Qualitative Voices in Educational Research

Michael Schratz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367441692
• eBook ISBN: 9781000769623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

By neglecting the 'human' factor in the process of research analysis, much has been lost and researchers are now looking for new ways to broaden the social reality in their research.

In this volume, originally published in 1993, the research perspective adopted shows new methods of dealing with the world of education, including ethnographic studies and action research. The 'voices' offer a critical insight into both the scientific rationale and the methodological application of their individual approaches. This book provides a rich source of material for students and researchers doing qualitative analysis.

Part 1
Giving Personal Voices a Chance in Social Organizations

Chapter 1
The Theatre of Daylight: Qualitative Research and School Profile Studies

Jean Rudduck

Voices

The word ‘voices’ suggests something different from the word ‘dialogue’. Dialogue is part of a social convention where rules underwrite the possibility of speaking and being heard: turn-taking offers some promise of equality. Voices are more emotive, more disembodied, more disturbing. At one level they can ‘represent’ individuals or groups who have been denied the right to contribute or who have simply not been heard. Such voices speak to our conscience. At another level, voices remind us of the individuality that lies beneath the surface of institutional structures whose routine nature pushes us to work to ‘sameness’ rather than to respond to difference.

Translated into the context of qualitative research, the word ‘voices’ signals two things. First, it suggests the need for researchers, when they set out to help outsiders and insiders understand what goes on in schools, to give weight to the groups that seem, on past experience, more likely to be passed over: for instance, part-time female employees, black teachers, pupils. Second, it suggests the need to check out the extent to which the institution’s stories about itself allow for and reflect authentic and important differences of perspective and experience.

In this chapter, the qualitative methodology that provides the frame for thinking about ‘voices’ is the school profile study — a label that we use to denote a form of focussed, school-based enquiry in which researchers are commissioned by a school to investigate an issue that is important to the school and which involves the use of condensed fieldwork (see Walker, 1974). In the setting of a school profile study, the word ‘voices’ points to a tension that makes all case study work interesting: it challenges the researcher both to keep trust with individual perspectives while, at the same time, building some kind of composite picture that both individuals and the school staff as a whole can recognize.

Background

‘Whole school curriculum planning’ is one of the most exciting and potentially powerful ideas to emerge in the 1980s. However, in the present climate, where schools are obliged to compete with one another and where school work is increasingly described in ‘the language of the city pages and business news’ (Lawn, 1990, p. 388), there is a danger that the educational task of understanding and thereby strengthening the ‘whole school’ way of working will give way to the technical task of measuring whole-school performance. Public accountability is currently holding the spotlight on whole-school outcomes, but if attention is not given to the process of building a whole-school ethos and way of working, we may find that models of institutional performance and student achievement are being constructed on very shaky foundations.

The move towards a ‘whole-schooľ focus requires considerable thought about such things as power structures and patterns of participation; the relationship between personal and professional values; the nature and importance of shared understanding; and the means of achieving some level of overall institutional self-knowledge. In this chapter I suggest that one way of trying to build a firm foundation of institutional self-knowledge is to use what I and my colleague, Jon Nixon, are calling ‘school profile studies’, using condensed field work methods and democratic feedback techniques.

The title of the paper, ‘The Theatre of Daylight’ is taken from the Introduction to Tony Harrison’s text (1990) of The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. Harrison contrasts the theatre of darkness, in which people habitually sit, unseen, and watch actors on a lighted stage, with the theatre of daylight, in which Greek actors and audience took their places in full view of each other. The idea of a mutuality of awareness, responsiveness and respect among the totality of participants in the theatre seemed to engage with some of my concerns about whole school issues in schools, in particular about the development of collegial understanding and communal self-knowledge. ‘The shared light’, says Tony Harrison, ‘begs a common language … a common wholeness, a common illumination, a common commitment …’ (pp. x and xxi).

The Individual Teacher: Professional Self-knowledge in Context

I have argued elsewhere (Rudduck, 1988, pp. 210–1) of the usefulness of the biographical approach in helping individual teachers, particularly in a context of rapid educational change, re-examine their professional purposes and direction so that they can feel that they have some control over the agenda for change — or are at least clear about their own values and stance in relation to the changes that others require them to be part of. Biographical interviews offer teachers support in undertaking a personal enquiry into the nature of their own professional commitment, and a way of seeing that is different from ‘the almost unconscious lenses’ they normally employ (see Apple, 1975). As Nias (1984) reminds us, ‘many of the profession seem to receive little significant assistance in the working out of their own professional values’ (p. 14). It is difficult to get an analytic grip on the familiar context in which we work day in and day out and which we have probably been so effortlessly socialized into that its frameworks are no longer visible to us. Moreover, as Grumet (1981) says, we not only become part of that context but we are also responsible for it through our daily, albeit unconscious, reconstruction of it. If teachers are, in the main, so tightly meshed into institutional routines and regularities, it is not surprising that radical change is both unnerving for them to contemplate and difficult to accomplish. In order to release themselves from the complex and constraining webs of habit, they need some structure for standing outside their own work place in order to see how its values have been shaped and whether their own professional values are being expressed or are becoming muted. The biographical interview can go some way towards helping teachers construct a different perspective.

