Portraiture or not Week 6

As I get into writing about my pilot study, I wanted to examine what truly makes a portraiture case study. Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot (1997) writes about it as if the researcher is a narrator to a story, or an artist capturing a portrait of an individual. And, that the researcher is personally involved in interpreting the people and their stories while also adding their personal touch to it. I raised a dyslexic child, which gives me a unique empathic perspective that I can contribute to my research and I have a great rapport with the students and their families. This research project and my personal connection to these students permit me to contribute my matchless representation of them.

Redefining Case Study by VanWynsberghe, R., & Khan, S. (2007) clarified what a case study was for me. All of these terms this class has seemed so foreign to me, but this article made sense. I need to go through the process to determine what type of research I am doing. I realized that for what I was trying to accomplish, which is to find out whether the artistic process does indeed assists dyslexic students to communicate their ideas better, I was on the right track with ethnographic design, although a sub-category of portraiture case study was pretty much right on the money, I think, I hope. And, the methods of collecting data would be through interviews, personal journaling or interpretations, student art-making and writings. The assessment is through words not tables and charts.

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S., & Hoffmann Davis, J. The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

VanWynsberghe, R., & Khan, S. (2007). Redefining case study. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 4(6), 80-94.