Purpose: This paper aims to present and reflect on a phenomenological research process used to elucidate the nature of creativity and innovation in haute cuisine. Design/methodology/approach: In-depth unstructured interviews and field notes capturing subjective experiences were employed to elucidate the experiences of 18 top chefs from the UK, Spain, France, Austria and Germany with regards to creativity and innovation. Findings: The findings are twofold: first, an empirical sample finding is presented in order to contextualize the type of findings obtained; second, key methodological findings are presented explaining the process of elucidating the nature of creativity and innovation through iterative learning from the descriptions of the interviewees and the subjective experiences gathered. Research limitations/implications: The underlying phenomenological study is limited to male haute cuisine chefs in five European countries. Future research is planned including female and male chefs from other countries in order to learn whether similar empirical findings can be obtained. Practical implications: The paper presents a research process for elucidating cognitive and nebulous phenomena such as creativity and innovation to make them accessible to managers, researchers, students and policy makers. Originality/value: The findings explain the process of elucidating the nature of creativity and innovation through iterative learning from the descriptions of the interviewees and the subjective experiences gathered. Further conceptual and methodological development emerges from investigating interviewees representative of the notion of the extraordinary.
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In the course of our supervisory work over the years, we have noticed that qualitative research tends to evoke a lot of questions and worries, so-called frequently asked questions (FAQs). This series of four articles intends to provide novice researchers with practical guidance for conducting high-quality qualitative research in primary care. By ‘novice’ we mean Master’s students and junior researchers, as well as experienced quantitative researchers who are engaging in qualitative research for the first time. This series addresses their questions and provides researchers, readers, reviewers and editors with references to criteria and tools for judging the quality of qualitative research papers. This second article addresses FAQs about context, research questions and designs. Qualitative research takes into account the natural contexts in which individuals or groups function to provide an in-depth understanding of real-world problems. The research questions are generally broad and open to unexpected findings. The choice of a qualitative design primarily depends on the nature of the research problem, the research question(s) and the scientific knowledge one seeks. Ethnography, phenomenology and grounded theory are considered to represent the ‘big three’ qualitative approaches. Theory guides the researcher through the research process by providing a ‘lens’ to look at the phenomenon under study. Since qualitative researchers and the participants of their studies interact in a social process, researchers influence the research process. The first article described the key features of qualitative research, the third article will focus on sampling, data collection and analysis, while the last article focuses on trustworthiness and publishing.
Nowadays, digital tools for mathematics education are sophisticated and widely available. These tools offer important opportunities, but also come with constraints. Some tools are hard to tailor by teachers, educational designers and researchers; their functionality has to be taken for granted. Other tools offer many possible educational applications, which require didactical choices. In both cases, one may experience a tension between a teacher’s didactical goals and the tool’s affordances. From the perspective of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), this challenge concerns both guided reinvention and didactical phenomenology. In this chapter, this dialectic relationship will be addressed through the description of two particular cases of using digital tools in Dutch mathematics education: the introduction of the graphing calculator (GC), and the evolution of the online Digital Mathematics Environment (DME). From these two case descriptions, my conclusion is that students need to develop new techniques for using digital tools; techniques that interact with conceptual understanding. For teachers, it is important to be able to tailor the digital tool to their didactical intentions. From the perspective of RME, I conclude that its match with using digital technology is not self-evident. Guided reinvention may be challenged by the rigid character of the tools, and the phenomena that form the point of departure of the learning of mathematics may change in a technology-rich classroom.
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