No matter whether it was reading Bourdieu\u2019s The State Nobility, coding data that were not collected by us or trying to understand elite schools across the world in the reading, I think there were always some of us experiencing confusion during the class. And no doubt I was like that too. It feels like walking in the dark and trying to find the exit of this darkness.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, after accumulating background knowledge and gradually constructing different concepts in my mind, I started to have the ability to understand elite from the theoretical perspective. Although we read some articles from other researchers using Bourdieu\u2019s concepts of field, cultural capital and habitus to help us get used to them, I had difficulty understanding the idea in a broader context. However, after I finished The State Nobility, I gained confidence in applying Bourdieu\u2019s unique concept to cases we discussed in the class because the process of learning where he derived his theories from is enabling me to build a solid foundation of my understanding. I felt it was much easier to read the following articles when they reference Bourdieu\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
Resolving one problem does not mean that I have no more new obstacles. I had a tough time making sense of the structure of an education research paper, especially the part when you apply theories to your findings. This is not like any other papers that I have read. Besides scholarly work in the field of education, I have been reading articles in Psychology, Linguistics, and Sociology this semester. Most of them are way more quantitative in their methods compared to what we are going to write and what we have been reading in this class. It was apparent that in those papers\u2019 structure that numbers are the evidence of findings. It was not the same when looking at the interview. We couldn\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t simply use a number to conclude any interviewee\u2019s perspective. There are themes that students\u2019 interviews do not correspond to each other since every individual has their unique experience in the school. Reading articles and exploring how researchers include different theories in their discussion is helpful. Maybe we still lack writing skills to present an argument and eloquently using theories, but we certainly learn how a qualitative research paper is. In another way, I think every time we connect what is happening at Colby with theories we are learning, we are practicing our ability to connect theories with findings we have in real life. Writing similar things down requires a clearer structure and a stronger argument, which we might ignore when we follow how our minds flow during classes. In some ways, I am still confused when thinking about how exactly we will lay out our points because social learning, school community, students\u2019 experience, and IB all seem to be intertwined. But I am confident that we will sort out since we have an outline to build on already.<\/p>\n
I learned a lot related to educational research in this class and my senior seminar this year. However, as someone who is only majoring in education, I sometimes feel regretful that I didn\u2019t get a chance to take research methods classes like what Psychology and Economics department would offer, a foundation that is provided separately but not alongside when we learn theories and conduct actual researches.<\/p>\n\n
No matter whether it was reading Bourdieu\u2019s The State Nobility, coding data that were not collected by us or trying to understand elite schools across the world in the reading, I think there were always some of us experiencing confusion during the class. And no doubt I was like that too. It feels like walking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5672"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5674,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5672\/revisions\/5674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}