My Reflections & Questions on Price dissertation proposal,Gabriel & Lester paper and Johnston's proposal

My Reflections on Price's Dissertation Proposal

Price seeks to explore the discursive practice of students receiving special education services, caregivers, educational staff, school leaders and some other stakeholders participating in IEP meetings in order to better understand how planning is constructed and negotiated through naturally occurring talk in an institutional setting.
I enjoyed reading the reflexivity statement and how the author's direct experience as an educator and also the sibling of an adult with disabilities, might affect her interpretations.

The following are my questions regarding the research method used in this research:
1. Author has articulated in several places in the proposal that the participants include students, educators, parents, teachers and school managers. I wonder if it would be really possible to capture the main body of transitions through focusing on the interactions and talks of these many individuals in a context. Isn't it difficult to capture the patterns that show up in the discourse of all these people in individual meetings?


2. I wonder what "legal pads" are where in page 48. author has named them as an instrument for keeping track of his/her writings of observational notes?

3. In the data analysis section (Page. 48), author has talked about his/her selectivity of "what to transcribe beyond exact participant words". I am not sure what this means? Does it mean that the researcher is looking for those "turns in talks" that Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008) talk about that is sort of beyond the words that are used by the participants in their conversation or does it mean something else?


4. In discussing the analytical implications of the research journal, the author talks about "scrutinizing my own discourse for differing and competing versions ..... that pushes towards an unfamiliar and the uncomfortable" (P. 49). My question is whose discourse is the author focusing on? The participants' discourse, his/her own discourse about the participants' discourse or both? also, it's not clear to me why this reflexivity is uncomfortable and unfamiliar?

MَََARGINAL NOTE: I think it's so cool that you are transcribing your own observational notes to compare and supplement the transcriptions of the actual utterances within recordings (P. 52).

5. Researcher has explicated this in different sections of the proposal that his/her unit of analysis is discourse and not participants and that it's not of high interest for the research purpose to be aware of the participants' characteristics and that their talks is what that matters the most which is DP approach. My question is that isn't it true that what we say (converse) is largely influenced by who we are in terms of our gender, race, nationality, etc. So, I think, ignoring participants' demographic profiles is likely to limit the trustworthiness of the findings of this research which I think should be mentioned in the "limitations of the research".

6. While reading through the proposal, I kept thinking about if the use of different data sources is a strategy for triangulation. Then In page 54, author talks about "variability" in DA work rather than "triangulation". It would be great if she/he talks about why this is variability and not triangulation.


My questions about "A discourse analysis of the Los Angeles Times"
This paper examines policy narrative centered on teacher evaluation and effectiveness. In other words, it seeks to explore how media- Los Angeles Times- has worked its way  to shape VAM which is a teacher evaluation and effectiveness methodology through discourse analysis.

I am interested in how important is the repeated reading of the texts, transcripts, etc. in producing reliable findings because both pieces have emphasized on that.
I like the idea of keeping an "audit trail" that permits outside researchers to review and become familiar with researchers' decision making process.

1. Researchers have used 9 extracts to show how media shapes the discourse around teaching evaluations. My question is that how did the researchers decided about the number of extracts that is sufficient to lead them to the patterns they were looking for in the extracts. Are there saturation thresholds in this type of research?
2. This research is all about the interpretations of the researchers? Are there any possibilities that they enrich their interpretation by conducting content analysis across the extracts or if this type of research doesn't validate methods such as content analysis?

My reflections and questions about Johnston's dissertation proposal

This research aims to propose a DA to uncover how teachers' identity is negotiated at the beginning of their careers.
1. Is there any specific reason why the researcher has used Inqscribe for transcription instead of Atlas?

2. One thing that struck me in this type of research and also the two other research is that as researcher's selection of the texts/transcriptions that he/she thinks will be helpful to the analysis, plays an important role in where the research would go, I wonder if there is anything  like inter-rater reliability that could be done according to the selection of texts/transcription that would go to the analysis phase. After all, it is possible that a good part of data is neglected by a specific researcher whereas another researcher might be able to extract some interesting patterns out of the same ignored data.