Policía del orden, policía de la seguridad: la calle y el barrio.

Field notes are written records of observational work, a process Geertz (1973) famously described as the inscription of social discourse. However, this process of inscription is necessarily partial; field notes do not approximate moments of complete and ‘pure’ description wherein the entire

observed world is rendered into an all-encompassing text. Rather, field notes are a form of representation (Emerson et al., 2011), or ‘montage’ (Jones et al., 2010), that reduce “the welter and confusion of the social to written words … [and] (re)constitute the world in preserved forms that can be reviewed, studied and thought about time and time again” (Emerson et al., 2011: 353).

As selective acts of representation field notes reflect particular purposes and commitments on the part of the researcher. What is written down is a priori influenced by the “other discourses and texts [that] have already shaped the researcher’s modes of seeing and representational practices” (Jones et al., 2010: 481). Thus, what is rendered in the field note is not merely a descriptive account of what the observer perceived, but a filtering of this perception through a prescribed set of possibilities embedded in the researcher’s research design, what Malinowski (1922; 1984) termed ‘foreshadowed problems’, and Blommaert and Jie (2010) call ‘patterns of expectations’ (p.29). Thus, in my classroom observations and field notes I choose to focus on how the new curriculum is implemented in terms of classroom routines and practices, whereas another researcher may well have decided to focus on teacher-talk, or homeroom teacher - ALT relations.

In writing field notes Emerson et al. (2011) emphasize writing descriptive accounts that minimize explicit theorizing and interpretation. However, I found such an implicit chronological distinction difficult to maintain. Rather, my approach involved a continual thinking through of what I was observing and selectively recording. In doing this I was adhering to Gibson and Brown’s (2009) contention that,

“Observational work is data analysis - it involves thinking through what is being observed, why it is interesting, how it is to be categorized, what its relevance is to the problems at hand, how it might be thought through in relation to other data, which aspects of it are unintelligible or confusing; how it contrasts with or supports existing ideas/propositions/data/assumptions, and so on” (p.107).

This congruent process of observation and analysis also draws upon my ‘tacit knowledge’ (Emerson et al., 2011) of elementary school teaching and my broader knowledge of English language education in Japan. For Wolfinger (2002) tacit knowledge is perhaps the most important consideration in determining how particular observations are deemed worthy of annotation. Hammersley and Atkinson describe the use of such tacit knowledge as ‘head notes’ (p.147) and commend their use in ethnographic research in order to “add detail and decontextualize recorded events and utterances” (p.147). Thus, for example, in a field note for the 6th grade class at Kiiro school on June 16th, 2011:

Today was a show class ‘sankanbi’, so discussion beforehand with ALT was for 15 minutes - normally 2. Lesson about countries and what you can do there: “This France. You can see the Eiffel

lesson before, they had great difficulty remembering and producing the target language. So, HRT had to write key sentences in mnemonic katakana on the blackboard. ユー カン シー ゼ イーフェ ル タワー (Yuu kan shii ze iiferu tawa).

(Field note: K/K/6/061611/4)

Sankanbi is a special ‘open’ day at the school when parents (and other interested observers) can attend classes and subsequently meet the homeroom teachers. They are a regular feature of elementary school education in Japan and schools usually have three to four sankanbi days in the school year. As a form of public performance there is immense pressure on the teachers to present both their teaching and the students’ learning (and classroom behaviour) in a favorable light. Teachers wear formal ‘business attire’ (what they describe as their ‘seifuku’, [uniform]) and spend considerable time preparing for the day. Hence my note on the length of time the homeroom teacher spent planning the class with the ALT. However, as the students clearly struggled to produce the expected target language from memory alone, for this particular lesson the homeroom teacher, K. sensei, wrote a katakana gloss on they blackboard as an aid for speaking practice. The unfortunate effect of using such a gloss is that it overlays Japanese phonetic representations on to English pronunciation with the result that, for example, the verb ‘see’ is pronounced like ‘she’, while the final ‘l’ sound in ‘Eiffel’ is rendered as ‘ru’, which renders the sentence as “Yuu kan shii ze iiferu tawa”.

The excerpt from my field notes does not detail this tacit knowledge, yet such ‘analytical self-consciousness’ (Wolfinger, 2002: 88) was crucial for making sense of what I observed. Thus, in writing my field notes I was not simply putting ‘happenings’ into words; I was contextualizing and interpreting what I observed using my accumulated ‘chunked mental models’ (Bloch, 1991) of socio- cultural practices in the Japanese elementary school. This results in data that were both contingent and inimitably ‘mine’ - what I observed, noted, and analyzed was inseparable from the positionality, knowledge, experience, and stance I brought to the field. A different researcher would not be able to reconstitute my methods nor achieve the same outcomes.

4.6.2 The process of writing field notes

Sanjek (1990) suggests a two-stage process in writing field notes: ‘scratch notes’ are first made while in the field. In the second stage these are expanded and developed in to more detailed field notes (p.95). Emerson et al. (2011: 15) and Hammersley and Atkinson (2007:142) recommend that field notes be written up as soon as possible after the observed action. Connolly (interviewed in Walford, 2009:124) drives home the importance of this when he reports losing “a fair bit of notes” because he couldn’t understand his shorthand when he came to write up his notes a week after his

My approach to writing field notes followed the procedure advocated by Emerson et al. (1995): during the classroom observations I would make ‘mental notes’, subsequently write abridged jottings, then fill in an observation sheet (see Appendix 2), and later the same day I would write ‘full’ field notes.

For the most part I did not write any notes in the classroom as I was wary that such actions could be misinterpreted by the teachers (or ALTs) as form of assessment or judgment. Instead, I adopted a ‘participating-in-order-to-write’ approach (Emerson et al., 1995: 17), so that if a teacher or student requested my participation in an activity I was actively able to engage. Between classes or at lunch time I would make a series of jottings or scratch notes of the significant incidents in the classes just observed and write down as close to verbatim as I could any salient comments from the teachers or ALTs. Such an approach “minimizes the level of interference and the facilitates the construction and reconstruction of the analysis” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007: 145).

Following the day’s observations, I would get in my car and drive a short distance before parking and completing an observation sheet for each of the classes I had just observed (see Figures 3 and 4). By doing this I was attempting to preserve the immediate “idiosyncratic contingent character [of observed activities] in the face of the homogenizing tendencies of retrospective recall” (Emerson et al., 1995: 13-14). Later that day I would combine my initial ‘mental notes’ with the observation sheets to write up a ‘full’ field note of that day’s observations (Figure 5). In doing this I was rendering the disparate data into a more coherent narrative, a form of ‘sense-making’ (Emerson et al., 2011) that inevitably presents and frames events in particular ways that “reflect and incorporates the sensitivities, meanings, and understandings the field researcher has gleaned from being been close to and participated in the described events” (p.9).