nevertheless, as educational researchers, we still want to know that we have a way to come close to understanding what happens in the learning culture as we observe and participate within it. It is our human nature to make sense of what we experience. And, as researchers of learning, we want to be able to use theories, tools, and methods of investigation that will result in making learning, not only sensible to ourselves, but also, more meaningful for learners. As we learn to participate in the global online community, we might want to consider that the full range of continually emerging media forms can and will be used to describe, interpret, and represent what was happening for the members of the community “by the corrective of different culturally based viewpoints.”

Framing Challenging Questions

During these past two decades, I have written, almost exclusively, about the need to embrace diverse points of viewing (Goldman-Segall, 1990, 1996, 1998) to prevent the hazards of bias, misrepresentation, and missed-representation, emphasizing the affordances of using advanced video technologies. In the digital commons, knowledge is shared simultaneously, immediately, and sometimes without safeguards. Although this can be somewhat unnerving for educational researchers, the real hazard we now face, 30 years after Mead made her statement, would not only be the failure to use emerging video-based technologies to include diverse perspectives, but also the failure to take the time needed to reflect on how these technologies change every part of the research process from the moment the camera is turned on. Perhaps we should begin the process of reflection from the time a researcher conceptualizes her study of others using video. Perhaps we should continue to examine how these emerging technologies are changing every part of the research process.

From the start of the video research process, educational researchers are confronted with five interwoven questions when using the video camera in research. The first one addresses the importance of understanding the affordances and problematics of using video in the learning sciences. What do we learn during our investigations while videotaping, editing, and analyzing video that we might not be able to learn without having this media form? Are these rich media artifacts a new way of understanding not only those we study, but also, ourselves as researchers as the camera is pointed in a certain direction taping what the camera-person wants to display about these learning cultures? As you read the chapters in this book, you will notice the many affordances that video offers and how these affordances are often met with an equally strong challenge to overcome as researchers attend to the subtleties seen in every frame and in every stream of video. The authors selected for this book have experienced how repeated viewings, for example, are not only an affordance, but also a challenge. When does one stop re-viewing? What is enough viewing for a given study? How can we be sure? Another affordance is the ability to share with others what one sees with colleagues, teachers, and the learners themselves. The challenge is how to manage the rich commentaries and observations that others make on the video data. Another affordance that most every author in this book has had to confront is how the medium of video affects and changes the culture one is studying from the moment the camera is turned on. Can any of us, with real honesty, say that the camera is not affecting our actions? As Barron notes in her study of sixth graders:

Although it is possible that the video camera may have influenced student behavior, it is difficult to predict in which direction. Being recorded could as easily have been distracting as facilitating with respect to the attention of the student participants. (Barron, 2000, p. 397)

If we can learn not to act in front of a camera, how long does it take to establish that kind of composure? And, do we ever know, even when we seem comfortable with the camera taping us, if we are being true to ourselves? It seems obvious but necessary to state that we should not decide to not use video because our actions might be affected by the presence of the camera, but rather to accept the performative actions we demonstrate whenever we are being observed.

A second question to ask in our learning science community is whether the use of video in research is only an evidentiary tool or also a media form used to tell a story and convince viewers and readers of emerging texts so that they understand what happened to learners as the research was taking place. Let us use an ethnographic lens to address this question. Both modernist and postmodernist ethnographers have underscored the importance of being there (Geertz, 1973) or being with the community (Heshusius, 1994). The difference is that the postmodern ethnographer understood that convincing the reader that she was there was not the Truth, but a partial truth (Clifford, 1986), a construction of what she experienced and how she interpreted that experience into a textual narrative. Traditionally, ethnographers used field notes to record what was happening as it happened, and, then retreated to an office close to their academic homes to write the compelling story. Often, field notes were gathered while the observing ethnographer sat at the back of a room or village huddled over her notebook. Later, during analysis and interpretation, the ethnographer constructed journal articles, chapters, and books. This was the way it was done. That is not to say that anthropologists did not engage in the life of a village. Many had deep relationships with informants and participants, sharing in the day-to-day lives of the places they studied.

Research with online digital video with easy access to online environments creates an even more complicated process in spite of the ease of pressing the record button on a camera and then downloading the video onto a computer. Each part of the research process can now be a community activity, with multiple feeds of data, shared video databases, and shared analysis tools. One can also predict in the very near future collages or blends from one “movie” to another, sharing databases (McWhinney, this volume). Researchers will be able to fluidly work either deductively (top down), inductively (down up), or by using both approaches simultaneously. They may also decide to explore themes as they review digital video records before the focus of the study is defined. Or, they may search video databases to build rich cases from large-scale quantitative or qualitative studies. The point is that video seems to put researchers not only in touch with the perspectives of those who design, participate in, and analyze the study; but it also puts them in touch with the multiple methods of conducting a study, a method we often refer to as triangulation. This will, no doubt, become more pervasive within and across research communities of the flattened world (Friedman, 2005).

