Monumento Nacional Archipiélago de Solentiname

and other school staff in the period from January to May 2016 (see Appendix 8 for a sample of my fieldwork log entries during this period). Through interviews I sought information which could not be gathered through observations alone (for example, students’ higher education plans, as discussed further below and detailed in Appendix 13). These interviews also enabled a verification of my emerging analysis based on my observations of the field (Agar, 2011). Most of these interviews were conducted in English. However, some interviewees including students, lower cadre school staff and mothers conversed in Tamil. With the interviewees’ consent, I recorded interviews directly on a Dictaphone, and later had the English interviews transcribed. I translated the Tamil interviews myself.

With regard to students, my initial plan was to interview only around 15. I had

shortlisted students, so as to represent the different cliques in the class and include those students whose mothers I was interviewing. But once I started conducting student interviews, an expectation was generated among the first year IBDP group that I would interview all of them. Many approached me and as a result my interview sample increased to 31 students. I interviewed students in a quiet cabin in the library or in a vacant classroom. Many students wanted to be interviewed along with their friends, and often two or three students (always from the same gender!) would jointly answer my questions. In these interviews, there were some standard questions which I ran through with all the interviewees (see Appendix 13). I asked the interviewees to describe

themselves, discuss their educational plans after finishing school and their occupational aspirations. I also asked them to describe their typical on weekdays and weekends. The last question served to provide for the information which I had originally sought from student journals (see below). In addition to these questions, I also used the interview opportunity to broach specific issues with individual students. For instance, I discussed an incident where some students had consumed alcohol in the school (which had occurred before my fieldwork) with the girls involved (see Chapters 5 and 6). Another example is my discussion with the rowdy26 _{boys about their conduct in the school (see}

Chapter 5). As a result, the interviews varied somewhat in terms of the questions I asked (Appendix 14 provides an excerpt from a student interview).

I also asked students to complete two questionnaires. The first of these (see Appendix 10), which I administered in October 2015 aimed at generating a demographic profile of the IBDP group, understanding their schooling histories, how many were boarders/day scholars, mapping their subject choices and their educational and occupational

aspirations. Of the 45 IBDP students, 44 returned the questionnaire. I administered the second questionnaire in April 2016 (see Appendix 11). I included questions on family income, religion and caste, and students’ self-identification in terms of social class. I also sought answers to questions which had emerged during fieldwork relating to students’ subject preferences, their individual school timetables and about the relative role of English versus mother tongue in their lives. I asked students to fill this

questionnaire anonymously, and made it clear they could leave out questions they did not wish to answer. Only 32 students returned this questionnaire, and of these, only 14 students provided information on their caste and eight on family income (24 students said they did not know their family income). Further as I discuss later in the section below, while I was giving out the questionnaire, a brief, tensed conversation on caste broke out, reinforcing students’ hesitation to provide information on this.

In October 2015, I had sought student volunteers to maintain a daily/weekly diary, where they would record routine as well as interesting aspects about their daily lives (see Appendix 12). Although 15 students showed enthusiasm initially, eventually none of them kept a journal. I therefore incorporated some of these questions in the student interview schedule.

I also conducted 21 interviews with IBDP teachers and other staff members of the school, including four senior administrative staff. I asked the teachers questions related to their educational backgrounds and prior experiences, their understanding of the IBDP curriculum, especially in relation to their own subject and about the group of students who constituted the primary participants of my study. To the four senior administrative staff, I asked additional questions related to the organisational structure of the school, teacher recruitment and training practices, the school’s vision and policies related to discipline and surveillance and the fee structure of the school. The four lower cadre school staff I interviewed were – one laboratory assistant, one cleaner, the school kitchen in-charge, and a staff member whose duty was to oversee purchases. The

questions I asked in these interviewees with the school staff are presented in Appendix 15.

