Head to Head

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The storyteller and the scientist are at best uneasy allies. The scientist argues that we must capture the reaction that actually occurred if we want our analysis to be valid. The storyteller is willing to call foul on the scientist for setting up the scene to induce a preferred reaction. The storyteller is concerned with narrative truth, the pitch and key of the details. The scientist wants to mark the details present or absent.

So tell me, can you remember doing anything in your classroom that might have asked your students for that positive response? Is your surprise really scientific astonishment over the objective data? Do you absolutely deny the role of puppet master in this situation?

I think you've misread my astonishment in this piece. Scientists like me are used to patterns, and most of the patterns I'm familiar with in terms of my focus on technology in the writing classroom relate to conflict between students and technology, teacher and technology, and, as you've noticed, conflicts between students and teacher. The lack of conflict these positive reactions show, for me, is a red flag that the data is not objective. But there are many other ways to read it. Perhaps, the scientist in me longs for a closed system in which we can study direct correlations, but was astonished at the agency of the subjects...their sheer nerve in actually liking our foray into writing technologies. The puppet master allegation I have to think more about, especially how it relates to studies of student perceptions toward a given topic. Obviously, in that case the teacher/researcher is somewhat responsible for how technology is presented, the kind of modeling we do as teachers, which ultimately affects student perceptions. We aren't the same kinds of scientists as physicists, biologists, and chemists.