Entrevista etnográfica

This study is focused around one main research question which seeks to explore how beginning teachers without any previous training learn to teach during the first year of their teaching experience. There are two sub-questions involved in this main question:

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a) What is the influence of prior learning experiences on beginning teachers’ experiences of learning to teach?

b) What is the influence of the teaching context on beginning teachers’ experiences of learning to teach?

So, the study requires a research design which can best address the nature of its scope of focus, i.e. how teachers learn to teach and the different sets of influences involved while they learn to teach. The research design also needs to account for the multi-dimensionality which the study attempts to capture, i.e. the role of teachers’ previous learning experiences as well as the role of their teaching context where they currently work.

Thus, such explorations entail studying the participant teachers in their natural settings and delving into their personal experiences –past and present– trying to get inside them and understand them from within focusing on the meanings and views they use to describe their own experiences. To do this, the study adopts a naturalistic approach, i.e. studying people as they do their work and events as they happen in their natural settings (Punch, 2009). The data will be collected in the field where teachers work in order to allow ordinary events and behaviours to be studied in their everyday context.

The study also operates within a qualitative perspective to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings participants bring to them (Creswell, 2003; Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) taking into account their individual everyday experiences as well as personal lives and beliefs (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2000). Qualitative research approaches offer an important contribution to the ways in which we can understand our social world. The power of research with a qualitative nature lies in its potential to better understand aspects of the lived work and study human actors in natural settings and in the context of their ordinary, everyday world. It seeks to explore the meanings and significance of actions from the perspective of those involved. It is often described as a naturalistic approach, concerned with exploring phenomena ‘from the interior’ (Flick, 2009) and taking the perspectives and accounts of research participants as a starting point. Such an approach helps “preserve chronological flow, see precisely which events led to which consequences, and derive fruitful explanations” (Miles and Huberman,

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1994: 6). The words that the informants produce will “have a concrete, vivid, meaningful flavor that often prove far more convincing to a reader […] than pages of summarized numbers” (Miles and Huberman, 1994: 6). Qualitative data will help focus on participants’ actions and delve into reasons and meanings that these actions imply. Meaningful actions appear as informants interact with the world around them (Orlikowski & Baroudi, 1991).

From an epistemological point of view, qualitative research is largely associated with interpretivism, which claims that

“natural science methods are not appropriate for social investigation because the social world is not governed by regularities that hold law- like properties. Hence, a social researcher has to explore and understand the social world through the participants’ and their own perspectives; and explanations can only be offered at the level of meaning rather than cause” (Ormston, Barnard & Snape 2013: 24).

The present study is interpretive in nature. It seeks to understand the participants’ lived experiences with a concern with ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions rather than ‘how many’. With such an interpretive focus, the study aims at penetrating deep into people’s actions, personal lives and social world in a way that more quantitative methods do not. Although quantitative approaches are able to explain phenomena and provide valuable information and insights in certain kinds of research, “they are not designed to explore the complexities and conundrums of the immensely complicated social world that we inhibit” (Richards, 2003: 8) in which case a qualitative approach offers the best source of illumination. Achieving a better and deeper understanding of ‘practice’ requires researchers’ immersion resulting from actually being there in the fieldwork, and thus more qualitative designs are needed for this kind of research. Eisner (2001: 137) puts it this way:

… scholars have become attracted to the idea of getting close to practice, to getting a first hand-sense of what actually goes on in classrooms, schools, hospitals and communities. That kind of knowledge takes time. The one-shot commando raid as a way to get the data and get out no longer seems attractive. You need to be there. A clean research design with tight experimental controls might be right for some kinds of research, but not for all kinds.

In addition, a qualitative approach is “a person-centred enterprise and therefore particularly appropriate to our work in the field of language teaching” (Richards,

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2003: 9). Quantitative approaches cannot fully describe the complexities involved in this field, as Peshkin (1993: 27) notes: “most of what we study is truly complex, relating to people, events, and situations characterized by more variables than anyone can manage to identify, see in a relationship, or operationalize.” Teachers’ work operates in a professional context that is loosely predictable, which is why a different sort of investigative approach is needed in language teaching research, one that seeks to understand the patterns and purpose in teachers’ behaviour and provide insights that enrich our understanding.

Qualitative investigation depends on engagement with the lived world, and the place of the researcher in the research process itself is something that needs to be addressed. Based on the notion of ‘researcher engagement’ in research, the present study derives elements from ethnography. Ethnography fits well into the description of qualitative research outlined above. It seeks to describe and understand the behaviour of a particular social group, and to do this, researchers try to see things from the perspective of members of the group. This requires extended exposure to the field (Richards, 2003). Adopting such a perspective enables the researcher to move from outsider to insider status, although “the aim is not to become a complete insider because this would mean taking for granted the sorts of beliefs, attitudes and routines that the researcher needs to remain detached from in order to observe and describe” (Richards, 2003: 14-15). In this study, an ethnographic perspective offers insights into the learning to teach experiences, especially as a means of understanding the professional world of teachers and how they perceive their own experiences in the context of their own workplaces.

A key concept related to ethnography is emic stance, that is sometimes used to refer to an insider’s perspective on events, as opposed to etic that describes an outsider’s view. The literature of naturalistic inquiry talks of the importance of adopting an emic insider stance if a researcher wants to understand individuals and behaviour, rather than an etic outsider one. Morris et al. (1999) explain that

emic researchers often express preference to use observation as a major data

collection tool and immerse themselves in the setting while developing relationships with the informants. Questionnaires, therefore, are criticised because

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they have an etic rather than emic perspective on human behaviour, in that they do not provide individuals with opportunities to show their own ideas or beliefs, as the researchers' ideas are provided instead (Munby, 1984). The emic perspective is not simply a matter of choosing the data collection method, nor is it a choice to be made only at the data collection phase in the fieldwork, but rather, it is actually an issue to be taken into account in the data analysis, especially with reference to making sense of the transcribed texts and categorising themes based on the meanings brought by the informants. Drawing on Pike's (1967) work, Tashakkori & Teddlie (2003: 522) comment that "Etic refers to a trained observer's analysis of ‘raw’ data, whereas emic refers to how those data are interpreted by an ‘insider’ to the system or organization.