Getting the school’s permission to meet parents proved to be a hurdle for reasons which remain opaque to me even today. While I was never once questioned as I went about my daily routine of school observations, whenever I made a formal request to meet parents, the school administration turned me down without offering any explanation. After several weeks of such efforts, an opportunity for direct contact with parents arose when a Parents Teachers meeting (PTM) was scheduled in January 2016. It was to be held in a large hall, with each teacher being allotted a table so that parents could privately talk to him/her about their child. Taking cue from this arrangement, I arranged a table for myself and displayed a poster stating that I was a doctoral scholar at University of Sussex. On the advice of a senior teacher, I wore trousers and a formal shirt which I was told would impress parents. I had already requested individual students to ask their parents to meet me. During the PTM, I distributed a letter, requesting parents for a personal meeting (see Appendix 16). Most parents were encouraging, and many agreed to meet me. Using ‘native wit’ (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007, p. 41) to gain access to parents, I was now easily able to conduct interviews with mothers. The school posed no further problems, thus strengthening my suspicion that their only purpose in

stonewalling me was to assert authority and this too was only half-hearted.

Over the next four months, I interviewed 11 mothers in their homes and offices. In these open-ended interviews, I sought to understand the students’ family backgrounds, the region to which they belonged, the educational and occupational trajectories of students’ parents and grandparents and parents’ aspirations for their son/daughter. I also sought to understand why the families had chosen to send their children to KI, and how

parents/family members supported their child’s education on an everyday basis. (see Appendix 17 for the interview schedule I used). I interviewed four mothers a second time in the end of April. This time I directly sought their opinions on specific issues such as gender and caste. I also asked them about marriage practices in their respective communities and whether they considered themselves as middle class. That I could interview only mothers, points towards the dominant norms around gender in the region and my complicity with these. Even in cases where I met fathers in Parents Teachers Meeting (PTM), they directed me to their wives. Having managed access to parents

after some difficulty, I did not want to take any chances, and therefore did not explicitly ask to meet fathers either.

In selecting my sample for interviewing, I ensured that there were mothers of both boys and girls and tried to include mothers from two distinct groups of the school clientele, those who had lived abroad for several years, some of whom had a foreign nationality, and ‘local’ parents, typically from families with established local businesses.

Towards the end of April, as initially promised, I made a presentation based on my initial analysis to a gathering of students and teachers. I presented my work in clear terms, but I also steered clear of controversial topics. My presentation notwithstanding, barring a few teachers and students, I am not sure that I could convey what my work was all about. This was partly because the idea of research in Social Sciences was as distant to them as it was to a lady I met in Chennai, who bluntly opined that research happens only in science laboratories.

To recapitulate, my data collection consisted of observations (mostly in the period from September to December 2015), interviews (in the period from January to May 2016) and questionnaires. This information is summarily presented in the table below.

Table 4.1: Summary of fieldwork processes

Time Period Nature of fieldwork Further details August 2015 -

first week

Reconnaissance visit to school

August 2015 to April 2016

Classroom and school

observations and hanging around with students and teachers

Over 100 hours of recorded observations, with over 70 hours of observations on classroom teaching, (see Appendices 6,7 and 9)

October 2015 Student Questionnaire 1 See Appendix 10; 44 responses (98 % response rate)

October 2015 Students were asked to keep a weekly journal

See Appendix 12

End January to End April 2016

Interviews with mothers 11 mothers were interviewed; I interviewed 4 of them again; duration ranging from 11 minutes to 45 minutes (see Appendices 16 and 17)

February to May 2016

Interviews with teachers and other school staff

13 teachers, 4 administrative staff, and 4 non-teaching staff were interviewed; duration ranging from over a few minutes to 45 minutes

(see Appendix 15) February to

May 2016

Interviews with students 17 boys and 14 girls were interviewed; durations ranging from twelve minutes to over an hour (see Appendices 13 and 14) End January –

early February

Educational excursion with students

4-day trip with IBDP students and teachers

End April Student Questionnaire 2 See Appendix 11; 32 responses/71 % response rate