Existencia de Casos de Violencia de Género en el centro educativo

Heath and Street (2008) summarize ideas about positionality in the following passage:

We also enter our field site(s) open to learning. As we do so, we keep in mind the many limitations we bring as instrument. Our physical features (such as age, gender, size, and phenotype), as well as our own cultural identities and life experiences, prevent our fully participating as the “other.” (p. 34)

This statement acknowledges that the researcher as a subjective instrument will always present a partial portrayal of the research context. Descriptions of the experiences of participants are partial in that they are incomplete, and they are partial in that they represent the biases of the researcher who collects and reports them. In this dissertation I endeavored to be reflective about how my positionality influenced data collection and data analysis. In order to engage in such reflection, I continually questioned the way that my insider and outsider status impacted the lens I brought to the data.

Brayboy and Deyhle (2000), Foley (2000), Chavez (2008) and Sherif (2001) present accounts of the demands involved in negotiating insider and outsider status. As a White former science teacher of urban multilingual students, I achieved some level of insider status with Mr. H and other teachers in the school. However, in my role as ethnographer and participant-observer, I spent more time interacting with the students than with the teacher. My presence in the class as a researcher afforded me the ability to interact with the students in ways that were atypical for the classroom teacher. For example, in my attempts to understand student experiences during small group work, I sometimes participated in (i.e., by coauthoring) off-task conversations and behavior. For the most part, students in the class ignored me or interacted with me politely when I asked them questions. Only two students came to actively seek my attention and help during class.

It was common for me to visit Gu Jun Pyo and OneDirectioner’s table or group at their request to clarify information from the teacher’s lectures or from whole class

discussions. There were also times when I became more involved with helping particular lab groups during lab tasks because it was important to me to be of service to the student participants. I believe it is unethical to watch students struggling to be successful on an assignment for over an hour without intervening to help them if it is clear that they need help in order to complete the task. This being said, I attempted to minimize the extent and duration of my interactions with students during labs so that I might capture the type of social interactions that would be likely to occur without my participation in the classroom community.

My work with Latina students was influenced by the fact that I am a White European American (non-Latina) researcher who is a very unbalanced English-Spanish bilingual (English-dominant). Although I attempted to speak Spanish with the three focal participants at various times, they always spoke to me in English. My lack of local cultural and linguistic proficiency positioned me as an outsider with these students along this domain of racial and linguistic background. Because of this outsider status and my lack of proficiency in Spanish, I verified my translations and interpretations of Spanish discourse from classroom and interview recordings with native Spanish speakers or high- level bilinguals with linguistics and translation training. Despite the lack of overlap in my cultural and linguistic background and the students’ backgrounds, my interest in their lives and their struggles during class served to position me as an adult confidant for OneDirectioner and Gu Jun Pyo. I also feel that because we discussed discrimination in the school during interviews, Gu Jun Pyo and OneDirectioner were more comfortable speaking with me because they knew that I cared about their challenges. In addition, because I could answer many of their content-related questions, I believe OneDirectioner

and, in particular, Gu Jun Pyo used my presence as an additional resource to support her academic success. Despite the fact that Rose was often present for class-time

conversations that I had with OneDirectioner and Gu Jun Pyo, she did not seem interested in interacting with me beyond the ways in which the other students (regular participants) interacted with me.

The interview results described in Chapter 5 for each focal participant reveal these differing positionalities. I collected more data from OneDirectioner and Gu Jun Pyo than I was able to collect from Rose in part because OneDirectioner and Gu Jun Pyo expressed enjoyment in our interview sessions and a desire to conduct multiple interviews. In qualitative research studies, one’s relationship with participants depends on the type of study, theoretical framework and the researcher’s notions of validity and trustworthiness. Marshall and Rossman (2011) describe the replacement of notions of reliability, validity, objectivity, and generalizability from positivist research with concerns regarding the credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability of qualitative research findings. According to Marshall and Rossman (2011) the latter four criteria are achieved via the inclusion of prolonged engagement, member checks, using multiple data sources, and peer (researcher colleague) debriefing. Marshall and Rossman extend these criteria further by citing Cho and Trent’s (2006) validity chart that summarizes five different purposes for qualitative research (“truth” seeking, thick description, developmental, personal essay, praxis/social) and corresponding fundamental questions and validity criteria. Given the dual focus on description and critical analysis presented in this study, the validity criteria for both of these approaches apply to this study and they include triangulated descriptive data, accurate knowledge of daily life, member checks, critical

reflexivity of self (as researcher), and redefinition of the status quo. In addition, Gee (2011) describes the validity of discourse analyses as depending on convergence, agreement, coverage, and linguistic details. In order to achieve these efficacy criteria, I engaged in prolonged relationships with the teacher and students, I critically reflected on how my values impacted data analysis, I conducted member-checks, and I reviewed segments of data with other researchers.

3.5.1 Ethics and Reciprocity

Marshall and Rossman (2011) claim that the trustworthiness of a qualitative study depends on the level of trust built between the researcher and the participants. I built trust with the teacher by complimenting aspects of his instruction, chatting with him

informally about our experiences teaching physics, and offering my services as a

chaperone on physics field trips. In terms of reciprocity, I plan to share the results of this research with the teacher so that he can use the information for his own purposes. As mentioned above, for student participants I regularly circulated the classroom when they worked in small groups to provide assistance when needed. I reiterated that students should email me if they ever considered that I might be of service to them in the future. These relatively small acts of reciprocity served to build trust between the participants and me, and they served to ensure that students felt some positive outcome of my presence in the classroom.

It is my sincere hope that students and the teacher also gained self-awareness from participating in the study, that in turn will empower them to participate in the classroom setting in new ways or, at the very least, to develop new perspectives about

their participation. Rymes (2009) claims that the act of asking a question can often lead participants to reflect critically and perhaps modify their actions.