Hacia una educación patrimonial basada en la diversidad.

The interviews I conducted were semi-structured. I developed an interview guide that contained an opening question designed to invite the participant to speak24_{, and a}

number of key themes that I wanted to explore at some stage during the interview. I wanted to use the interview as an opportunity to elicit two types of data. The first of these was narrative, or stories, about different temporal phases of experience: in particular, study life, returning home, and life after study. Here I was strongly influenced by the case narrative researchers make for the value of this type of data. Narrative researchers argue that eliciting storytelling is particularly important because stories form such a central part of the process of interpreting how our experiences fit into larger social processes (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990:2; Fraser, 2004:180). As Fraser (2004) argues:

Part of being human involves narrating stories to ourselves and to others. Located in imaginary worlds, as well as those that are materially based, human beings use narratives to express emotions and convey beliefs about how ‘things should be’. Through the retelling of stories, they represent their identities and societies. Storytelling is such an important activity because narratives help people to organize their experiences into meaningful episodes that call upon cultural modes of reasoning and representation. (Fraser, 2004:180)

Narrative researchers position ‘storytelling’ in opposition to the traditional ‘question and answer’ model of interview research (Elliot, 2005:21; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995:28), that they argue encourages participants to abstract and ‘intellectualise’ their experiences in a way that captures ‘rational intention’ but obfuscates the underlying affective dimensions

of experience that motivate behaviour (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000:35). They suggest that eliciting storytelling is a much better technique for accessing all the dimensions of experience, including those that “contain significances beyond the teller’s intentions” (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000:37).

As well as constituting a useful tool for capturing more naturalistic, holistic data, a narrative approach is also useful because it produces the sort of data that engages readers. This is a really important consideration within research that involves a political commitment to producing development knowledge that makes an impact. Political ecologist Paul Robbins (2004) argues that traditional academic writing around environment and development issues has tended to be dry and uninspiring, and that this has contributed to the comparatively limited reach of this type of work:

Political ecologists don't write very well. For some reason, people at home in colonial forest archives or East African Millet fields can't seem to master simple phrasing and good anecdotes, nor convey to a broader audience the importance of the problems that they take so seriously. The implication of this failing is that political ecologists are not widely read, and when they are read, they are not well understood. (Robbins, 2004:136)

While the type of analytical writing common in academic books and journals can be informative, it can also be rather boring. Narayan contends that this is because we are encouraged to “read these articles with our minds more than our hearts, exhorting ideas and references from their pages” (Narayan, 2003:298). Narrative on the other hand can be “bewitching” (Abu-Lughod, 1993:31), making academic writing much more compelling and accessible, and, therefore, providing greater incentive for readers to open themselves up to new and different ways of seeing the world. As Narayan (2003:298) argues, stories can inspire us to “forget we are judgemental professionals, so swept along are we in the evocative flow of other people’s experiences.”

I felt, however, that there were also some limitations associated with taking a narrative approach to my research topic. Narrative researchers often take a very detailed line by line approach to analysing data, poring over the discursive significance of every word used (Fraser, 2004). In this way, narrative analysis can be seen as part of the broader linguistic tradition which “treats text as an object of analysis itself” as opposed to a more traditional qualitative approach “which treats text as a window into human experience” (Ryan & Bernard, 2003:259). I thought that the former approach was likely to be a little

unfair to the participants within this study, whose choice of vocabulary was on some levels shaped not only by their intentions/emotions/experiences, but by the fact that English is their second language. Thus, while I have attempted to incorporate some of the conventions of narrative research - particularly the need to pay attention to the ways that the interviewer’s communication style can act as a “facilitating catalyst” to story- making within an interview (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000:36) - I have also chosen to stick with some of the conventions of a broader ‘thematic’ rather than ‘discursive’ approach to interviewing and data analysis.

Thus, I not only sought to elicit stories, but I also asked some direct questions about participants ‘perceptions’ of certain aspects of their experience, where they had not covered these issues in their narratives. In particular, I sought reflection on the ‘impact’ of the experience on several key areas of their lives, including on their view of self, relationships, and work life. I also asked participants to comment on what they saw as the broader impact of these types of scholarships on women’s lives, and on ‘development’. In practice, because the New Zealand participants were in the midst of their study experience (although they had all previously studied abroad, and thus, experienced ‘return’), their responses tended to focus more on ‘study life’ than the other participants. Because these participants had also all had more than one scholarship experience, they were also more likely to talk in broader terms about the impact of overseas education on their life choices/outlook, rather than providing specific examples of outcomes associated with one scholarship experience, in particular.

The interviews were informal and ‘dialogical’. The choice to use a conversational interview style is in keeping with the feminist aversion to ‘mining’ participants, in favour of a more egalitarian commitment to knowledge exchange and mutual vulnerability in an interview setting (Cook, 1993; Lather, 1988, 1991, 1992; Oakley, 1981). As Tierney (2003) argues, it is only when we are willing to share our own stories that we are able to break down the power differential between ourselves and our participants that inhibits their willingness to share important stories about their lives. In taking this risk, he suggests, our “vulnerability is not a position of weakness, but one from which to attempt change and social fellowship” (Tierney, 2003:315).