The research was founded on the belief that the uniqueness of every teacher made him or her a valuable potential contributor to the research and theory. In this respect, all teachers were potential participants. However, to ensure the generated theory was relevant to as wide a population as possible within the limited scope of the research, it was deemed desirable, when the opportunity arose, to select for diversity with respect to teacher gender, school decile ratings10 and ethnicity of students.
Although it was originally thought that theoretical sampling would be a maJor component of participant selection, it ended up playing only a very minor part. This was because, after beginning to code the first and second teachers' interview transcripts, it was decided to look at several data sets at the same time and to code the commonalities, as well as look at them individually to code unique instances. All 9 participant teachers were interviewed and the transcripts completed before intensive coding began. The preliminary analysis, too, resulted in delayed commencement of analysis. Thus, teachers were purposefully selected using criteria that were rationalised prior to analysis rather than as suggested by on-going analysis.
10 Every school's decile rating is calculated by the Ministry of Education, primarily for funding purposes. The variables used in the calculations render the decile rating a useful categorisation of the socio
economic rating of the area a school serves. The decile rating scale ranges between 1 and 1 0, I representing the lowest socio-economic rating.
Doctoral Thesis Chapter 5 Original Impetus, Fieldwork
Because the researcher's understandings of spirituality were expected to develop during the course of the research and the researcher wanted to remain open to learning from the research, she was reluctant at the outset to define what was spiritual and what was not, and to permit such premature definitions to influence her selection of participants. It was sufficient to know that teachers were chosen for the study because they had impressed someone as being a "good" teacher and therefore, it was argued, they had at least the potential to be spiritually nurturing.
Selection of teachers was rationalised on the basis of two purposes pertaining to quality of the generated theory and relevance of the generated theory, respectively:
to maximise the likelihood of the field-data capturing information about teachers doing a good job of bringing students to learning; and
to maximise the relevance of the generated theory to teachers in diverse types of state schooling situations.
In order to serve the first purpose, teachers were selected who had been a 'good teacher' to somebody. It was reasoned that a teacher whom a contact considered a good teacher was almost certainly capable of positively affecting students' learning, even though contacts' reasons for their recommendations varied. The contacts' descriptions of teachers' merits included: admirable personal qualities; successful actioning of programmes of learning, e.g., developing the class as a community of enquiry (i.e., teaching philosophy); notable ability to engage with children; notable ability to have children learn in a particular topic or subject area; and a particularly child-centred philosophy or approach towards teaching.
Although initially considered, in the end teachers from schools that espoused a particular religious philosophy were avoided. This was because, as preliminary analysis progressed, it was realised that it would be problematic distinguishing between inherent concepts of the emerging theory and those that were direct products of the schools' declared philosophy. The generated theory was expected to fit these schools, however,
Doctoral Thesis Chapter 5 Original Impetus, Fieldwork
and the information from them might be incorporated as data at a later stage, to refine the theory via constant comparison.
In order to serve the second purpose, teachers of different aged students and in different levels of the school were selected from schools in diverse geographical locations within New Zealand. A range of decile ratings was considered desirable, as was a range of student ethnicities. Both males and females were present in the participant teacher group.
Sometimes the researcher's impression of a targeted teacher did not correspond with the contact's description, and the original recommendation seemed unfounded to the researcher. Once approached, however, no teacher who wanted to participate in the research was refused. This practice was justified on ethical grounds, even though it could be argued that it contradicted the principle of selectivity. From the researcher's journal at the time: "Who was I to tell the teacher she was not suitable for my research on nurturing spirituality? To tell her, after courting her interest in the research, that she was not wanted as a participant was like saying I thought she was not sufficiently spiritually nurturing to warrant studying. That would have gone against all my personal principles of relating to others and valuing every teacher's unique potential contribution." It was reasoned that selective practices had been employed at the point of targeting teachers to court, and that inclusivity was an equally important principle because it contributed to the richness of the theory.
The resultant group of participant teachers was not intended to be representative of all teachers, but it was believed to have the potential to contribute to developing understandings of spiritually nurturing teaching by virtue of the fact that each teacher in the group had had success at bringing one or more students to some sort of notable learning.
Doctoral Thesis Chapter 5 Original impetus, Fieldwork