researcher inquiry
Liz Jones
And because the stories were held in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become yet new stories, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories. (Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990: 73)
My aim is to illustrate how written observations, undertaken as part of a practitioner inquiry for doctorial studies, became a means for self-scrutiny. In general, teachers who work with very young children, as I did, spend considerable amounts of time observ-ing them closely. Careful observations are the bedrock of good teaching, where current strengths and weak-nesses of the children are identified so that subse-quent learning can be mapped. Observations in this instance aim to be objective and can be seen as reflections of reality. But what are the reverberations if an alternative position is adopted regarding lan-guage and meaning? What are some of the conse-quences if a sceptical attitude is taken in relation to language and its capacity to tell us how it – including the nursery classroom – really is?
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What follows tries to illustrate the dynamic inter-play between observing events, writing about them and then subjecting these texts to practices of deconstruction. The consequences of such an engage-ment can be fruitful, where observations can become
‘enabling stories’ (Bernstein, 1983) that can be used to:
understand ourselves reflexively as persons writing from particular situations at specific times. (Richar-dson, 1993: 516)
A reflexive reading has, I think, the capacity to foreground how certain personal blind spots (Lather, 1993: 91) work at blocking the vision necessary for creative thinking. In brief, I want to enact how one story changed and became a new story . . .
Observing the mercurial world of the nursery classroom
Research for the doctorate took place in a nursery that is part of an inner-city primary school situated in Manchester, England. A central aim of the research was to provide an account of how children’s identifi-cations, as evidenced in their use of language, contrib-uted to their own evolving identity, with particular reference to gender. Specifically, this entailed collect-ing examples of interactions between the children and their teacher and the children and each other.
Choosing which interactions to focus on was clearly an issue. Within the nursery classroom the children experienced a relatively large degree of physical autonomy. They were encouraged to take some control over their own learning and as a consequence the children often made their own decisions about where they wanted to be located in the room and the type of activity that they wanted to be engaged with.
The mercurial nature of this particular context had implications for the way in which observations could be undertaken. Undertaking Masters work – which was also a piece of practitioner research – had helped to evolve my observational techniques. It was here, for example, I learned never to be without my research journal. In this, rough notes about aspects of classroom life were quickly noted, including descrip-tions of children’s play and snatches of their conver-sations. Having worked for some time with young children I had also become quite skilled in being able to work alongside one group of children while
simultaneously being able to ‘eavesdrop’ on others. At other times the children involved me in their play. As a consequence, there were opportunities to observe both as a participant and a non-participant and, because the research journal had become such a familiar feature – part of my teacher persona – its presence was readily accepted by the children. Thus I made on-the-spot observations and, at more leisurely points in the school day, added reflections to enrich and categorize the initial notes.
Clearly decisions were made about what should and should not be recorded. To imagine that such recordings could comprehensively capture everything was a nonsense. As Martin and Bateson note:
The choice of which particular aspects to measure, and the way in which this is done, should reflect explicit questions. (1986: 12–13)
My own criteria for selecting particular phenomena did not, however, rest on ‘explicit questions’. Rather, instances were selected where it seemed that the children, through their imaginary worlds, were explor-ing a range of ‘social positionexplor-ings’ (Davies, 1989).
Role-play was a rich data source. I also noted extracts of children’s conversations where they demonstrated a capacity to move between everyday, matter-of-fact talk to more wishful, imaginative musings. I was particularly attracted to moments that worked at destabilizing my own understandings and assumptions that I inevitably brought to notions such as ‘the child’
and ‘identity’. Moreover, I recorded examples that had, for a number of reasons, touched the ideological and theoretical baggage that accompanied me into the nursery.
The written observations functioned on two levels.
First, they fleetingly captured features of classroom life and, secondly, they revealed aspects of myself including particular attachments to specific value systems. Deconstructing the observations helped me to tease apart these attachments and in so doing created a necessary conceptual space where more creative ways could be considered. What follows illustrates this process.
An observation from the field (Journal entry)
Lisa and Michael are in the area where the dressing-up clothes are kept. Lisa ties a narrow
band of cloth around Michael’s head. He then does the same for her. Both children have now become karate fighters. There is no actual fighting between them. Just a lot of posturing, with arms, legs, hands and faces indicating that they are executing some form of martial arts. Michael declares that he’s
‘Leonardo’.1 Lisa states, ‘I’ll be Leonardo’s friend’.
