It's a grand muddle

E.M. Forester in Passage to India talks about mysteries and muddles. I believe I am in a great big muddle. I have immersed myself in my slice 5 of data, and I think I have dug so deeply into the minutia of the data that I am overwhelmed with it all. Like I experienced as I prepared for phase II of my lit review, I have been busy collecting and preparing separate "items," and now I have all of these cards scattered on the floor like 52 card pick up.

I am struggling with the axial coding, and how to do it in such a way that I am seeing patterns and relationships. I'm struggling with my insights to the overall draft cycle and then maintaining my focus on the reflection. I can say that these reflections present a partial and even deceptive picture of what really is going on and ends up happening. Mostly, I am intrigued by how things go astray and by my speculations about why. This mirror of reflection is a fairly cracked mirror.

In my mind, I keep coming back to my analogy of my son going to school with his collar up or his hair unbrushed and a wing of hair flying high from the back of his head. The act of reflection is the act of gazing in the mirror. The mirror itself is the "other" that presents a representation of you--a peer response, a self-evaluation, a glance at an other's draft, or looking at additional research. I have recently reincorporated viewing drafts and doing research as "mirrors" along with considering/reporting feedback, and I'm not sure they exactly fit, but they do provide contrastive and additional perspectives. Hmm. I'll have to think more about how to categorize them, but I know that they impact the identification of problems and coming to know (and eventual revision goals).

So now that we have the elements of this act of reflection in place, let's return to my son walking down the hall past our hall mirror and let's say he looks in the mirror.

Scenario 1: He sees his collar is up, realizes that it is a problem, and reaches up and folds it down. Reflection works. He would have gone to school looking like a slob, but now he is a guapo stylish guy. He gets an A on his paper.

Scenario 2: He looks in the mirror, sees his collar is up but shrugs his shoulders, says who cares, and walks on. He either purposefully decides the collar is not a problem, or he doesn't see it as a problem at all. He either does not have the appreciation (this is good/this is bad sense) of collars being down, or perhaps he doesn't think it is that bad. It fall within what McAlpine called his "corridor of tolerance." He can tolerate his collar being up. So has reflection failed? It has from the sense that we (the teachers) think all writers should have their collars down (our view of essay success).

He might also not have any sense that collars should be down. The whole concept of collars is so ill-defined to him that he really doesn't even notice the collar is up. As he looks in the mirror, he might even think his image in the mirror looks good. He leaves it up.

Scenario 3: He glances in the mirror, and he sees his shirt is untucked and hair unbrushed, but he doesn't even notice his collar is up. He might tuck in his shirt, but then decide not to brush his hair and not touch his collar because he has no realization that it is up.

Scenario 4: He looks in the mirror, sees his collar is up, but proceeds for the door without touching it. He told himself, "I need to pull down my collar," but he doesn't because it he is late for school and doesn't have time to pull it down. The expedient thing is to leave it up so he isn't late. Or he said he will get to it later, but then when he arrives at school he is is distracted and forgets.

Scenario 5: OK, once again he is getting ready for school. He puts his shirt on and the collar is up. He walks by the mirror, doesn't see the collar, but on the way to the car he feels the collar is up and then fixes it. He makes this change on his own without the aid of the mirror. Did he even need the mirror to make this change?

Scenario 6: Let's say he walks by the mirror, sees the collar is up and even acknowledges that it ought to be down. However, he doesn't know how to pull his collar down. He doesn't have the strategies, tactics, and skills he needs to make this change. So the collar stays up.

Scenario 7: He's back in front of the mirror, and he knows that I am standing there too, so he says the collar is a problem and that he will pull it down just because I am standing there and that is what  he knows I want him to say and do. I go into the bathroom, and he proceeds to the car having appeased me but not pulled down his collar. This problem identification and setting of revision goals has been done for my benefit. And the collar stays up.

I'm running out of scenarios, but I think these give a picture of the muddle I am seeing and trying to make sense of. So what role does reflection play? What is the purpose and effect of looking in that mirror? What if we had no mirror in the house? Is it necessary? Do we only gain this perspective on ourselves through this reflection?

Muddle muddle muddle.

I believe that the dymanic of these writing reviews is fundamentally shaped by what I am calling "essay success." I believe that will be my core category. So how do I do selective coding just for it? My axial coding is a mess right now. I think I need to spend some more time now that I have the cards all scattered about the floor. I think these scenarios point to variations I am seeing in the dynamic of reflection, but I need to refine these patterns and compare them to other patterns. What is significant in each case?

I'm also confused as to what constitutes a "theory." What is it that I am creating? I've become so lost in my data I feel that I have lost sight of what my end point will be. So I am going to take a break from my data for tomorrow. I want to review my literature on grounded theory both to refresh and guide me at this point and prepare for writing my methodology chapter. I'll come back to it on Friday and see what I see then.

In the meantime, I muddle on.