The scene I behold each afternoon I walk home
I’ve been reading long-overdue “seminal” articles since yesterday. It’s a good way to remember the things I’ve forgotten about this research, as well as a great opportunity to put things together, make connections, and synthesize. I’m basically exploring the landscape of epistemologies–that’s how I’d describe what I’ve been doing these days, and it’s funny how it seems to keep changing each time I visit. Have I been away that long? Read More »
Trying very hard to engage in intellectual thought
Took almost an hour yesterday to get to the National Library. So much for John Eddy’s 20-minute hike. Nevertheless, it was exhilarating to get out and walk by the lake.
Spent three hours thereabouts just re-familiarizing myself with the basic thinkers and the key concepts of the research. I think I will need to think about stuff more, maybe even read more. I’m not even touching my data yet. Read More »
It’s difficult enough to “fumble in the world of academia,” but for practitioners like myself, to turn this thing on and off, one can’t help but end up being a dabbler.
And dabbling just isn’t going to do the job, I’m afraid. Read More »
I’ve been reading Dr. Gottlieb’s Ph.D. dissertation, which he graciously emailed to me when I requested for it. It’s fascinating. He talks about the need for studies not so much on the CONTENT of religious thinking (so much written about that already), but about the FORMS and PROCESSES of religious thinking. For example: How different is religious thinking — including, I guess, religious beliefs and knowledge claims — from, say, mathematical or scientific thinking? In other words, as a judgment domain, how distinct is it from the others identified by Kuhn et. al.: personal tastes, aesthetic judgment, value judgment, social truths, and physical truths.
I suspect reading Gottlieb will be a defining moment in my research experience. There’s so much in there that I resonate with and that is quite provocative actually. For now, I still have that lingering question in my head — or perhaps an insight about to be born — this whole relationship between religious belief, on the one hand, and Authority/Expert Knowledge and Certainty Knowledge on the other. My hunch is that contrary to my initial guess, it’s Certainty Knowledge that is crucial to a more “sophisticated” religious epistemology, not Authority/Expert Knowledge.
But that, of course, is only a hunch.
I met with my supervisor yesterday morning at the library cafe, which never opened. The library was virtually deserted, but that meant we were better able to discuss my research. Our discussion focused on the instrument that I’m fine-tuning, and we agreed that I would stick to the original instruments as much as possible so as not to invite unnecessary questions. Also, he encouraged “greed” in the data collection–i.e., get as much data as possible and just sort them out later.
So my formerly four-part survey has morphed into a monstrous five-part survey with about 85 questions. Argh. But here are the sections so far: Read More »
It’s been a while since I blogged because it’s been a while since I thought about my research.
And that, I think, is precisely the problem with working students — which applies to most of the population of graduate students anyway. We can’t just think about our studies and nothing else. It takes an entirely different mode to think deeply about teacher beliefs compared to my day job of running a school. True, the two can feed on each other — as I sure hope they will — but the stage in my life does not have enough room for both the scholar and the practitioner to share the limelight.
So what happens is that given the daily rush of things, the non-stop series of concerns and things that crop up the way they do in the real world, the scholar is elbowed back to the wings, waiting for his chance to be summoned on stage. The practitioner does his thing, and only when there’s a lull — like a holiday like today — does he concede to bow out and give the floor to the scholar. Read More »
It ain’t over. Just when I thought I’ve had enough of it, here I go again, having second thoughts about my research design. As it is, there are three parts to my data gathering:
(a) I’ll use a survey to determine someone’s epistemological orientation in the six judgment domains (nominal scale).
(b) Then I have a Likert scale to measure religious beliefs, values, and practices.
(c) Finally, I’ll do a semi-structured interview to determine ontology, fallibility, and decidability. Read More »
