The research design is organised according to two components that talk to five sources of data that have been collected (refer to Figure 1, below). Component one responds to the first main research question, and the first three sub-questions that follow. Ian Parker’s (1992) ten criteria for identifying discourse, as a broad framework, along with Davies and Harré’s (1990) positioning analysis are used to answer these particular questions. Component two responds to the second main research question and the last two sub-questions that follow. As aforementioned, Davies and Harré’s (1990) positioning analysis, along with Hollway and Jefferson’s (2000) psychosocial psychoanalytic approach are used to answer these questions.
Figure 1
Sub-questions
(i) What discourses concerning gender are found in the Life Orientation sexuality education programmes? __________________________________________ (ii) What discourses concerning gender are found in the contemporary music that learners in the school prefer listening to?
__________________________________________ (iii) How do the discourses concerning gender, found in the Life Orientation sexuality education programmes and contemporary music
that learners prefer listening to, dovetail or diverge? __________________________________________ (iv) What interactive and reflexive gendered positionings do learners and educators invoke when talking about Life Orientation sexuality education and popular music?
___________________________________________ (v) What are learners’ and educators’
conscious and unconscious investments in the gendered positionings they invoke in their talk?
Data Collection
Life Orientation manuals Observations
_____________________ Music videos & lyrics
_____________________ Observations
Life Orientation manuals Music videos and lyrics _____________________ Interviews with learners Interviews with educators
_____________________ Interviews with educators Interviews with learners
Data Analysis
Component 1 Discourse analysis using Parker’s work and positioning theory
_________________ Component 2 Positioning theory and psychosocial theory i.e., Hollway and Jefferson’s theory on thedefended subject
4.1) Schools and Learners
This study forms part of a broader research project that investigated Life Orientation sexuality programmes in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape. All five of the data collection sources were generated within two schools in the Eastern Cape province. Of the nine provinces in South Africa, the Eastern Cape is one of the largest, yet also one of poorest. The province faces educational challenges with regard to inadequate infrastructure conducive for teaching and learning. Large numbers of learners are accommodated, and teachers lack proper training. Due to these reasons, the Eastern Cape’s educational performance is ranked as one of the lowest in South Africa (Bantwini, 2010). With this in mind, the first of the two schools that formed part of the study was Rylands West. The school integrates both primary and secondary phases of learning and is situated in a small rural and farming community forty kilometres away from the closest town. The school building itself is very old, rundown, and not very big, which reflects in the learner population that averages around 150 learners
every year. The majority of the learners come from impoverished backgrounds and most, if not all, are black and isiXhosa-speaking. The school also has a very strong Christian culture, with learners constantly encouraged to abstain from sex. Sexuality education was formally introduced into the school’s curriculum through the Life Orientation learning area around 2002.
The second school, Clarins Hill High is situated in a working class area within a town in the Eastern Cape. Historically, under apartheid the school was developed for coloured learners, but has since changed post 1994, with the learner population currently comprised of coloured and black learners. Learners who attend this school come from working- to middle-class homes. Clarins Hill High used to teach predominantly in Afrikaans, but switched to teaching in English since the mid-1990s, and has classes devoted to teaching all subjects in both languages. The school is much bigger than Rylands West Combined School, with an average of over 1000 learners in attendance every year. The school’s infrastructure is old and appears to be rundown. A major problem that Clarins Hill High faces is growing numbers of teenage pregnancy each year despite the introduction of formal sexuality education offered through the Life Orientation programme post 2002.
4.2) Component 1
In this section, I outline the data collection process and data analysis involved in answering the first three sub-questions; (see Figure 1) namely, (i) what discourses concerning gender are found in the Life Orientation sexuality education programmes? (ii) What discourses concerning gender are found in the contemporary music that the learners in the school prefer listening to? (iii) How do the discourses concerning gender, found in the Life Orientation sexuality education programmes and contemporary music that learners prefer listening to, dovetail or diverge? In this regard, there are three sources of data that were collected. These include (i) the Life Orientation sexuality education manuals and materials, (ii) the lyrical content and music videos of songs to which learners prefer to listen; and (iii) classroom observations. These three data sources were subject to Parker’s (1992) ten criteria for identifying discourse as well as a positioning analysis.
4.2.1) Data collection for component 1
(i) Life Orientation sexuality education manuals and materials
In order to gain access to Life Orientation sexuality education manuals and materials, I consulted with two educators, one from each of the schools, who are responsible for teaching Life Orientation at Grade 10 level, in order to gain a sense of the kind of resources they utilise in order to teach the
sexuality education component of Life Orientation at their respective schools. Each of them mentioned that they relied on one primary source to teach Grade 10 learners sexuality education. The educator from Clarins Hill High relied on Oxford Successful Life Orientation, (2011) whilst the educator from Rylands West School used Shuters Top Class Life Orientation (2011) as the base for their teaching material. Both sources are referred to as a ‘Learners Book’ and are approved by the Department of Education as prescribed textbooks for Grade 10 Life Orientation classes. It is also worth noting that each textbook contains fewer than two hundred pages of information and about twenty to thirty of these pages are devoted to sex and sexuality education. In line with my research questions, only the sections on sex and sexuality formed part of the data collection. As mentioned earlier on, this research locates the Life Orientation sexuality education manuals and materials within other discursive practices, which are taken up in formal and informal ways, such as the classroom interactions and the interviews, with educators and learners.