In much the same way did Frank Meadow-Sutcliffe, the Victorian photographer of Whitby in North Yorkshire, try to enable local people to ‘see’ familiar places with different eyes. His strategy was to photograph his subject ‘at every hour of the day, on fine days and at intervals on dull days, (to) photograph it after it has been rained on for weeks, and after it has been sun-dried for months’ (1912). By waiting and watching for unusual effects of fog, sunshine or cloud it is generally possible, he said, ‘to get an original rendering of any place’ (1914). In this way he offered the inhabitants of Whitby a fresh and surprising vision of the world they thought they knew and that familiarity had reduced to a predictable and unexciting outline.

The School Staff: Institutional Self-knowledge

If it is difficult for the individual to see beyond routine and re-engage personal and professional values, how much more difficult it is for a collection of individuals — for this is what a school staff often is — to re-view the structures and purposes of their work. Here the problem of socialization into conventional ways of seeing and behaving is compounded by various sub-group affiliations and mythologies that structure social encounters and perceptions in institutional life.

A recent study by Gillborn (1990) reveals something of the intricacies of building a whole-school commitment that confronts and is capable of working through personal and ideological differences. The school he worked in is known for its commitment to developing a democratic approach to policy-making. The inside story shows that it has not been easy. There has been some connivance in papering over the cracks, and a shift in the balance of power from the staff to parents and governors, effected by the Education Reform Act of 1988, has exposed the fragility of the consensus. For example, a head of department interviewed by Gillborn acknowledges his ambivalence towards the group of colleagues who, three years ago, successfully put the case for an integrated curriculum: ‘The people who were getting involved in the change … are generally very articulate people’, he begins. (Does he mean that innovative people are by nature articulate, or something slightly different — that such people talk about their ideas with a more persuasive excitement than is usual?) He goes on: ‘to challenge them is very difficult’. In this case, of course, it was the innovators, as a group, who had the floor and it is often difficult for individuals to question the position taken by a united group — whether a radical group, as was the case in this school, or a conservative group. As a result, says the head of department, ‘people tended to keep quiet rather than say (the) things, you know, that they felt in their hearts’. Thus, instead of learning to manage differences of opinion in debate within their institutional ‘community’ and to negotiate policy, the teachers accepted a false public consensus. But the ‘support’ that is offered in the public forum is not always sustained in private conversation, and criticism that should have been offered constructively in open dialogue can easily become sour and vindictive when expressed out of earshot of the rightful partners in the debate.

The picture that emerges from Gillborn’s study underlines the complexities of communicating even in settings — such as the school he worked in — where considerable effort had been made by the headteacher to support the possibility of open decision-making. A swing in the external politics of curriculum construction enabled some actors to question the curriculum changes that had been introduced, thereby revealing that the consensus that had kept the school moving forward was, for them, merely a mask. Another teacher looks back and describes the micropolitics of in-school dialogue and decision-making:

… it depended on which group of the staff you were talking to as to how much of your real feeling you gave away, because it seemed to me there were sometimes fairly dishonest meetings where people were backed into a corner, defending something that, having spoken to them at other times, I knew they actually didn’t really mean. But they weren’t going to… they weren’t able to say… They would have been in danger of denying the last two years’ work if they said certain things. (Gillborn, 1990, ms p. 13)

Gillborn’s study reminds us how ill-prepared schools generally are to manage their internal educational debate and achieve some depth of understanding, some genuine negotiation, and some integrity of whole-staff commitment. Without such a capacity it is exceptionally difficult for a school staff to begin to confront highly sensitive issues, such as issues of social justice.

The ‘whole-schooľ concept does not only relate to policy-making; it also relates to shared understanding and the building of common knowledge about practice. Schools have got better at this but most still have a long way to go. The old caricature, drawn in words by Anderson and Snyder, presented a ‘colleague’ as someone who teaches on the other side of the wall. Writing in 1982, the authors could still fairly confidently say that ‘education is among the last vocations within which it is still legitimate to work by yourself in a space that is secure against invaders’ (p. 2). Things have changed but we found, only a few years ago (see Cowie and Rudduck, 1988), at a time when there was, nationally, a growing interest in cooperative approaches to learning, that members of school staffs tended not to know which departments and which individual colleagues were developing interesting approaches to group work. Instead, myths persisted: ‘It’s probably the English department — the drama teacher I should think’. This lack of knowledge of the school’s own internal resources meant that teachers who wanted to develop new teaching strategies did not know that there was anyone to turn to for advice and support among their own colleagues.

What strategies are available to help schools realize a ‘whole-school’ way of working? School Profile Studies could, we think, make some contribution. They involve a partnership between experienced school case study workers and individua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Voices in Educational Research: An Introduction
• Part One: Giving Personal Voices a Chance in Social Organizations
• Part Two: Listening to the Silent Voice Behind the Talk
• Part Three: Keeping Authentic Voices Alive and Well
• An Epilogue: Putting Voices Together
• Notes on Contributors
• Index