To determine my level of involvement as participant researcher, it was important to consider my researcher status, the impact of my participant-observation on the participants’ responses and my subjectivity. During the research I recognised that my etic and emic status influenced my level of involvement and engagement with the research participants, the balance between my observations of events, my interactions with participants and the participating activities themselves. Maharaj (2016) discussed how the researcher’s perception of themselves in relation to the participants can affect their observational sensitivity by what they notice, document and even leave out of their field notes.
66
In my observational diary notes I found it useful to record further questions to be asked and make notes about new understandings and ideas that occurred.
Interestingly, my description of the research-participants I noted was limited, partly due to my concern about the ethical considerations of the research. I was extremely cautious to respect the participants’ anonymity and their identifiability due to my connection with them and the research settings. Here is an extract from my dairy notes that illustrates the point:
The Head Teacher came and observed for a short while; the children remained absorbed with the story puppet and discussion.
Influence of the story – what they wanted to be when older. The boys eagerly drew their ideas and choices mostly from the story or make-believe characters, sitting up and loudly naming popular action heroes.
From my prior tacit knowledge about the state schools’ practice, I was able to knowledgeably prepare the storytelling research activities and thereby feel powerful rather than powerless. However, I was less familiar with the WS kindergarten practice, although welcomed as part of the ‘teaching’ team as demonstrated in the transcript with the younger WS teacher and a boy:
The children are sewing felted finger puppets for their show, they have no faces like the cardboard 2D characters in a fairy tale.
TWS2: Knot on the end. Can you do knots? B: Can you do knots?
R: I’ll have a go.
TWS2: Introduce that puppet to Jane. Who is it? B: Grandma? (Child is unsure, genderless puppets).
TWS2: Got to go around to the ear, which is where you started. Need to be quite strong – go around the neck twice.
R: See how it forms the shape of the head. Go around once more. Keep going on up here.
B: I need to go quickly.
My observational notes showed that I often used the first pronoun in my field notes in the state schools, indicating a confident integration in the research settings as mentioned (Appendix 3). This was not the case with the WS kindergarten, due to a
67
lack of any previous experience in this educational environment. Following their philosophy about providing an uninterrupted rhythm for the children, they again requested I stayed all day when conducting my research. Doing so enabled the possibility of developing a greater empathic understanding and confident relationships with the staff, overcoming my initial uncertainties.
3.7.1
Self-revelation and observer-participant continuum
When investigating the gender assumptions children and adults make, my position adjusted according to my place on the observer-participant continuum. I noted that my role was mostly visible and highly participatory when conducting the storytelling discussions, activities and the teachers’ interviews. Aware of this, I tried to reduce and withdraw my participation to limit the possibility of researcher bias. It was only with the informal conversations with the WS parents and teachers that the
interactions became less researcher-led. In designing and analysing the parent and teacher questionnaires, my role again was significantly highly participatory and highly observational. Similarly, as Fook and Gardner (2007) found, the research milieu drew upon my knowledge, skills and own gendered cultural and emotional background, which sometimes conflicted with those of the research participants (Chapter 7.5.1).
3.7.2
Critical reflexivity to research cultural tools and gender
As a co-participant and co-constructor, it was important to consider myself as an instrument of data collection and analysis. My role as co-participant observer was evident when the WS teacher described my behaviour from her observations:
WS2: She's very quiet, she watches every single thing we do. [Laughter]
WS1: I have noticed, Jane, you do see wider little things. You're very observant.
In response to the awareness that I was being critically observed, my attentional focus intensified. Critical reflexivity is the process of acknowledging or making explicit one’s own contribution, such as thoughts and decisions, to the research process. Critical reflexivity encompasses both reflection and critical reflection, and although these terms are used interchangeably, they are not equivalent. Fook and Gardner (2007) defined reflection as the process of thinking about an experience or a particular practice, whilst critical reflection involves a deeper level of reflection and the deconstruction and examination of assumptions, beliefs, insights, attitudes,
68
interests and curiosities as they play out within the interpretive dimensions of the study and guide one’s actions. Critical reflexivity requires the researcher to consider how their personal experiences relate to their assumptions about knowledge, power and privilege. The critical element is not only the questions that researchers use to direct their focus towards the intentional development of different perspectives, but also the consideration of their mindset or outlook when examining the assumptions that are implicit and explicit in their research.