Michael responds ‘girls can’t be your mates’. At this point I intervene in order to reason with Michael.
I try to point out to him that as he and Lisa had been ‘playing so well together’ then ‘weren’t they friends, so why couldn’t Lisa be the mate?’ Michael makes no verbal responses. He looks uncomfort-able as if he is being told off. He shifts around, avoids my eyes and looks down at his feet. Lisa looks bewildered. I make one more appeal to Michael: ‘Couldn’t Lisa be the mate?’ I move away from the children hoping that by so doing the situation will be resolved.
Ground-clearing activities
Clearly, given the position that has been articulated concerning language and meaning, the notion that the above is an unbiased account is untenable. Better perhaps to see the above story/observation more as an invention than a description (St Pierre, 1997: 368).
So, what fuelled the above account? What libidinal investment helped in its enframing (Lather, 1991: 83)?
Why did I intervene? I think my intervention was prompted because I perceived Lisa as being treated unjustly. That is, Michael was refusing Lisa an opportunity to be a mate and it was a refusal that was premised on her gender – ‘girls can’t be your mates’.
His refusal confounded me because it seemed to me to be irrational and illogical. On the one hand it appeared that Michael could befriend a girl in that they could play together. They could share their collective knowledge of a television programme with Lisa introducing headbands into their play so that both she and Michael could undertake transform-ations into karate fighters. Michael therefore appears to be accepting of Lisa when she is in the guise of a karate fighter, but nevertheless he is disbarring her from being a ‘mate’. My intervention was I think guided by a sense of wanting to right a wrong.
However, retrospectively I now perceive my action not as an intervention but as an intrusion. In part, I think my interference was fuelled by disappointment.
My reading of the children’s play was filtered through a number of adult perspectives, including a feminist
one, and as a consequence I found it wanting.
Michael’s particular reading of friendship precludes not just Lisa but all girls. There is of course a certain irony in his declaration because in the interest of reproduction girls have to be your mate. But for Michael, and indeed for a great number of men, mate is the favoured term for a same-sex friend. So what within the context of the play does ‘mate’ signify for Michael? My infringement into their play prevented opportunities occurring whereby this question might have been addressed. As it was, by truncating their narrative I managed to close a gap that had briefly been opened and which had allowed some insight into a young child’s perception of the social order.
The observation illustrates, I think, how both Michael and I are caught up in undertaking what Connell (1983) refers to as category maintenance work. Categories are used in order to impose order on the world but it is a practice that can have negative implications. They can, for example, work at narrow-ing conceptions of what is and is not acceptable. In this instance, Michael has established which groups can and cannot be your mate. Meanwhile my own investment in feminism prompts me to act in ways that are unproductive, where an over-readiness to intercede in the children’s play curtailed opportunities to fathom or appreciate why girls can be a play mate (a partner in play) but not a mate.
Tentative conclusions
In general terms, researchers who undertake observa-tions are involved in first looking at ‘the field’. Their task is then to analyse: to establish the ‘essential meaning in the raw data’ and to begin to tame the chaos by using ‘the lenses we have at our disposal at any given time’ (Ely, 1991: 140–54). These lenses are those tried and tested modes of qualitative analysis that are ‘perfectly learnable by any competent social researcher’ (Strauss, 1987: xiii) and are, in effect, filing mechanisms that work at organizing and categorizing the data (Goetz and LeCompte, 1984; Strauss, 1987) so that the researcher is better placed to stake a claim for certainty and impose absolute frames of reference.
In contrast, what is being suggested here is a shift from observation of the classroom events to inquiry into the observation itself. As such, a ‘generative’ as opposed to a reductive methodology is proposed (Lather, 1993: 673). Texts within a generative method-ology do not purport to be transparent, where explicit findings are available. Nor are they attempts to
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capture the real. Rather, they are ‘reflexive explora-tions of our practices of representation’ (Woolgar, 1988: 98). Moreover, they are attempts at struggling with those boundaries and categories that work at stipulating what it is to know and do. In all, they are textual undertakings that endeavour to dislocate mas-tery.
Notes
1. Leonardo is a cartoon character drawn from a children’s television series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The characters are highly trained in karate skills that are used to ensure that good triumphs over evil.
2. Thanks to Dr Julia Gillen of the Open University, UK for assistance in developing this Annotated Bibliography.