Doing Sociology of Education (RLE Edu L)

Geoffrey Walford

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415505994
• eBook ISBN: 9781136462085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection of specially commissioned articles exposes the practical and personal influences on the process of doing sociology of education. All of the authors have been involved in conducting well know major research projects, and discuss here the pitfalls and problems, conflicts and compromises that went into doing their particular research. A particular feature of the book is that a wide variety of types of research in the sociology of education is covered. The range is from small-scale ethnographic case studies to large-scale postal questionnaire sample surveys and includes studies based on interviews, observation and questionnaires. There are examples of longitudinal work in case studies and in surveys. The collection also includes discussions of action research, the development and influence of theory, and the relationship between research and policy.

1	Past, Imperfect, Tense: Reflections on an Ethnographic and Historical Study of Middle Schools

Andy Hargreaves

When at the first I took my pen in hand,
Thus for to write, I did not understand
That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode; nay, I had undertook
To make another, which when almost done,
Before I was aware, I this begun.

So wrote John Bunyan in ‘The Author's Apology for His Book’ at the commencement of The Pilgrim's Progress. I have some sympathy with how he felt. Except amongst the most inflexible, the process of social research is, like the skills of navigating among the Trukese ‘argonauts’ of the South Pacific described by Gladwin (1964), one which involves a continuous process of ad hoc adjustment and realignment, major and minor changes of course and speed, appropriate responses to the onset of unexpected adversity, and so on. Unlike the Trukese, however, who almost invariably succeed in reaching their desired destination, for the social researcher it is often not just the route that changes, but the destination too. When the research voyage must be undertaken alone, as ethnography and historical enquiry commonly are, and with the minimum of appropriate previous experience, as is the case with the majority of higher degree students, it presents not just technical challenges but deeply personal ones too. The purpose of a research biography is to unfold and retrieve the technical, personal and social aspects of this ever-changing research process, not just as a procedure for expiating methodological sins (though there is something to be said for that), but for illustrating how irremediably social (a point of strength as well as weakness) the process of social research actually is.

This research biography is of a doctoral study of English Middle Schools (Hargreaves, 1985) published in revised form as Two Cultures of Schooling: the case of middle schools by Falmer Press in 1986. This was not just a study of middle schools as such. It also sought to examine, clarify and develop links between ‘micro and macro’ levels of analysis in the sociology of education — using middle schools as a critical case. Much of the emphasis of the final thesis was therefore directed towards showing and developing links between theory and evidence, school and society, policy and practice, and history and ethnography. Yet when the study commenced, no such theoretical ambitions were entertained. ‘Micro-macro’ integration was not an issue within the study. Indeed, at this time, it was scarcely an issue of theoretical importance within the sub-discipline at all. More than this, in substantive terms, the original study was not even meant to be about middle schools. I scarcely knew what they were, in fact. This research biography, therefore, is a retrospective attempt to chart the changing course of this study amid strong and often cross-cutting theoretical currents in the sub-discipline; and in the context of shifting practical interests and possibilities, too. Like all biographies, the account is a selective one. Fuller (though of course, still not exhaustive) accounts of the fieldwork — particularly of the issues involved in doing comparative ethnography — are available in the methodological appendix to the original thesis. Here I want to focus more on issues bearing upon the overall course and direction of educational research projects and in particular those encountered in the process of analysis and writing up.

Origins

My study, supported by an SSRC studentship at the University of Leeds, began as a rather abstractly phrased venture to explore the ‘relationship between different kinds of educational experience and different individual constructions of reality’. It was my contention that the structure of people's educational experience in terms of classification and framing (Bernstein 1971) would significantly affect the ways in which they later construed and responded to other life experiences. My ‘critical case’, as I would now call it, for testing this thesis would be an examination of the educational backgrounds and experiences of politically radical and non-radical students in higher education. This proposal did not directly follow from any specific interests I had been pursuing in the sociology of education component of my undergraduate sociology degree at Sheffield University three years earlier. Apart from some discussion of the deschoolers and Jackson and Marsden's Education and the Working Class (1962) the sociology of education course I studied was predominantly concerned with issues of educational access and opportunity within a rather atheoretical tradition of political arithmetic. This was much less attractive to me than work in sociology more generally which engaged more directly with and tried to make sense of people's everyday experience — the writings of Schur, Szasz, Matza, Douglas and Lemert in ‘social problems’ and radical and humanistic traditions in ‘social psychology’. When, as a result of a ‘chance’ conversation with a fellow student, I ‘discovered’ the ‘new sociology of education’ (Young 1971) and other related work (D. Hargreaves, 1967; Barnes, Britton & Rosen, 1968) during study for my Postgraduate Certificate in Education, I felt, at last, that I had begun to find ways of linking experientially-directed approaches in sociological theory to the process of education in particular.

