Sometimes I feel I don’t have a very sophisticated research agenda… The things I’ve tended to write about can seem obvious, ordinary, everyone knows about it. Competition, ability, culture, classrooms—it’s everyday, ordinary stuff. I’ve been told I’m now “Mr. Positionality” (or Dr. I guess?) but part of me feels like everyone knows about positionality on some level, either formally because there is a long tradition of people writing about it, or informally because each person knows about themselves and what their sense of self means for their work. But one time when I mentioned this feeling of doing ordinary stuff to a friend of mine, she put it something like: “It’s not that you only research obvious things, it’s that you look at what’s around you and everyone else but other people aren’t really paying attention, and you pick out something and turn it around and show it to people in a way they hadn’t noticed before. And that’s something special, not everyone can do.”

I agree with the sentiment. I have often thought of it as sort of a “low hanging fruit ethnographic research agenda”—there are so many things out there I think other people aren’t paying attention to or misunderstand the situations of in their daily educational life. It’s always felt like I can just cast my gaze on some piece of my reality that represents a complexity of education / education research, and I can find within that the underlying relationships that people aren’t noticing enough.

The nice thing about this research agenda is if you can look for the underlying theoretical dimensions of a practical situation, you can be both insightful and practical. Oftentimes, that is the whole point of the research (connecting theory to practice), all I have to do regarding the research / empiricism is to design and argue for the study that helps reveal the theoretical relationship to practice / everyday life.

In my dissertation, I quoted William Blake “to see a world in a grain of sand” to show how complex and interesting even ordinary moments in education can be. I think once we attune ourselves to theory, and practical / everyday challenges, and the perspective (positionality) of our audience, we can find these everywhere. We can conduct research studies to help uncover and illuminate these theoretical problems of practice that concern our audience. We can go deeper to uncover the dimensions and nuances that bring them about to help understand ways to improve education and equity. I’ve often thought that most engineers (and engineering teachers) are good with data and good at problem solving, but they aren’t as good at understanding the theoretical aspects of educational situations or social situations. So, I lean in that direction.

How can you start “to see the world in” a single student? In an engineering classroom? In any educational phenomenon? I think the attention that an ethnographer takes to a topic is probably one of the habits / skills to practice and develop. Don’t stop at single easy answers that are ultimately not true and not helpful. Look at a problem and turn it around and over to see new dimensions. Keep paying attention. How does the problem look to students, and to faculty? Why does the discrepancy exist? How do different groups of students engage on the topic? How do the actions of one set of people create the problems of a different set of people? Why have the problems persisted or why have they changed over historical time periods? What can that help you infer about how things could or could not change in the future?

I find equity and educational settings endlessly interesting and complicated. Behind each issue I think other people present too simply is a lot of complexity left for someone to comment on:

• Identity – a sense of self but also constructed by others; multi-dimensional but often summarized quickly and simply based on salience; a story we tell but also something beyond words.
• Cultural responsiveness – important but almost impossible based on the diversity of a given classroom; aspiring towards attention to the uniqueness of each student yet at risk of essentializing the same students by basic cultural features; in tension with any true educational process which requires pushing a student to be more than they are.
• Learning – important but invoking much disagreement over how to define it; if left to pure cognition, as all knowing and learning must ultimately happen in the brain, it is unknowable; it requires effort and energy from the student but we cannot know the true potential and capacity of the student, we can only try to provide the resources to help them grow.

If I took any one of these concepts, I think I could unpack any number of literature reviews (how does the rest of my intellectual community discuss these topics, how are those discussions divergent or limited or needing refinement), research studies (how can I find these phenomenon in the real world and help comment on these dimensions and aspects or problems to help create new insight), and more.

So ask yourself what some concepts or topics or problems are most concerning others nearby you. Turn that problem over and inside out. Reconceive of it, redefine it, take two or three different angles on it. Look at how others are talking about it in the literature, look at how others are working on it in practice. Arrange a research study to find yourself in contact with the phenomenon, and keep refining your research study to help you uncover the most important and interesting dimensions of it. Engage with trying to solve the problem, engage with policy and historical context to draw wisdom from others who have already tried to solve it, and be honest and reflective when your best laid plans don’t work. We have a lot to learn from the everyday experience and will find the best new solutions once we have gained that everyday wisdom.