Myers Education Press Data Analysis, Interpretation, and Theory in Literacy Studies Research: A How-to Guide

About the Author Michele Knobel is a Professor of Education at Montclair State University. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Chinese, Danish and Estonian. Publications include New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (with Colin Lankshear, 2011) and New Literacies and Teacher Learning: Professional Development and the Digital Turn (edited with Judy Kalman, 2016).Judy Kalman is a professor at the Department of Educational Research within the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the IPN. She currently directs the Laboratory of Education, Technology and Society, a space for reflection, the exchange of ideas, design and research. Her recent books include Leer y Escribir en el Mundo Social [Reading and Writing in the Social World] (2018) and Literacy and Numeracy in Latin America (co-edited with Brian Street, 2013). Colin Lankshear is a freelance educational researcher, writer and teacher with a particular interest in literacies associated with new technologies. He lives in Mexico and is currently adjunct professor at Mount Saint Vincent University (Canada). Publications include Researching New Literacies: Design, Theory, and Data in Sociocultural Investigation (2017) and A New Literacies Reader: Educational Perspectives (2013; both edited with Michele Knobel). Product Description This research guide addresses the difficulties novice and early career researchers often have with understanding how theory, data analysis and interpretation of findings “hang together” in a well-designed and theorized qualitative research investigation, as well as learning how to draw on such understanding to conduct rigorous data analysis and interpretation of their analytic results. Books that describe data analysis approaches and methods often fail to address the question of how to decide which ones are most appropriate for a particular kind of study, and why they are the best options. This book seeks to clarify these issues in a distinctive way. Chapter authors draw on a successful study they have undertaken and spell out their “problem area,” research questions, and theoretical framing, carefully explaining their choices and decisions. They then show in detail how they analyzed their data, and why they took this approach. Finally, they demonstrate how they “translated” or interpreted the results of their analysis, to make them meaningful in research terms. Approaches include interactional sociolinguistics, microethnographic discourse analysis, iterative coding, conversation analysis, and multimediated discourse analysis, among others. This book will appeal to beginning researchers and to literacy researchers responsible for teaching qualitative literacy studies research design at undergraduate and graduate levels. Review In this book, Rantala skillfully draws on a range of feminist poststructural, feminist post-colonial, new materialist, and posthuman thinkers and concepts to both map a theoretically-driven methodology and, through a detailed exploration of a study on processes of subjectivity formation, illustrate how this methodology might work. Rantala’s methodology is an affirmative experiment of movement and flux, multiplicity, relationality, and creative difference that produces situated knowledges simultaneously part of, and accountable to, the researcher. This methodology is an enactment of a process ontology, both in terms of its espousal of a logic of becoming, in the Deleuzian sense, as well as its shift in focus from subjects to processes of inquiry. Theoretically creative with accessible explanations, Rantala’s work offers a methodology well-suited to multifaceted analyses that can help us produce new ways of thinking in our increasingly complex historical moment."" - Dr. Kathryn Strom, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, California State University, East Bay