Intimacy in coming to know

OK, I admit that coding is not really my genre. I find it a useful process to perhaps get inside data (interviews, dialogue) for a while, then I need to escape into another way of thinking and being with the data. It is a very reductionistic process and I have to push myself through it, feeling like walking through mud, with my brain being squeezed when really it wants to run and shout. I want to get inside the person that is writing, to understand them, their paradigm, to see them as a whole human being, with living educational theories. How do these shape who they are, what they say and how they be with others? I want to engage all my levels of womens' ways of knowing!

I want to lie down and gaze at the top of the trees with the clouds moving past and let my mind wonder and dream. I find I move too soon into theorising, wondering why, imagining, seeing myself in conversation with the research participators. I put myself in the facilators shoes and ask "how might I do it different?" before I have been thorough with the data. I move into praxis. Yet, in unpacking what I would do and asking what informs that, it enables me to go deep into the patterns in the data which is resonating with my theories and wondering. I begin to have insight and I find dimensions that are outside the reductionistic story. I find new questions to ask.

I have come to very much admire Helen's process of iterative layers of coding, drawing essences, sleep time, reflecting, seeing patterns, reflecting, looking for interpretative frameworks. It is very thorough and is more likely to stand up as a legitimate research process of inquiry compared to mine which is suited to the action research, auto-ethnography and lived experience genres that I used in my thesis.

We have been talking about the differences in our approaches. She describes what she does as small steps with think time in between. It is not just about these steps providing rigor of procedure, whereas my approach seems more imaginal (and less rigorous) but it enables her to become intimate with the data - it actually suits her ways of coming to know.

So I have got out my Inquiry Map that I created for my physics class and have been reflecting on how Helen and I move around this map. There is a complementarity to our processes which come together in rich and interesting dialogue. I begin to realise that what might seem to be "scattered" and not grounded in evidenced research is actually a very important part of developing and choosing interpretive lenses. I am zooming around the inquiry map like a buzzing bee... it is me trying to get a sense of the inquiry "whole". As long as I visit each quadrant enough to develop a path of rigor.