(ii) Lyrical content and music videos
For the lyrical content and music video component of my data collection, I generated a list of the music that Grade 10 learners at the two schools preferred listening to by conducting a survey that I developed (see Appendix A). The survey took the form of a one-page self-administered questionnaire, with instructions at the top of the page asking learners to list their top ten current favourite songs which they had heard on the radio, through their cellphone, watched on TV or the internet. I met with the Life Orientation educators of both schools in order to discuss how the survey would be administered in such a way that did not impact on teaching. At Clarins Hill High, the Life Orientation educator was helpful and kindly suggested that I leave the questionnaires with her, which she distributed to all her Grade 10 educator colleagues who would in turn hand them out in their classes. She was instrumental in carrying out this task, collecting all the completed questionnaires as quickly as possible and then returning them to me. In terms of administration, the questionnaires required very little instruction as they were self-administered. At Rylands West School, however, I was involved in the administration of the questionnaires as there was only one class of Grade 10 learners with eight learners in total. This required a lot less logistics than would have been needed on my part at Clarins Hill High if the educator had not kindly assisted. The Life Orientation educator at Rylands West School kindly made available a date and time for me to administer the questionnaires. Once all the questionnaires (in the region of just over 300) had been collected from both schools I went through them to look for the songs most commonly cited by learners, and from this I selected the top three ones. The songs were: Climax by Usher; ‘Beez in the Trap’ by Nicki Minaj; and ‘Where have you
(iii) Classroom observations
In order to organise the classroom observations aspect of my data collection, I met with the Life Orientation educators from both schools to learn about which day/s and at which time/s they teach the sexuality education component of the curriculum, so that I could observe those lessons. The educators drew my attention to an outline of the Life Orientation curriculum, in which it is stipulated that the sexuality education component would be taught during the third term. However, there were areas related to sexuality education such as gender and gendered power relations that were taught during the first term. As a salient area related to my research, I asked the educators if I could also observe these lessons, in addition to the ones I would observe during term three. In speaking with the educators during this time, I emphasised that the point was not to evaluate their teaching, but rather to look at the content of what is taught and how the learners related to this and the educator. This was necessary in terms of reducing educators’ performance-based anxiety, related to feeling evaluated by someone from an institution of higher education. I also explained that the observations would not be video- or audio- recorded and nor would I participate in the lesson. Rather, I would find a seat at the back of the classroom and make extensive notes during the lesson. Lastly, I also asked them to alert the class beforehand that I would observe them, as a way of gaining their permission and to gauge if any learners did not feel comfortable with the process, which was not the case in the end.
The observations that I did were used to look at how the dominant gendered discourses, and gendered power relations, found in the Life Orientation sexuality education manuals, were reproduced in the classroom between the educator and learners and amongst the learners themselves. Simpson and Tuson (2003) argue that the act of observing occurs from the perspective of the researcher’s subjective world: it includes past experiences of situations related to the current one, and conceptual frameworks with which the researcher is familiar in order to interpret the situation. This view has implications for the observational technique the researcher uses, which influences what kind of information is collected, how it is collected, what it demonstrates and how it is understood by the researcher (Angrosino, 2005; Anderson & Burns, 1989; Mertens, 2005; Parker, 2005; Stocking, 1983; Walford, 2001). Conceptualising, then, the role of the researcher and/or observer within the observed context becomes important. Accordingly, I wanted to observe the behaviour of educators and learners as they occur ‘naturally’ in the classroom, but I was simultaneously aware of my relation to them, as a stranger, and perhaps someone that they may like to try and impress, and how it might influence their behaviour. Thus, the classroom interactions that I observed might not have been a truly authentic representation of what usually occurs there.
In relation to this, Spradley (1980) identifies five types of participation that characterise the extent to which the observer engages with the observed. These include non-participation, passive, moderate, active and complete participation. My participation was passive in that I was present in the classroom but I did not interact with the educators and learners. Furthermore, Adler and Adler (1994) argue that, as an observer, the researcher occupies membership roles where they exist as an outsider to, but also inside, the observed group. They identify three common roles in relation to this: (1) a peripheral member researcher; (2) an active member researcher; and (3) a complete member researcher. I adopted the role of the peripheral member in that I observed and interacted closely enough with educators and learners to establish an insider’s perspective but without participating in the actual classroom activities. This underscores that there can be no pure form of observation as the mere presence and the subjectivity of the researcher will influence what is observed, as aforementioned. Later on in this chapter, I talk to my reflexivity as the researcher, as a way of thinking further about the role that I played in, and thus the influence that I had, on the production of the data collection.
