Chapter 5 Exploring reality: a critical realist study
5.4 Data collection
5.4.1 Data collection at the empirical level
The empirical level of reality is ―the domain of experience‖ (Sayer, 2000 p. 12) and is mainly concerned with perceptions of the world which constitutes the knowledge that is most accessible to people. At this level, the following data collection methods were used:
Documents (Faculty handbooks and course readers)
Interviews with students, language tutors and engineering academics I begin with a discussion of the documentary evidence.
5.4.1.1 Documents: Faculty handbooks and course readers
My focus on dominant discourses prompted me to examine curriculum documents such as the course outlines, course packs and students‘ written texts. Of these, the Faculty handbooks and course packs were regarded as representing collective empirical knowledge about the nature of academic literacy from an institutional perspective. My working rationale was that these documents provide accounts of
what the Faculty of Engineering considers to be the academic literacy practices to be taught to the students and how it has planned to make such practices accessible to engineering students. From this point of view, these documents are interpretations of what the Faculty believes and values. Taking this perspective, I then analysed these documents to determine the values and beliefs that they espoused. For this purpose, I drew up an analytical instrument shown in Figure 5-2.
Figure 5-2 Document analysis schedule English for
Engineers (2008)
ENCH1TC
(2009) ENCH1TC
(2010) ENCH1TC
(2011) ENCH1TC
(2012) Author
Audience Purpose Benchmark knowledge Listed outcomes
The document analysis schedule shown in Figure 5-2was used to analyse the course packs. Identification of the elements of analysis was guided by the theoretical framework, in particular Bernstein‘s pedagogic device, which puts the emphasis on what is worthwhile knowledge and how it is validated. Consequently, the instrument focused on the authors of the guides as well as issues of benchmark knowledge.
Benchmark knowledge was identified in the aims of the course and in the assignment topics. Five course packs and their course outlines were analysed, dating from 2008 to 2012. The 2008 course pack was included to provide the background to the Technical Communication course which was introduced in 2009. I also examined students‘ technical reports written between 2009 and 2012. These documents are performances in a social practice, and they provided me with a better understanding of the rationale for a course on academic literacy and the debates around the way it is understood in the Faculty. Essentially, these documents laid bare the dominant representations of academic literacy and students as constructed within the Technical Communication course, containing, as they do, multiple voices from the range of different academics in the Faculty. Analysing these documents using the instrument described above enabled me to uncover underlying causal
mechanisms that produce events (in the classroom) and influence students‘
experiences of academic literacy in the Faculty of Engineering.
5.4.1.2 Interviews
The politics of representation that frames my study also prompts me to analyse academics‘ conceptions of the teaching and learning context. Interviews are an efficient and valid way of understanding someone‘s perspective and can provide additional information that was missed in observation (Maxwell, 2005 p. 94).
Following from this understanding, I chose to use interviews because, in my view, representations of students come primarily from their educators and these representations are also a reflection of the educators‘ ontological orientations. As a consequence, interviews with academics helped me gain a better understanding of the discursive constructions of academic literacy within the Technical Communication course that might not be evident in the classroom discourse. I also sought students‘ perceptions of academic literacy and of the Technical Communication for Engineers course in particular. From a realist point of view, people‘s perceptions of things can provide the basis for exploration of the real. In terms of the critical realist framework, this data source corresponds with the empirical level(i.e., individuals‘ perceptions or experiences of their reality). These experiences are considered to be a culminating point of reality in that they are structured by underlying mechanisms. It is the mechanisms that produce the experiences that we see at the level of the empirical.
I elected to use the guided interview approach, where I had a basic checklist of all the items that I intended to pursue (see Patton, 2002). This allowed me to probe and pursue other topics that emerged from the interview while still operating within the parameters of my study. I made audio recordings of all the interviews that I conducted. Participants were also made aware that their responses were recorded.
These interviews were then transcribed to allow me to capture participants‘
responses verbatim, which in turn provided me with accurate quotations to use in the analysis of data. The interview participants comprised 2 engineering academics, 12 language tutors and 24 engineering students at various levels of study. As a result, I prepared three interview schedules/checklists to cater for the different groups.
Copies of these checklists can be found in Appendices B, C and D. The language tutors came from the different Humanities disciplines such as Sociology, Philosophy, Literature studies and Creative writing. These tutors were chosen primarily for their
‗perceived‘ expertise with academic literacy since they came from disciplines that required substantive amounts of writing.