The course target is to afford an initializing experience in scientific inquiry. The skills acquired are those of clarifying or getting over relevant psychological concepts in a specific educational situation (preferably in school life) - by means of a scientific research in the field. The knowledge acquired is that of the theory of educational ethnography and qualitative analysis of empirical data.

The course contents are organized as individual project work on research reports. The difference between a One Semester and a Full Year project is that of scope of experience called for by the general requirements: preliminary versus full-fledged research; draft versus publishable quality of the final texts.

Specific requirements of the first semester

- Students establish basic ethnographic relations with actors, especially with the gatekeepers - to be allowed to proceed with participant observation of actors’ life. (The preferable setting is thus the school life of one class of pupils. Other educational settings are allowed for.)

- Students find and write down their emerging theme; preferably in school literacy (1 page memo). The terminology being that of school life events; that of school actors’ behavior.

- Students reformulate their theme in terms of psychology - spelling out their research interest (as if a title and an abstract of the intended paper). The research interest should be explained in its motivation by discrepancy between data and students’ theories of the observed phenomenon; a conceptual map should aid the explanation.

- Students adopt an adequate research design, gather their basic corpus of data, and provide their qualitative analysis; if needed accompanied by quantitative analysis. Students cultivate their theoretical sensitivity, called for by the qualitative analysis of their data, by utilizing relevant literature.

- Students write down their final research report; following standard research report structure; including a discussion of attained findings (10 pages; in draft quality).

Specific requirements of the second semester

- Students review their draft research report from the first semester to specify their agenda: in (1) the conceptualization of the studied phenomenon; in (2) the collection of data; in (3) the reading of relevant literature; and in (4) the writing (in the narrow sense of literary stylistics) of their final report (20 pages; in publishable quality).

- Students elaborate the conceptualization of the studied phenomenon with the aid of conceptual maps - diagrams.

- Students gather further data in accord with the questions evolved in the conceptualization of the studied phenomenon. In general, they aim (1) at getting the idea about full variability of the studied phenomenon in a naturally afforded sociological unit (e. g. school class); (2) at getting idea about ecological validity of the studied phenomenon (e. g. it’s role in children’s school life); (3) at getting idea about developmental validity of the studied phenomenon (e. g. in the frame of one or more grades of studied education).

- Students read relevant literature looking for theoretical argument or discussion with the aim to find an alternative conceptualization of the studied phenomenon.

- Students subordinate their writing to the elaboration of theoretical integrity of their analytical story. Respect for typographic standards is considered as obvious.

Literature

Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. (6th edition) Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, 2010.