Honing In on my Questions

I started with the idea of using Orff methods of music instruction—combining it with movement and dance—with Instructional Design and then ran into something about the importance of breathing. Then, I thought that if breathing gives us a sense of confidence and beauty (as in vocal instruction), then that should be able to be applied to the world of education and learning so we can make people confident in what we’re training them to do. Using movement in instruction should make people more confident in what we’re training them to do.

I understand that movement in dance is much easier to detect and learn in a dance class, or in a softball game. But movement is not the peak of engagement. There was another study that talked about dancers who teach themselves to “multitask,” and think of other things while they do their dances, thereby losing the emotional connection with the action. (I think that translates to dancers who dance with Flow rather than Focus.) These dancers have to re-teach themselves to focus on the basics of what their bodies are doing as they dance in order to put emotion back in their dances.

· Is the emotional connection is triggered by focus/peak of engagement?

· Is it possible to come up with a peak of engagement for every profession; not just

There are some studies that say that learning is emotionally-based. I started going over my notes of things that have interested me in the past few years, and I remembered a story about a

Qualitative Research Notes

What to do with resulting data?

• Find themes/patterns that can be used again
• There are often blinders on these kinds of studies, because they are often to try to understand rather than to change or "fix" (using research to study research)
• Things are always changing anyways, so... by the time we finish a study, that culture is already in the past. (How do you ever get progress?)
• Can you create something like what you study? (Carl Marx, Rosa Parks, Ghandi)
• There is something divine within us that allows us to innovate.
  
• What if the case study is the "outlier"?
• Describe the root meanings
  
• Thick description: has enough contextual data to defend the bias/conclusion
• Let go of the reins and don't think that you can tell everybody what they will do, because that's not really how it's going to go.
• Case Study: give you the experience that you can't have by yourself. (Like what it's like to give birth, etc.) THIS requires that people who are writing it understand it from a personal perspective, so they can write it in a way that is applicable to people; something others can understand.
• Write a documentary! :)
• An ethnography can be something from middle-class America, even if you are middle-class America. Some of the most interesting ethnographies came from people who are native to that culture.
  

Writing Style

• There is no real stance, just write in the voice that you usually use.
• Don't pretend to be third person omniscient if you're not.