In this study, I engaged in two forms of reflexivity, as denoted by Ryan (2007), introspection and epistemic reflexivity. Introspection reflexivity is based upon experiential encounters, and provides emotional openings that allows the
opportunity to empathise with the research participants’ situations, belief systems and lives. This strategy helps the researcher to gain an insight into the participants’ culture and understandings. Epistemicreflexivity is an examination of one’s beliefs and assumptions. This form of reflexivity included the use of Kuehne’s
(2016:Sec.3:4, Para.43) interpretation of Stephen Brookfield’s four lens model of critical reflection in varying degrees: analysis of assumptions, contextual awareness of responses, imaginative speculation and reflective scepticism. The key factor was that although any one of these lenses could prove beneficial as an independent tool for critical reflection, Brookfield’s intention was that they were combined as a whole
to give multiple perspectives.
3.7.3
Reducing bias
Reflexivity-as-praxis is much less often discussed in research, but examining the positionality of the researcher is a critical part of any reflexive process, especially concerning research interactions. Positionality involves being transparent about one’s identities, such as ‘I am a white middle-aged teacher and lecturer, with a Christian background and lone mother of four’. Hence, I was aware that any research practices I adopted would be influenced by the intersectionality of my cultural identity facets. Seddon (2013) commented on the effect of research practice due to the powerful ‘sway of past paradigms’, and showed how the influence of these ‘monster’ narratives can dictate adult-child roles. I was therefore conscious of the slippages between discourses, such as the practice of being ‘the teacher’
following a well-entrenched script dictated by past meta-narratives around an adult’s role to simply impart knowledge to children. To address these issues, I treated all knowledge as contestable and equally balanced, to the best of my ability, and
69
respected the perplexity expressed in the children’s questions against my own wisdom to date, as suggested by Haynes (cited in Robson and Quinn, 2015:473).
3.7.4
Contradictory role
During the research, I found myself in a contradictory position in relation to the children, especially in regard to three aspects: my teacher-researcher role,
challenging sexist behaviour and researcher-led study. In the adult-researcher role, I was expected to adopt a ‘teacher’ role to monitor the children’s behaviour and to intervene in situations where children transgressed acceptable lines of behaviour. On the other hand, my participant-researcher role involved collaboration and building trusting relationships, as someone the children could confide in within specific contexts. This had an impact on the provision of space and freedom to introduce and talk about taboo matters with the children, such as physically gendered appearances.
Another contradictory involvement in the children’s discussions took place when they made sexist and misogynistic statements, and it was often difficult to know when to intervene. To ensure that the children were not left assuming that their views were condoned, I would purposely ask the child to explain what they had said and would encourage them to reflect upon their perceptions. I invited them to think about questions such as: ‘Do you think that is a nice thing to say?’ or ‘How would you feel if someone called you a name like that?’ The use of such questions was designed to encourage the children to reflect upon the consequences of their attitudes, and thus begin to challenge them for themselves (Pullman 2017). Furthermore, children are often engaged in general struggles to subvert the
authority that adults have over them within the school, as Christensen (2004) found. The blurring of adult/child boundaries in relation to my own gendered researcher position created an opportunity for resistance, which some of the children attempted to capitalise upon (Chapter 5.5). The way the children drew upon sexist discourses of gender did suggest that they were partly directed towards me as an adult, white female, a strategy the boys in particular were found to employ.
The final contradictory position occurred when supporting the Vygotskian dialogical pedagogical model where I tried to deliberately design a child-led study as opposed to a pre-structured researcher-led study. I noted that it oscillated between a purely ‘child-led’ process and one where I interjected to scaffold more in-depth thought, as
70
Bruner (1983) recommended. This influenced the data and raised the question about its true and genuine representation of the children’s gendered worlds and their ‘authentic’ voices. To address this matter of contamination of data, I ensured that the data was fully contextualised, as advised by Connolly (Christensen and James, 2017:115).