Relationships Emerge
by Teresa Rothrock, Kathleen Hardgrove, & Ben Rothrock
4.22.22
During the two years of research activity, Phase 4 of this ethnographic heuristic inquiry produced two sets of notable patterns.
Naming of Pattern #1
Once we had ruled out finding any definitive research representing a consensus of what soft skills college graduates needed, we returned to two of the launching questions:
* What is required for success?
* What is more important in online courses—content or contact?
As professors at liberal arts institutions and philosophical artists ourselves, we quickly broadened the definition beyond the soundbite that success means achieving a well-paying job. Though a nice option, being content with one’s work and contributions is also important. Although each member of the research group brought different experiences associated with these topics, each self-identified, first and foremost, as an educator, and ultimately viewed this esoteric search for the key components for success with a pedagogical eye. Therefore, the dialectic kept returning to what can we do as part of the education machine to help ensure success for our students?
Months of journaling, discussing, and analyzing brought us to this first pattern: -->
In this initial formula, we acknowledged the vitality of three components: hard skills, soft skills, and the environment, recognizing the nuanced balance of these three elements dependent upon other variables, such as the agent and agency involved.
Hard Skills
It almost goes without saying that educational institutions exist to impart and carry on the hard skills deemed important by society at large and especially from within the various institutions. In the dialectical process of this inquiry, the research group determined hard skills to mean not only the crystallized knowledge sets associated with a particular discipline but also the fluidity required to use them effectively (West et al., 2014). This cultural continuity is evident and expected. Research supports that the majority of graduates from institutions of higher learning demonstrate satisfactory skills in their content area. In this regard, faculty need not feel threatened that they are being asked to give up their expertise; it is still as needed as ever.
Soft Skills
The research team was quick to acknowledge, though, that without effective soft skills, those hard skills could stay locked in a cupboard. To know something is not enough. Knowledge without effective application is basically useless. The identification of those elusive soft skills continued to plague the research team. At first, we sought to find pre-existing and definitive skillsets, but that quickly became a game of chase-the-major. Then, the inquiry looked to categorize and define what the team and existing research deemed essential skills. Many attempts to define these soft skills could not withstand the inner validity test. What was defined seemed to work only in isolated instances. This portion of the formula took the longest, and will be explained in depth during the second part of Phase 4, Naming of Pattern #2.
Environment
We were quick to realize that graduates having the necessary hard skills and an effective grasp of soft skills still may not be successful if those skills are not being applied in the appropriate environment. Ideally, an effective environment is deemed any productive workplace that empowers constituents to apply the hard and soft skills they have, to find the skills they need, and to collaborate and negotiate with peers for the good of the project, thus creating an ego extended from productivity. Two members of the research team work directly with helping to place graduates into their chosen careers—one with public school English teachers and another with actors and theatre personnel. The third member works with beginning and veteran faculty who are already hired in their desired careers. These different experiences provided unique perspectives and ultimately led us to discover at least three levels of application —global, local, and personal, also to be explored in more detail with upcoming posts.
References
West, M. R., Gabrieli, C. F. O., Kraft, M. A., Finn, A. S., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2014). What effective schools do: Stretching the cognitive limits on achievement. Education Next, 14(4), 72-79. https://www.educationnext.org/what-effective-schools-do-cognitive-achievement/
* * * * *
Our Research Methodology Evolves
by Teresa Rothrock, Kathleen Hardgrove, & Ben Rothrock
4.15.22
Following the design laid out by Kleining and Witt (2000), we had already each had our own unique experiences—Phase 1. We each logged our experiences in our own journals. We also captured notes of our conversation in a shared online document. Over the next two years, we continued to meet one weekend a month for our Coffee Talk. In addition, we agreed to journal new insights, observations, and ideas as well as to collect secondary research in the shared file as it came along. Of course, the plan wasn’t that clear when we started. We simply wanted to understand this topic more thoroughly, especially in regard to our own careers. The first external research that launched from our first Coffee Talk was to find out a definitive list of soft skills needed for success. The naiveté of that task seems laughable now, but at the time, we earnestly believed we could figure it out before we met again. Over the next several months, what we found out is that there was little consensus on this issue.
Meanwhile, our journals started to show how we couldn’t take off this heuristic lens. We each went about our lives, looking first at the soft skills needed in our workplace, then at soft skills we felt we possessed that had helped our successes, and eventually, we each explored soft skills in our personal lives, unbeknownst to each other at first. Phase 2 of this research methodology, the documentation of the introspective experience, took the bulk of those two years, with smaller senses of closure popping up along the way, only to open up expanded areas of inquiry. As forewarned by Kleining and Witt (2000), this process is not linear but recursive. As our Phase 2 spiraled around topic exploration, two other phases occurred.
