PLANIFICACIÓN DE CALIDAD

The process of analysis and interpretation in this project was on-going, and very much woven through the continuation of teaching and researching days in 2001 and 2002 as I continued to work fulltime and study. It was also personal because autoethnography acknowledges that ‘your own self-interest, your history and biography, and all that you bring to the project from your own experience plays a crucial role in the analysis and interpretations you make’ (Bochner & Rushing, 2002, p.155). Analysis and interpretative strategies can be diverse, creative and multi-faceted in autoethnographic research.

I use the terms ‘analysis’ and ‘interpretation’ to denote different aspects of my critical thinking during this project. For me, analysis involved identifying emergent themes or ‘patterns’ and then giving names to these different textures. Flannery (2001), when expanding on the concept of quilting as an apt metaphor for qualitative research methods, noted that ‘touch’ is another way of understanding what the qualitative researcher does when working with raw data. Flannery (2001) explained that ‘touch is important in quilting: the feel of the fabric, of the needle piercing the layers of material, of the texture of a quilted surface’ (p.63). For me, analysis was about sorting out the fabric of my research. I followed Lather’s (1997) method of ‘splitting texts’, which involves taking data apart and identifying different fragments (p.251). This meant literally dividing up the teaching journal into sections, collating the similarities and noting the differences.

Interpretation occurred as data were reshaped into the multiple research texts that comprise the following sections – ten ‘teaching stories’, five fictional ‘conversations’ between teachers, and then what I have called ‘poetic research realisations’. For example, interpretation involved the transformation of the collated similar data into the teaching stories.

The interviews I conducted with Eleanor, William and Angela were used to help me analyse the teaching journal, by highlighting particular themes and issues that

stood out to them which were similar or different to what I had identified as the predominant themes in the research literature on beginning teaching. For example, all three teachers commented on the support that White School offered me as a beginning teacher. Support became an issue that I explored in the story ‘Swimming, Not Sinking’, which is in the chapter Thursday. I found it hard to acknowledge feeling tired and run-down at the end of my first year, but these critical conversations enabled me to broaden my perspective. Therefore they impacted on how I represented the issues of teaching context and support structures in later chapters.

Analysis of data was constant and comparative. In the same way as Kuzmic (1994) described I went through processes which involved:

…simultaneous comparison of emerging conceptual categories with data from interviews and observations. Thus, as data are recorded and classified, they are also compared across categories… Throughout the study this process allowed for the generation, refinement, and clarification of conceptual categories to emerge from the data itself (Kuzmic, 1994, p.18).

During 2001 I experienced a narrowing of my field of reference and a refining of my research focus. Patterns emerged through an analysis of the data, and became explicit by immersed reflection on the journal, interview transcripts and the literature. The beginning teaching journey, for me and others, seemed to have a shape not unlike the days of the week. A week has many beginnings, middles, and endings - ordered and ongoing, yet also multiple and intricate.

In 2002/2003 I began sorting the data based on the categories that had become apparent using inductive analysis. These categories were the familiar characters, images, and phrases that I found in the multiple data as I had spread the raw data around me. Janesick (2000) defined inductive analysis:

The qualitative researcher uses inductive analysis, which means that categories, themes and patterns come from the data. The categories that emerge from field notes, documents and interviews are not imposed prior to data collection (p.389).

The categories emerged in the pieces of paper I spread around me as I made my researcher mess; my initial reactions, the things I marveled at, the people, places, situations that caused me anxiety, the students I mused over, the tricks that worked for me, the days I felt I wasn’t coping, the moments of realisation where I felt that I had learned something about teaching, about myself, and about my self as a teacher. I formalized these themes and gave them names, thereby having distinct concepts that I identified in first the teaching journal, and then the interviews with my critical readers. The names given were 1) motivation for entering teaching 2) initial response to the reality of teaching 3) first experiences

of fulltime teaching 4) my context and its particularities 5) students I remembered, wondered, focused on 6) problems and challenges 7) coping strategies I learned and developed 8) workplace issues and teacher socialization 9) teacher identity

and my sense of becoming a professional 10) professional learning and my metacognition – my realisations. I was able to return to the literature, and formalise my connections there, highlighting the words of other researchers in the way I had highlighted my own. These categories became my themes of my quilted research.

The conversations with my critical readers were an important form of comparative analysis as they enabled me to frame my experiences in the teaching journal in relation to the experiences of the three other teachers. For example, Eleanor began teaching in 2000, as I did. We had very different teaching contexts. She began in a small, parent-controlled Christian school and was the only Drama teacher in the school. I was at a large school governed by a board, and was the third of three Drama teachers. As already noted, sharing stories of teaching can create narrative- interlapping (Norris, McCammon, & Miller, 2000). While reading my teaching journal encouraged my critical readers to share their own beginning teaching stories, listening to their stories in these interviews made me once again reflect on

my first year and remember the stories I had recorded. Yet this time, I was re- telling my stories from a different time period (one or two years later) and with a richer perspective that now included the perspectives of my critical readers. The process of storytelling became cyclical - from my story, to theirs, and back to mine.

This stage created a sense of a research team, where critical readers were able to assist me to reexamine my first year of teaching, and to see the experiences with the fresh perspective which was required for analysis and interpretation. Critical friends can be important in giving researchers a ‘reality check’ (Schuck & Segal, 2002). Their feedback and insights helped me see my first year of teaching anew. They pointed out things that I had noticed, but also highlighted other issues that I had not considered. The process of analysing and interpreting the data began as a team approach.

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