Mitch's Memo #7 on Steinberg

Hi all,

Here is my latest memorandum. I've used chapter 5 from "Doing Educational Research" as we will be discussing it this coming Wednesday. I hope you find it useful. My questions are included at the end. I haven't read chapters 4 or 7 yet, but will be beginning them tonight...I mean this morning. See you in a few days.

Mitch

Memorandum on	Submitted by: Mitch Bleier U ED 70300 Prof. K. Tobin Spring 2008 April 9, 2008
Steinberg, S. R. (2006). Critical cultural studies research. In K. Tobin & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Doing educational research--A handbook (117-137). Rotterdam (NL): Sense Publishers.

Shirley Steinberg (2006) identifies information in the “cyber/mediated jungle” of twenty-first century electronic media, not as it is often seen—as a new democracy born of access for all, but as a source of “new forms of disinformation, and new modes of hegemony and ideology” that are forged to “benefit the purveyors of power” (p. 117). Her response, and the focus of this chapter, is the proposal of a form of critical cultural studies exploring cultural pedagogy. She uses for examples her research on film as she describes “bricolage in action” in educational research.

Steinberg indicates that the bricoleur, recognizing the limited utility of traditional monosemic scientific research, attempts to widen her perspectives through “methodological diversity” of the bricolage. Even this multiple-perspective approach, she cautions, leads not to certainty, universality and Truth, but to incomplete, tentative understandings that are situated both in place and in time.

Steinberg describes her use of a number of types of critical research including critical ethnography, content analysis, literary reception research, application of feminist theory and critical hermeneutics. She makes it clear that, contrary to criticism of qualitative research of popular culture as “vacuous and without rigor” (p. 123), her “poststructuralist, feminist pedagogical research not only meets the requirements of serious academic scholarship, but enables her to raise and address questions that more accepted methodologies miss completely.

Questions:

• How does the bricoleur become adequately adept at all of the research methods she seeks to employ in her research?
• Can/should a team of specialists successfully use bricolage?
• Are there methods/methodologies specifically associated with bricolage?
• Are there methods/methodologies specifically excluded from bricolage?