Extending Practices...Building Networks An Institute on Research in Practice in Adult Literacy – June 17-21, 2003
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Writing up the case study

Mary suggested that people use the following framework to write up their case study

Part 1
Context: how you chose a literacy event
What? Why?
Your own relationship to this context
Data you collected

Part 2
Description. Possible formats include:
mapping     grid
narrative
photo story board     time line

Part 3
Taming the data: discuss what you noticed from your data: What is it about?
Identify themes (from the group discussion, from your experience, from reading about literacy as social practice)

Part 4
Reflect on the method
What worked well, what was difficult, strange or uncomfortable.
Ethics, confidentiality, relationships with others

Part 5
Relevance
What might happen as a result of the research you have done?
Who wants to know about it?

Participants also identified some methodological tensions in carrying out the case studies:

  • How to connect the local and the global; moving between complexity, detail, data and simplicity, analysis, and themes
  • Individual research process and public, collaborative meanings and interpretations
  • Focusing on literacy vs. focusing on broader social practices within which literacy is taking place
  • Telling the whole story and telling the smaller story within the whole
  • Process and product–giving different weight to each
  • Insider, outsider and other roles of researchers (as teacher, participant, resource person)
  • Different purposes for research
  • Holding the different perspectives together – data – researcher's perceptions – theory – other participants
  • Systematic vs. intuitive analysis
two photos - one of a canvas bag aone of a group of paper signs