Sarah Bridges-Rhoads

Overly Scripted: Exploring the Impact of a Scripted Literacy Curriculum on a Preschool Teacher's Instructional Practices in Mathematics

As part of a renewed focus on early childhood mathematics education, researchers have recently called for increased attention to preschool mathematics curricula. This article, which is based on a multiyear ethnographic study in a rural preschool primarily serving African American children, contributes to this area of interest by documenting the instructional practices a teacher learned from her mandated literacy curriculum. This curriculum, which was highly scripted, shaped the teachers instructional practices in mathematics as well as in literacy. The teachers mathematical engagement with children, during formal lessons and informal play, reflected the instructional beliefs of the literacy curriculum, which was demonstrated by a focus on efficiently completing planned tasks, rather than pursuing childrens thinking, and by narrowing mathematics to the use of proper grammar and posing simple questions. This study argues that the curriculums highly structured scripts made it less likely that the teacher would engage in innovative practices in mathematics, which reduced opportunities for children in the classroom to reason and problem solve mathematically. In addition, because of the adoption patterns of scripted curricula, teachers of low-income, minority children are more likely to have their mathematics teaching shaped in this way.

Complicating methodological transparency

A historical indicator of the quality, validity, and rigor of qualitative research has been the documentation and disclosure of the behind-the-scenes work of the researcher. In this paper, we use what we call methodological data as a tool to complicate the possibility and desirability of such transparency. Specifically, we draw on our disparate attempts to address calls for transparency about methodological processes in our respective dissertation studies in order to examine how novice researchers can explore transparency as a situated, ongoing, and philosophically informed series of decisions about how, when, and if to be transparent about our work. This work contributes to conversations about how qualitative researchers in education can understand, discuss, and teach qualitative inquiry while continuing to push the boundaries of the field.

Pursuing Responsibility Writing and Citing Subjects in Qualitative Research

Similar to qualitative researchers who have troubled and been troubled by the impossibility of representing subjects, in this article, we focus on how our attempts to write subjects to excess—to remain open to unforeseeable data that proliferated as we wrote—“radically de-naturalize[ed] what [we’d] taken for granted” as qualitative researchers. Specifically, the unraveling of the humanist subject initiated the rupture of what we thought of as a practice of responsible representation—citation. This rupture made visible how conventional citation could not hold the reconfigured, poststructural subject who remained in play during the research and even after. Rather than erase this complication, we saw it as an incitement to enact responsibility differently in relation to representation, and we draw upon our collaborative work with Sarah’s dissertation study to theorize citation as a necessary, useful, and impossible construct.

Writing Paralysis in (Post) Qualitative Research

In this article, the author takes up the page as a site of experimentation with/against/through paralysis. Struck by the (im)possibility of untangling and taming a deconstructing inquiry to “write it up” as recognizable research, she writes, instead, to pursue previously unthought and unseen openings for thinking and doing qualitative work. The effect is an article that negotiates the tensions of doing qualitative research in the post(s) and questions the possibility and value of resolving such tensions.

Writing the Torment Aporetic Data and the Possibility of Justice

In this article, we reconfigure the notion of writing with theory to include a troubling of theory as data that is always already coded by our citational practices. However, the reduction of the “cacophony of ideas swirling as we think about our topics with all we can muster” to a singular citation, while necessary if we want to bear the burden of our interpretations, is also dangerous because the more mechanistic data analysis becomes, the less situated it is. We demonstrate here how we rupture this mechanistic bent by using the space of the page both to inhabit and halt aporias, producing aporetic data. When we write and reread our claims to those theorists through citation, aporetic data highlights our inability to do those theorists justice and produces additional uncertainty about the possibility of justice for any data. To that end, we provide a theoretical conversation that has been interrupted and revisited multiple times as we think and rethink the many Derridas produced through our readings. This work highlights the possibilities enabled by calling upon one another to keep data in motion by truncating, diverting, or extending aporias rather than treating data as passive objects.

“As Cited In” Writing Partnerships: The (Im)possibility of Authorship in Postmodern Research

Despite that qualitative researchers have persistently positioned research as a collaborative endeavor, single-authorship is ultimately valued in the academy, producing tension between the expectation and (im)possibility of such single-authorship. In this article, we demonstrate how we attend to this tension by focusing on how our citational practices within the text and in authorship bylines enable us to continuously interrogate and deconstruct how the author functions in our work. Specifically, we describe how our writing partnership produces each other as secondary sources for all of our writing, and we explore how American Psychological Association’s (APA) phrase “as cited in” helps us do authorship differently, even in those texts where our contributions are not acknowledged in authorship bylines. This exploration highlights how writing and methodology are completely imbricated in qualitative research, so we propose that choices about how we produce the author should be as philosophically informed as other methodological decisions.

Work/Think/Play in Qualitative and Postqualitative Inquiry

In this article, we introduce the special issue on work/think/play in qualitative and postqualitative inquiry. Our aim for the issue is to open up conversations about what does happen, what can happen, and/or what should happen in the name of qualitative and postqualitative inquiry. We hope that the issue raises methodological questions in qualitative and postqualitative inquiry about ways of being in the world as researchers—and most specifically, the need to keep raising questions rather than finding answers as we make and remake the field.

Writing Posthumanism, Qualitative Enquiry and Early Literacy.

This paper was written in the midst of enquiry – provoked by the question of what happens when we write posthumanism, qualitative enquiry and early literacy together. Rather than offer a stable methodology that is the product of our experimentation, the paper functions as a map, a situated cartography that has multiple access points and is generative and always becoming. Likewise, it does not present findings from which to draw easy (or even difficult) conclusions. Instead, it produces possibilities, as it remains open to further intra-actions that fall into and out of view as different readers, immersed in their various entanglements, take it up and see what it-they-we might do/be/become as they move through the process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, entangled life happening.

Work/Think/Play in Doctoral Education:

This article is the introduction to the special issue, “Work/Think/Play in Doctoral Education.” Similar to its companion issue titled, “Work/Think/Play in Qualitative and Postqualitative Inquiry,” the goal of this issue is not to define, categorize, stabilize, or normalize the processes and practices of inquiry that remain behind-the-scenes of research reports and dissertations. Nor is it to make visible what researchers do when we say we are doing (and learning to do) qualitative and postqualitative research. Instead, we hope the articles in this volume open up conversations about scholars’ work/think/play that goes beyond the scope of the dissertation study and contribute to the continuous re-creation of teaching, learning, and qualitative and post qualitative research.

Readings That Rock Our Worlds

During doctoral programs, many scholars have experiences with texts that disrupt, that interrupt, that somehow open up unforeseen ways of being, thinking, feeling, and knowing. In this article, we provide short contributions from a wide swath of scholars who explore the many ways reading can change everything, electrifying us with possibilities of what might be thinkable now, and terrifying us because ideas and knowledge that we’d held dear all of a sudden feel tenuous and fragile. In short, reading rocks our worlds and, as a result, shapes the kind of inquiry we do.During doctoral programs, many scholars have experiences with texts that disrupt, that interrupt, that somehow open up unforeseen ways of being, thinking, feeling, and knowing. In this article, we provide short contributions from a wide swath of scholars who explore the many ways reading can change everything, electrifying us with possibilities of what might be thinkable now, and terrifying us because ideas and knowledge that we’d held dear all of a sudden feel tenuous and fragile. In short, reading rocks our worlds and, as a result, shapes the kind of inquiry we do.