On a Doctoral SSHRC Proposal
0Sunday, September 30, 2012 by Unknown
My group discussed a doctoral SSHRC proposal that sought to analyze
Hannah Arendt’s conception of judgment and imagination, and its implications
for the professional lives of educators. While the proposed research is more
humanities-oriented – and thus less relevant to our class assignment – the writer
is quite successful at demonstrating its importance to the field. She/he uses
some interesting rhetorical and formatting techniques that convince the reader of
her/his suitability to conduct the research, and that might be useful to some
of us when writing our proposals.
The writer begins with a quotation: “A
teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who
can arouse young persons to go in search of their own.” – Maxine Greene (1988).
At first I was put off by this, and felt that it failed as a kind of
overused gimmick to provide any real relevance to the proposal. After reading
it through, however, I came to see the quote as an effective – albeit lofty – articulation
of the research’s social implications. It also serves to affirm the research’s
place in an academic tradition of educational philosophy and social theory, of
which Maxine Greene is an authority.
Secondly, I had been under the impression that it was a good idea to start with your educational background, or to explain right from the start why you are “the right person in the right place and doing the right thing”. This proposal’s writer begins with the aims, questions (which seem to merely formalize the aims), and rationale of her/his research. My guess as to why the writer does this is that she/he had already received SHRRC funding for a Master’s thesis, and had therefore already demonstrated her/his capabilities and academic support network.
One thing to note is that the researcher aims to combine the practical
and the theoretical into her/his findings. This becomes clearest in the
Methodology section of the proposal, which does not occur until the second
page, and yet contains what I found to be the hook: “As I work through the
analytic space between subjective understanding and the horizons of theoretical
possibility I expect to better understand the ways in which judgment and
imagination can, do and may better play a role in the professional life of
educators, particularly as regards their understandings of social
responsibility and citizenship.” To achieve this combination, she/he will use
both historiography and interview methods.
The writer specifies that she/he will use “in-depth phenomenological”
interview methods that focus on the subjective experiences of eighteen
beginning and seasoned teachers. From this, I gather that she/he will use the
open-ended questions and free-flowing inquiries that Knight discusses in
Chapter 3. As Knight suggests, the researcher is likely to get incomplete
responses, especially to questions regarding abstract terms like “judgment” and
“imagination” (and with such a small sample size). On the other hand, this
interview method is most appropriate to the research, which is based solely in
theory. It would be interesting to know more about who (or what kind) these
teachers are, and what knowledge they have of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy (if
any). Despite its practical or subjective aim, I would still consider it to be humanities research. Does anyone have any thoughts?
Anyway, the proposal is well done, though perhaps it doesn't quite fit
the class’s model (not that there necessarily is one).
