Cálculo de los Números “EAL”

The main theme in this first data chapter has been the connection between initial processes of getting to know each other and subsequent patterns of social interaction and communication between project group members. Early encounters with each other were used in accounts to demonstrate the personal characteristics of other project group members, and thus the type(s) of person that they were each dealing with, the potential relationships that might be expected to develop, and the types of conversations that might be possible. While participants talked about the efforts at the beginning of the project to develop good working relationships with other project group members, including those who they were finding difficult to understand and to work with, they also described points at which ideas about the other became more stable and personal characterisations became more fixed as they got to know each other better. Both Nina and Sean described how, at such a point, they stopped trying to develop a more positive relationship with each other. Others, however, described a more positive outcome, for instance as both Kerry and Alison began to understand Sean's perspective better and started to trust him more. Project group members therefore came variously positioned as being easier or harder to work with, and as presenting more or less difficulty to raise, and discuss, certain topics with. Project group members were also positioned as having different conversational resources available to them through which issues could be successfully raised in the group:

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Kerry noted how Nina would respond differently to the same words spoken by either Martin or Sean, and Paul noted how Alison had become able to talk more easily to the university team members better than he or Nina had.

The concept of silence elaborated in people's accounts in this chapter has already taken on in this chapter a number of slightly different forms. Participants talked about practices of silence that unfolded during the early stages of the project - for instance, as Alison talked about staying silent in a gesture of trusting others (firstly Nina, then Sean) to do the work - and about silence that emerged as an outcome from these early stages. In this latter sense, the discursive construction of silence was not so much that of a conscious withholding at a specific moment, but a more abstract sense of undiscussability and absence, of items being taken off the agenda. The council officers were positioned as being silenced in two ways: through a physical exclusion from certain spaces in which the university team project planning was taking place; and through an expectation that certain topics, namely those relating to council control or involvement in this stage of the project, were no longer to be raised for discussion in the project group meetings.

The resources available to participants to speak up, and the requirements to stay silent, therefore were depicted as becoming uniquely allocated based on personal characteristics but also on organisational membership. After the 'Stockholm

incident', the professional language of academic co-inquiry might be conceptualised as having developed a centripetal force that was imposing one particular set of meanings upon the project work delivery: that the work was to be delivered via the university team's standards of co-inquiry rather than the council's standards of

consultation. This set of meanings made it difficult for Nina and Paul to raise certain suggestions and concerns and get them heard in a way that they might wish to be

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heard. The issue of access to project resources, that participants talked about as otherwise being unavailable to the council officers, was highlighted as underpinning this centripetal force.

In the council officers' accounts, other additional characters from outside the project group, such as line managers and local councillors, were introduced, and the

relationship with these other characters became intrinsic to the construction of when and why staying silent was evaluated as appropriate or not. On the one hand, council officers evaluated their temporary disengagement from the detail of the project work at this stage as an appropriate response based upon the pragmatic justification of finding a way to get project work done that was required of them in their work role but for which they had limited resources. On the other hand, for both Alison and Nina, a practice of staying silent was considered to be problematic at moments when they became positioned as not being able to meet the expectations of those to whom they were accountable, of not representing the organisation's interests or not being able to report back adequately.

The next chapter introduces some specific accounts of withholding as the co-inquiry events started to be delivered at a point about half-way through the project, and when I was actively involved in fieldwork. While it continues to develop some of the themes raised in this chapter, namely around the ontological meaning of staying silent, it moves the discussion away from discursive constructions of silence during processes of getting to know each other and concentrates in more detail on silence in relation to processes of professional learning and role delivery.

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