Literacy Narrative Qualitative Analysis
Kamila Kinyon

I. Formulate one or more research questions about literacy narratives.

II. Conduct interviews to collect 3 or more literacy narratives outside of class. Each narrative should be 3-5 minutes long. Preferably, you should tape and post the interviews. (You may use either audio or video, and may borrow an audio recorder from the Writing Program office.) Alternately, you may ask your interviewees to write a brief literacy narrative, and then follow this up with a 3-5 minute interview. If you choose this option, you should take careful notes, later editing and posting this along with the written narrative provided by the interviewee. Whichever technique you use to collect literacy narratives, you will need to have each interviewee fill out consent and data transmission forms, as explained on page 3. These forms are posted on Blackboard under course documents and may be filled out and posted electronically.

III. Post your audios, videos, or written narratives with edited interview notes on Portfolio, so other 1133 students can have access to them. (We will discuss in class how to post and share the audios or videos through Portfolio. I will create a larger archive, so you can have access to the audios, videos, or written narratives with interview notes from members of my two other sections of 1133.)

III. Look for connections between the narratives you and other 1133 students collected and the narratives on the DALN (Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives) website.

IV. Do a qualitative analysis. You may draw on selections from (1) the literacy narratives you and other 1133 students collected and (2) the narratives on the DALN website.

V. In writing your paper, be sure to describe your research questions. Document what you have found using direct quotes from at least some of the literacy narratives you are analyzing. Qualitative research is quite flexible in the accepted formats for presentation, more so than the quantitative research format we studied earlier. For an example of how qualitative research can be presented, see Sunsteins Getting the Words Secondhand (pp. 449-454 Fieldworking) and Hawisher and Selfes Globalization and Agency: Designing and Redesigning the Literacies of Cyberspace (available on Blackboard under Course Documents).

VI. Extra Credit: Post an audio or video literacy narrative to the DALN archive. This may either be an interview or a literacy narrative of your own. Send an additional attachment to me, since it takes a while for the narrative to be processed and to appear on the DALN site. The extra credit will count towards the class participation and informal writing part of your grade.
 

The Point Front Page