Our group had become its own “research instrument,” what Kleining and Witt (2000) call Phase 3, continually improving the collection and quality of the data from our individual experiences and letting the ongoing review and analysis clarify our insights. Phase 4 occurred twice during this two-year period, identifying two common patterns and a subpattern through this dialectic, which will be discussed in more detail in upcoming posts.
References
Kleining, G. & Witt, H. (2000). The qualitative heuristic approach: A methodology for discovery in psychology and the social sciences. Rediscovering the method of introspection as an example. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(1), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-1.1.1123
* * * * *
Coffee Talk as Research
by Teresa Rothrock, Kathleen Hardgrove, & Ben Rothrock
4.1.22
Driving home in February 2012, absently listening to some news station to get my mind off the stressful reports I had been reading at the office, I caught the end of an interview with an authority whose name I had missed. He was blaming universities for putting out graduates who cannot get jobs or promotions because they were not career-ready. Of course, this was also at a time when the United States was recovering from a recession wherein jobs were not readily available. However, as I listened further, the voice on the radio pointed out that it was not because the graduates were not smart or knowledgeable in their fields; instead, they lacked the soft skills to distinguish themselves from the flock. Of course, as both a faculty member and an administrator at the time, I entertained the typical argument in my own head:
Are faculty responsible for teaching soft skills, too, or is their priority to share their knowledge in the content areas for which they were hired?
The University operates to provide employable citizens in an ever-changing marketplace. If the soft skills are lacking, who else could teach them?
Faculty contend that passing on the knowledge sets from one generation to the next creates citizens for the future. Employers want those hard skills couched in mastered and effective soft skills. Policymakers seem confident that completion and employment will eventually achieve success.
I kept pondering if these elusive soft skills might serve as a connection between the hard skills our graduates apparently have and the completion and employability we are now mandated to ensure and track. As a tenured professor, I helped prepare future English teachers for secondary schools. I also served as the Director of Assessment for our entire regional university. I knew what soft skills my fields required, but the formality of that brief and random news report made it sound more official and ominous, so I thought this topic needed further exploration. I jotted down some ideas of what I thought they should be—writing skills, punctuality, professional disposition. Of course, as an English professor, would writing skills be a soft skill or part of the content of our major? As an assessment director, I questioned the vagueness of professional disposition: What is that exactly, and how would one measure it?
At work the next day, while focusing on my daily tasks, the crannies of my brain kept searching for soft skills. As the Director of Assessment, I worked with 49 different programs and units, whose faculty and staff come from a cornucopia of backgrounds and skillsets. One meeting with a professor in the business college included a conversation lamenting the lack of professional skills of some students, professional skills he defined as dressing professionally and speaking and writing with appropriate language. This deficiency was such a concern for their program at our rural university, where poverty is notably high, they had started a Clothing Library where students in need could borrow quality suits that had been donated by alumni and local businesses to be used for interviews. After that meeting, I scrambled across campus to meet with the nursing department about assessment, though my mind was still scanning for soft skills. Business suits were not one of them! And so went the next few days of work, but through a soft skills lens.
That next weekend, I was scheduled to get together with a couple of colleagues—one from a different department at my own university and the other from a similar regional university 75 miles away. Our intent was to reminisce about the good old days, discuss movies and travel, and drink lots of free-trade coffee. With all that coffee racing through our systems, we exhausted all the nostalgia, art, and travelogues in record time and somehow found ourselves talking about work. Ben, an instructional technology design specialist who trained faculty in the latest educational technology used at our university, had been asked by a tenured business professor what he thought was more important in online courses—content or contact. That occupied our conversation for the next round of coffee. Then Kathleen, a professor of theatre and communication from a neighboring university, shared another experience with an unnamed student who wanted to be a theatre major but just “wasn’t showing what it takes to succeed,” which spurned another dialogue that got us through lunch. Then, during dessert, I mentioned my irritating radio experience.
It was time for another pot of coffee. What soft skills do professors need to be successful online teachers? What soft skills did Kathleen’s student lack, and can that be rectified in their program through some sort of instructional or curricular change? We waffled around, trying to figure out what soft skills were most important, each being slightly myopic. Writing skills. Oral communication. Problem-solving. Patience. Initiative. Curiosity. Punctuality. Creativity. With our smartphones, we did cursory research to see if there was an official set of soft skills. Not surprisingly, that research pulled up more information than we could tackle on our tiny screens, and we simply couldn’t ingest more coffee. Born in that moment was our research project. We sketched out a plan to approach this as an ethnographic heuristic inquiry.