Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

6 n = 1: The Science and Art of the Single Case in Educational Research 93
could be checked and challenged. More accessible would be a case record “a theoretically
parsimonious condensation of the material of the case data produced by
selective editing without explicit comment” (Stenhouse, 1977, p. 20). The purpose
of the case record, as Elliott and Lukes explain, is to enable others “to critique the
case study and to judge the extent to which it could be verified as a reasonable
interpretation of the available evidence” (Elliott & Lukes, 2009, p. 90).
But we can go further than this in locating case study within an artistic or, since
the main but not exclusive tools of the case researcher are words, a literary tradition.
In so far as case study pays attention to rich description and the evocation of
place and time, to personal experiencing, to reflecting complexity (including moral
complexity) rather than abstracting a few variables from complex situations, to “portrayal”
rather than (or as well as) analysis, to narrative form, to ordinary rather than
technical language, to a good read and to the essential indeterminacy of the text –
does it not locate itself rather more in the stable of literature or at least the humanities
rather than science.
The kind of case-studies which we believe education needs have characteristics which call
for a fusion of the styles of the artist and the scientist. When Freud said, “It still strikes me
myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, one
might say, they lack the serious stamp of science” he caught the unease of the researcher
who, disdaining the “safety of numbers”, discovers that his data is most effectively exposed
in a mode which is generically associated with the artist. (MacDonald & Walker, 1975/1977,
p. 3; Freud, 1955, p. 160)
And not only should this not matter: Why do we find ourselves constantly having
to apologise because not everything in the academy meets the requirements of
science (or what these are supposed to be)? Might not the difference, after all, be a
source of excitement? Science may offer the general (though there are many reservations
which need to be entered into even this claim – see, e.g. Smeyers, 2009)but
the arts offer the possibility of the universal:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
(William Blake: Auguries of Innocence in Nicholson & Lee, 1916)
In a sense the greater the particularity of the case study and the more fully humanity
is displayed in all its complexity and ambiguity – and there is a direct analogy
here with a great novel or drama – the more opportunity there is for the reader to
discern not just what relates to their own condition or to a sub-class of subjects like
them but to humanity as a whole.
Case study is the way of the artist, who achieves greatness when, through the portrayal of
a single instance locked in time and circumstance, he communicates enduring truths about
the human condition. (MacDonald & Walker, 1975/1977, p.3)
In this process, too, the case study does something equally important, which is
to restore that humanity to its place at the centre of educational practice and policy
from which the crude abstractions of scientific measurement constantly threaten its
removal.