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Teacher Feature...
Direction for Teachers of Creative Writing
(continued from page 2)
by Dan Lukiv
(Condensed from Lived School Experiences That Encouraged one Person to Become a Creative Writer, a 2002 research study completed as part of the MEd requirements at The University of Northern British Columbia)
Copyright © 2002 by Dan Lukiv. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or through any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without written consent from the author.
Methodology
I logically employed "purposeful sampling" (McMillan & Schumacher, 1997, p. 397) as a method to choose a participant.
Sampling
In terms of limited time to complete this study, I note Patton's (1987) suggestion to limit the size of the case study. Therefore, in view of this sensible suggestion, and in view of hermeneutic phenomenology's focus on the individual, on his or her lived experiences, purposeful sampling of one participant seemed appropriate.
My goal, of course, was a systematic approach, a systematic methodology, to study those lived experiences.
A Systematic Approach
My research was systematic in that it used "specially practised modes of questioning" (van Manen, 1990, p. 11), analysing, and interpreting. In this section I discuss each of those modes, along with bracketing, thereby defining my methodology. Hermeneutic phenomenology is also "explicit in that it attempts to articulate, through the content and form of text, the structures of meaning embedded in lived experience (rather than leaving the meanings implicit as for example in poetry or literary texts)" (p. 11).
Modes of questioning, analysing, and interpreting, according to hermeneutic phenomenological tradition, must protect the researcher's objectivity and subjectivity. In van Manen's (1990) words, "objectivity means that the researcher remains true to the object. The researcher becomes in a sense a guardian and a defender of the true nature of the object" (p. 20). In this case "the true nature of the object" means the true nature of the participant's lived experience. As for subjectivity, van Manen says it "means that one needs to be as perceptive, insightful, and discerning as one can be in order to show or disclose the object in its full richness and in its greatest depth" (p. 20).
Questioning techniques. My interviews with Arthur required depth interviewing. Patton (1987) explains that "depth interviewing involves asking open-ended questions" (p. 108) that probe "beneath the surface, soliciting detail and providing a holistic understanding of the interviewee's point of view" (p. 108).
I kept an "interview guide" (Patton, 1987, p. 111) at hand. The foundation of that guide was a question: "Could you give me an example of an experience in school that encouraged you to become a creative writer in your adult years?" I included probes, to be used if necessary, to draw out the experience in concrete terms. Sensory questions in the interview guide were to be used, if necessary, to probe into what the participant had seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and touched (Patton, 1987). Feeling questions in the Carl Rogerian tradition (Egan, 1998) probed in order "to understand the respondent's emotional reactions" (Patton, 1987, p. 118).
Always I tried to establish a professional, humanistic--ethical (McMillan & Schumacher, 1997; Patton, 1987; van Manen, 1990; Cohen & Manion, 1994)--forum for neutrality and rapport. Patton (1987) explains that "rapport means that I respect the person being interviewed,...that the respondent's knowledge, experiences, attitudes, and feelings are important" (p. 127). Patton adds that "neutrality means that the interviewer listens without passing judgment" (p. 127) and the interviewer asks questions that do not have "a built-in response bias that communicates the interviewer's belief" (p. 129). To be neutral, Patton (1987) tells us, means not to ask leading questions. I coined a phrase, bracketing in possibilities, in the "Introduction" section, which refers to a process that not only helped me to address possible participant responses to my research question, but also helped me address biases that could have affected my neutrality and interview skills. Stated differently, any possibility I expressed in the introduction could have turned into a leading question that, unconscious to me, reflected my belief about an experience that the participant should have had.
Bracketing in possibilities helped me "establish neutrality" (Patton, 1987, p. 128) as an interviewer. Bracketing in possibilities helped me keep leading questions at bay.
Analysis of data. Hermeneutic phenomenology encourages "early analysis," and, van Manen (1990) says, eventually seeks to "develop a...narrative that explicates themes" (p. 97). It does not seek to "show or prove" (p. 22) the worth of a hypothesis. Instead of the term rival hypotheses, then, hermeneutic phenomenology uses the term "incidental" (p. 107) themes.
The phenomenologist uses the method of free imaginative variation in order to verify whether a theme belongs to a phenomenon essentially (rather than incidentally)....One asks the question: Is this phenomenon still the same if we imaginatively change or delete this theme from the phenomenon? Does the phenomenon without this theme lose its fundamental meaning? (p. 107)
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