The last chapter of, On the Case, describes one of the most gray areas for researchers; generalizations. Dyson and Genishi begin with the familiar Madlenka example in order to depict how each participant creates their own particular discourse according to a number of internal and external influences. These generalizations are produced by the participants as well as the observers or the researchers. The important aspect which this chapter discusses is how to entwine the generalizations of all who are involved with the experiment and formulate plausible explanations from this information.
What I found most interesting and helpful with orienting myself as a reader was when Dyson and Genishi commented on the human nature of experiences. “This is after all, what we human beings do: We respond to present circumstances, at least in part, by relying on the relevance of past experience.” (Dyson and Genishi 115). This quote illustrates how every person generates their own realities based on social influences and experiences which shape how they perceive situations such as Madlenka creating an entire universe that was one block long.
Generalizations are structured out of contexts such as culture, socioeconomic standards, linguistics, education, and the types of relationships that have been constructed. These different contexts blend together to create elastic ideologies, and more often than not, coalesce and form those gray areas in which researchers are troubled by. The authors then continue to discuss how generalizations can be incorporated into the researchers experiment by using Mrs. Kay’s and Ms. Yung’s classrooms. Each of those classrooms uses the environment to shape how the observations relate to the researcher’s findings in different ways.
I found your blog entry to be helpful when planning for my presentation last night. It's odd how we tend to forget how much we are affected by our own environments and experiences; Kay and Yung both had their own assertions about what made a successful classroom. Mrs. Kay chose to rely on the curriculum assigned to her, whereas Yung found it more beneficial to incorporate the children's viewpoints for better understanding. The different approaches don't necessarily guarantee more success or a better classroom, they just make more room for more generalizations I suppose. both could be intertwined by one generalization though: children refine their language through their own devices, though they are led by a curriculum, teacher, or other resources.
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