This leads us to the third challenge we face. Each research community using video, even within the learning sciences, has a different epistemological understanding about what makes research valid, robust, and reliable. How each community uses and evaluates video will be different. Why? Each community uses video quite differently. Even within the ethnographic community, some collect video to create more closely grounded stories that include the full range of gestural, auditory, and contextual subtlety in the thick description of the event (Geertz, 1973). Others map video representations to “locate particular analyses in times and spaces” (Green, Skukauskaite, Dixon, & Córdova, this volume). Others design rich, multilayered stories that convince the reader that the author of the visual representations was “there.” Others use video because they find the medium pleasurable and compelling, a better way to tell stories that show readers what they mean (Tobin & Hsueh, this volume; Hayes, this volume.) in short, the exploration of how to use video in the learning sciences has just begun.

The fourth problematic area is evaluation. If the use of video in research practices is indeed as diverse as we now know it to be, how do we develop criteria that take into consideration the range of both evaluative measures and e-value-ative qualities for adjudicating the significance of research using video as a research tool? Maybe we do not need to use video when conducting a study of a learning environment. We should select the appropriate tools needed for a specific study in a particular setting—using whatever combination of media works best for data collection, analysis, and dissemination. What we need to understand is each method, whether qualitative, quantitative, and—what my colleagues (Goldman, Crosby, Swan, & Shea, 2004) and I refer to as—quisitive methods, will have a variety of evaluative criteria, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes not.

Over the coming decade, many of the authors in this book will have participated in two symposia sponsored by the National Academies in Washington. The press of the National Research Council produced a report called The Power of Video Technology in International Comparative Research in Education (Uleeicz & Beatty, 2001). Certainly the challenge of evaluating video—or what I more commonly refer to as eliciting the value of video research (e-Value-ation)—will continue to provide us with rich discussions on the changing nature of educational research. From my experience of presenting papers at these sessions (Goldman-Segall, 1999), I am quite certain that many diverse viewpoints of how to evaluate video research will continue to be examined with scrutiny, critical analysis, and vigor. And also with enthusiasm for this emerging methodological tool.

The fifth issue facing video researchers speaks to the main topic running throughout this chapter: How do video representations make us more aware of the ethical stances in our research practices? What are the ethical concerns of using video? Surely it is not just an issue of privacy and confidentiality, although those are important issues. What I propose is that by using video in research, researchers are faced with ethical issues in the research process that they might otherwise overlook. Capturing people on video reminds us of our colonialist past when early explorers collected plants, animals, and people during travels to exotic lands. If we use video representations as disassociated objects to display others, we are indeed repeating past mistakes. As I will discuss later in this chapter, facing the dark legacy of imperialism in educational research (Willinsky, 1998) may serve as a valuable warning to the next generation of video and media researchers in educational settings. As we critique the ventures of early explorers, botanists (Charles Darwin, for example), and collectors of cultural artifacts, we may think differently about how to design and use advanced video and media in the still mostly uncharted territory of learning environments. It is time to change our colonialist past, not only by designing more ethical tools, but also by changing our practices and beliefs about what we are doing when we use video in our research studies.

Frames for Video Research: Chapters in Part 1

What are we doing to address the challenges of using video research in the learning sciences? Although this book offers many diverse uses of video in classroom and informal settings as well as a range of tools used in empirical studies, in Part 1 of the book, authors address how they understand the nature and meaning of video research in the learning sciences. Each chapter takes a different epistemological outlook. Many offer frameworks. One offers a manifesto! And each of the authors has found a unique way of describing how video influences their process of making meaning in and of educational settings and what particular challenges they each have faced in their use of video research. I have arranged these chapters with a narrative flow—a story of coherence within a broad range of diverse points of viewing.

Jay Lemke

[W]e cannot understand the epistemology of video as representation unless we also understand the processes by which we make meaning with video when we experience it. I propose that we consider the semiotic uses of video in terms of the ways we meaningfully (and feeling-fully) move across and through immediate and mediated attentional spaces. (Lemke, this volume)

Lemke uses an experiential and phenomenological approach to how video is used to study learning, pointing out the importance of materiality and the felt experience of using this “seductive” medium. He takes us on a journey that starts with the images we experienced inside that magic box called the television when it first arrived into our homes. He notes that the medium takes us beyond our living...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Theoretical Frameworks
• Part II Video Research on Peer, Family, and Informal Learning
• Part III Video Research on Classroom and Teacher Learning
• Part IV Video Collaboratories and Technological Futures
• Author Index
• Subject Index