Recomendaciones

I begin with a reminder about the research questions that ground my investigation of DV and film production in my chosen settings, probing the ways in which productive practices with the audiovisual are framed, catalysed or inhibited:

How does creative media work constitute a wider literacy in formal and non-formal school spaces?

What can traditional pedagogy learn from moving image production processes?

How do social discursive factors determine practical media work in schools

In addition to building context around my individual studies, I give an account of how they came about and my relationship with the settings. I specify what materials were gathered and how they help answer my question, along with a rationale for my interview technique. The section concludes with an explanation of my interpretive strategy and issues concerning the credibility, transferability and dependability of the same.

In my Introduction I explained that my motivation for working with young children and media related to my perception that learning through making with digital technologies offered an engaging and levelling route to authorship, especially for those struggling with traditional literacy practices. As my professional role in schools evolved more into one of a technical practitioner-educator, and latterly researcher-evaluator, this gave me access to a wide variety of school environments in the UK and abroad that use screen-based media in creative ways.

The four research locations below represent a range of school settings with varying degrees of enthusiasm for media-making from their respective senior management teams. This is an important element in my study as there is a degree of risk

associated with media production in schools as discussed in previous Chapters. In all cases the participant school children are aged between nine and twelve years old and attend state primary or secondary schools in north, south and east London. I had prior experience during my Masters research (2009-2011) with some of these schools, and my thoughts and experiences over that two-year period are further developed and contested in this thesis. As Hall states:

one moves from one detotalized or deconstructed problematic to the gains of another, recognizing its limitations. That, I think, is the infinite

open-endedness of critical work, why critical work is always dialogical. It does have the capacity to establish some important conversations on some ground.

That's what I mean by the gain; it gains some ground where thinking can go on around a particular set of problems.

(Hall 1992, p.290)

And as technology beyond the school changes the ways in which we access, create and communicate understandings to ourselves and to each other, schools’ ‘particular set of problems’ regarding digital media-making is a ‘conversation’ that becomes

increasingly pressing to have and maintain, in a range of contexts, with a range of people (Peppler 2013; Sefton-Green 2013a; Burn et al. 2014, p10).

Researcher role

In the interests of reflexive commentary, I will explain my researcher role within the research settings and the sense of insider/outsider status that coloured my perception and capture of events and materials. Broadly speaking my research took the form of various intensities of Participant-Observation in two protracted non-formal after school settings over a period of a few months, and two formal curriculum-linked activities that were considerably shorter in duration, over a few days. This discrepancy in length is indicative of the respective rhythms and time allocations accorded media-related projects in non-formal and formal school environments.

Because of my prior history with some of the settings and the nature of my

practitioner-educator skill set, my role did not fit so neatly into traditional research categories, problematised further by the messy and unpredictable norms of research on school terrain (Law 2004; Le Gallais 2008, p.146; Thomson and Gunter 2011).

My stance within each fieldwork space moved along an ‘Involvement > Detachment’

continuum of participation, inspired by Bryman (2008) and illustrated in Figure 6:

Complete Participant (CP) > Participant-Observer (PO) > Observer-Participant (OP) > Observer (O)

My understanding of each of the above positions is paraphrased from Bryman (2008, p.410):

• The Complete Participant (CP) is wholly embedded in the social setting to the point of covert operation: none of the participants know the researcher’s identity. This is not applicable to my research as I openly make my position clear to participants

• The Participant-Observer (PO) is regularly involved with participants who are aware of the researcher’s role. The nature of the material collected is ambiguously sourced – neither intended to be naturally-occurring nor the sole fabrication of the researcher

Figure 6: Gold’s (1958) classification of participant observer roles (Bryman 2008, p.410)

• The Observer-Participant (OP) mainly interviews, observes and listens with little participation. The material collected will be as naturally-occurring as possible

• The Observer (O) does not interact with participants and is as unobtrusive and ‘invisible’ as possible

The elasticity of my role is unusual and within each setting I indicate where I sit on this continuum. I argue that as a function of my practitioner-educator-researcher status the findings are enriched with multi-perspectivity, which in Hall’s (1992) terms could be said to perpetuate and productively complicate ‘the conversation’.

Gathering materials

Where possible or via self-selection, some participants contributed to the creation of

‘research visuals’, reinforcing a sense of social collaborative endeavour and

reducing, though not eliminating, the potential for researcher bias. Research material took the form of:

• my own and participants’ photos/audio/video footage during film and creative media preparation and production

• field notes (and blog posts)

• participants’ texts and drawings

• loosely structured group and individual (mainly) audio interviews with teachers, practitioners, participant children and commentators in the field To give an idea of the scope of my study, a comprehensive audit of all the research data – for example numbers of photos in certain milieux, sound and moving image files, and analogue materials - is audited in Appendix (A) by study and by medium, detailing timings, locations and interviewees. As in similar studies (Scottish Screen 2006; Burn and Durran 2007; Lord et al. 2007; Selwyn et al. 2010; Burn et al. 2012;

Potter 2012; Parry 2013; Mumford et al. 2013; Cannon et al. 2014), my material is triangulated with the literature, with interview transcripts and with pertinent observations from other studies, exposing explanatory thematic patterns, so as to produce a cohesive and evocative account (Rose 2006; Jones 2006; Pink 2013).

Throughout my research I have been conscious of the tactility and materiality of media texts, thinking of them as temporary assemblages of cultural materials, ‘thing-like’ artefacts mediated through concrete objects, rather than mere virtual ephemera (Burnett et al. 2012). Reflecting on concrete textual qualities has helped me

concentrate on young people’s interactions with audiovisual texts and the making of them. Rose paraphrases Gell (1998) who writes of visual anthropology’s interest “in the practical mediatory role of visual objects in the social process” (Rose 2007, p.217); indeed it is what is done and felt during audiovisual production, the manner and circumstance of digital fabrication, that is the focus of my ethnography. It is argued that this strategy prioritises digital making practices rather than the texts themselves, as Pink counsels in her appraisal of participatory video work:

it is not simply the final film document that is important, but rather the collaborative processes by which it is produced, and it is through these processes that both new levels of engagement in thematic issues and of self awareness are achieved by participants and ethnographic knowledge is produced.

(Pink 2013, p.118) Interview technique

The tone of participant interviews was informal and their semi-structured nature made for a conversational style of enquiry more fitting with dialogic and equalising epistemologies (Scott and Usher 2010). So overwrought are educational

environments in terms of rigid systems of accountability, that to do otherwise may have compromised the integrity and credibility of the findings. I conducted

interviews with children either in the round or in ‘informal huddles’, (Cohen et al.

2007, p.375) which are altogether less intimidating, and in which they were less inclined to be searching for the right answer. Questions that required a loose ‘here and now’ personal response, often prefaced by ‘Tell me about...’ rather than closed interrogatives (eg. How, What, Why) often generated the most useful answers with children (Bazalgette 2010) - although at the beginning I was less adept at questioning in this way.

For children I worked around specific themes asking them what they enjoyed about film and media-making, what was surprising or memorable and what they felt had changed for them personally, if anything. With adults, I devised a rough interview

schedule thematically related to my theoretical framework on: Time & Space / Pedagogic Processes and Roles / Outcomes as regards their film-making experiences with children and the external ‘conditions of possibility’ related to their context (see Appendices for an example schedule of questions). To complement my fieldwork, I chose to interview a range of ‘expert’ commentators with a pedagogic perspective, who I felt reflected the discursiveness of creative media practices.