“Representing Complexity Well": A Workshop on Qualitative Research in SoTL

Invoking Gary Poole’s (2013) call for SoTL to “represent complexity well,” this workshop will explore the assumptions, strengths, limitations, and methods of collection and analysis for doing qualitative research in SoTL.  Participants will consider what they can glean about student thinking and learning from formative in-class writings, think-alouds, narratives, formal essays, interviews, drawings, and other rich (and frequently messy) sources of ‘data.’ What questions about student learning and our own teaching do these materials help us answer?  What kinds of claims can be made based on such methods? When is there too little or too much information to be meaningful, or manageable? What does rigor look like in these processes? How do we effectively describe these processes to others?  Participants will return to their campuses with strategies for collecting and analyzing relevant, rich, and meaningful evidence of learning from their own students.