In accordance with the approach taken of the peripheral role as the observational researcher, I used an open-ended qualitative observational technique in order to record the classroom activities. This entailed a process of note-taking, at length, documenting what was happening from the beginning to the end of the lesson. This echoes what Simpson and Tuson (2003) refer to as a ‘descriptive’ and ‘narrative’ recording of what is happening in the classroom in that the point is to record as much detail as possible. There were, however, certain parameters that I established which allowed me to focus on specific activities occurring in the classroom. These parameters included; (1) the content of what is taught; (2) the pedagogical approach used; (3) interactions in the classroom; (4) materials used; (5) spatial arrangements; and (6) debriefing with the educator and personal reflections after the lesson. For each of these parameters, I focused on the extent to which constructions of gender and gendered power relations were taken up in the content of the lesson, by examining the educators’ approach to teaching, interactions between male and female learners and how they were organised spatially in the classroom.
4.2.2) Data analysis for component 1
I conducted the first component of the data analysis, as aforementioned, on texts generated from the Life Orientation sexuality education manuals and materials, the music videos and lyrical content of the most popular songs amongst the learners (accessed from the internet) and the sexuality education classroom observations. These three sources of data did not need to be transcribed as they already existed as written text. With the exception of the music videos, the videos had to be typed from a video
file into a Microsoft Word document. Parker (1990; 1994; 1999) conceptualises the text as anything that can be given an interpretive gloss, as stated earlier. This has implications for the inclusion of non- traditional texts such as the music videos and classroom observations. Therefore, the music videos are a source of data that can be subjected to a discourse analysis because they can be given an interpretive gloss. However, they needed to be converted into text, as aforementioned, in order to be interpreted for the discourses therein.
In order to perform the conversion of music videos to text, I drew on four ways that Machin (2010) argues that meaning is connoted through music videos as a transcription technique rather than an analytic technique. The four ways I used to transcribe the videos into written text included paying attention to the poses, gaze, objects and setting. ‘Poses’ are the attributes of the musician/people and the type of relation they create between one other and the viewer. ‘Gaze’ is how the viewer is invited to look at the musician/people. ‘Objects’ are items that fill in the video other than the musician or people, such as clothing, make-up, accessories and props. Finally, ‘setting’ is the place where musicians/people are situated. I went through each shot and frame of the three music videos and documented what was unfolding in terms of pose, gaze, objects and setting.
A corpus, then, of the first three sources of data was generated and subjected to a preliminary and early stage of analysis. This involved coding the data into manageable chunks, organised around dominant gendered discourses, gendered power relations and gendered subject positions. I used codes to chunk phrases, sentences and sometimes paragraphs in order to gain an idea of key themes emerging within and across the corpus of data that talked to discourses, power relations and subject positions.
When coding the data for discourses, Kendall and Wickham (1999) provide clear instructions for how to go about doing so. They remind the analyst not to confuse discourse for language as the former recognises a group of statements whose organisation is regular and systematic, especially in specifying types of objects and subjects. In this way, it was important to code groups of words or chunks of information that had a systematic and regular way of invoking and speaking about objects and subjects. By way of analysis, I also made notes or analytic memos of my general impressions every time a new code was created. I repeated the coding process several times before overarching terms and concepts surfaced, which became a way of streamlining multiple codes. ‘Discourse’ and ‘positioning’ represented the terms or conceptual ways I used to summarise the data, especially as these constructs drive the research questions (see sub-questions i, ii and iii). Thereafter, I began cutting and pasting excerpts from the corpus of data, related to the broad conceptual themes, into a Word document, and I
noted the source of the data that the extract came from. This is where the codes that were organised into conceptual themes shifted from a preliminary analysis and required a formal and in-depth analytic framework.
Parker’s ten criteria for discourse analysis and positioning analysis
Parker’s (1992) ten criteria for identifying discourse and positioning theory informed how I repeatedly went through and developed a list of the extracts that represent different discourses and subject positions. Thereafter, the overarching themes could be analysed for how the discourses and positions that speak to dominant gendered discourses and gendered power relations are constructed and what the implications are for using them. I did not use Parker’s approach (1992) exclusively but rather as a broad analytical framework in my research. Along with positioning theory, I drew on other Foucauldian discourse analytic approaches to counter the tendency of Parker’s (1992) method to reify discourse in a way that abstracts them from the material conditions that make them possible, which in turn weakens the analysis of power relations (Hook, 2001). This had implications for the classroom observations, which demanded the kind of analysis that would capture the liveliness and discursive nature of a social practice which is in jeopardy of being stripped away if Parker’s method was applied straightforwardly.
In an attempt to address this caution, I thus selected what I understood to be parameters that Butler (1997) and Humphreys (1999) use to analyse ethnographic-based research that attempts to maintain the integrity of the multiple voices within and readings of the classroom observations, as a piece of text. The multiple voices in this instance included (i) the researcher; (ii) the subjects under inquiry; (iii) the broader context, and (iv) the reader or user of the findings. I understood these parameters as producing subject positions which are informed by particular discourses, and could thus be applied to a Foucauldian discourse analytic approach. I integrate this below, where the finer details of the analysis are discussed.
Parker’s (1992) first criterion specifies the actual text where the discourse is located and the sets of relations that emerge in response to this discourse; namely, the objects and subjects. The second criterion is that the object(s) contained in the discourse rely on the process of objectification and there