My research proposal, constructed during primary teaching in the following year, drew heavily on Michael Young's and Basil Bernstein's contributions to Knowledge and Control (1971), and over the first few weeks I expanded my knowledge of interpretive sociology by reading widely in sociolinguistics, phenomenology (Schutz, 1973), ethnomethodology (e.g., Turner, 1974) and more eclectic interpretive syntheses (e.g., Berger and Luckman, 1966), as well as early attempts at interpretive forms of educational inquiry (e.g., Hammersley, 1974). Through this, I developed a heightened resolve to adopt a broadly qualitative approach to whatever it was I eventually chose to study: I wanted very much to get inside the ‘black box’ of schooling. In addition, though, I was now also aware that notwithstanding all its other advantages, interpretive sociology, particularly ethnomethodology, often neglected the role that power and constraint played within and upon social interaction. Though my unease was, at that stage, an inchoate one, in retrospect I can see that the seeds of my later, more extended, theoretical interest in ‘micromacro’ integration had now been sown.

Following this theoretical review, a substantive focus for the research now had to be chosen. Because of the decline of ‘student militancy’ as a public issue at the time and because of my developing interest in the analysis of school processes in particular (a result of my initial reading) — these things, together with my supervisor's advice, led to my dropping the initial interest in higher education students. Instead, drawing on my own brief experience and dilemmas as a primary teacher of trying to operate something my head called an ‘integrated day’ curriculum, and recognising that what classroom research there was to date had tended to be concerned mainly with secondary education, I settled upon a comparative case study of a ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ primary school with a view to examining how the educational experiences of the pupils in each of the schools subsequently affected their response to and interpretation of secondary education. Already, while the theoretical problem had remained constant, the empirical one had now changed very substantially.

Selecting Cases

For fieldwork purposes, I wanted to select two contrasting primary schools which would differ on progressive/traditional lines. There were no existing relevant survey data to help guide this selection (a common problem of case study), so I drew up a number of observable characteristics such as type of building (open-plan or class-room-based), degree of emphasis on ritual (types of assemblies, regulations regarding school uniform), and openness or closedness of the timetable, as possible criteria for the initial selection.

Both wider preliminary sampling (to identify the eventual cases which would best approximate to the initial criteria) and the whole problem of gaining access to schools were potentially difficult given that I was based in a sociology (not an education) department, with little continuing contact with schools. When my supervisor informed me that he was a member of the joint governing body of two adjacent middle schools feeding into a common upper school, this therefore seemed an ideal opportunity to circumvent these difficulties, and to bypass other more formal and time-consuming procedures of getting into schools too (involving formal consent of the LEA, etc.). If I had not been able to ‘case the joints’ (Schatz-man & Strauss, 1973) myself, I had been able to do so vicariously through my supervisor and thereby establish some grounds for typicality. At the same time, while access to the schools was not yet absolutely guaranteed, my supervisor's connection with them seemed to make acceptance very likely. Similarly, his involvement in local politics and his role as a (somewhat influential) parent in the receiving upper school, cleared the way for the head of that school to grant formal permission for me to do some small-scale follow-up work there later in the year. At this stage, I was extremely pleased with how well this informal network appeared to be serving me. Access had been secured — the ‘Hierarchy of Consent’ (Dingwall, 1981) had been bypassed.

A typed research outline prepared for an initial ‘clearing’ meeting with the two headteachers involved, contained several references to ‘middle schools’ and ‘middle years of childhood’, but these were inserted very much at my supervisor's suggestion. At the time, their inclusion seemed to me to be largely cosmetic. I had yet to appreciate the distinctive difficulties such schools encountered by virtue of their middle school status. In addition to these references to middle school issues, I promised anonymity, offered assurances that I had no research interest in ‘invidiously comparative’ rates of educational achievement, and stressed the research's focus on curriculum process. The second part of the outline then listed the methods I proposed to use during the study.

While both heads expressed some worries about the dangers of comparison, the problems of generalizability (they used the term ‘validity’) of case study research, and my underestimation of the importance of differences in size between the two schools, they nonetheless welcomed me warmly into their schools for the approaching summer term. I would have to secure the formal approval of their staffs, of course, and this was subsequently done at staff meetings in each school where I outlined my research intentions and dealt with questions and queries. But for all practical purposes it seemed to me that satisfactory access had now been gained. Fieldwork ‘proper’ could commence. At this stage of the research, following the selection of cases and the gaining of access, I was not aware of any imminent shift in the focus of the study. But it would soon become strongly apparent during the fieldwork that the choice of cases and the arrangements for access would have huge ramifications for the ensuing direction of the study.

Fieldwork

In describing the fieldwork, I want to pursue the implications of these two issues for the course of the research in some detail. My account of the fieldwork is therefore highly selective, and those who wish to look at other important aspects of the fieldwork in this study — the problems of doing comparative ethnography, the arrangements for sampling within the field, my own field role, etc. — should again consult the thesis appendix. Here, the briefest summary of such issues must suffice.

Background

Fieldwork took place during the whole of the summer term, 1975. Though apparently briefer than many other school ethnographies which stretch to a period of a year or more (e.g. Willis, 1977; Woods, 1979; Ball, 1981; Burgess, 1983), the intensity of the fieldwork (five days per week) meant that the overall field-work time of a little over sixty days was not dissimilar from and in some cases greater than a number of other studies (e.g. Hammersley, 1984; Delamont, 1984). Were the intention to undertake a full-blown ethnography of one particular school, I would still regard this as rather brief. The aim, however, was to try and identify contrasts and links between different settings and to that end, depth of exploration was to some extent sacrificed for breadth of coverage. All research involves such trade-offs, and given its place within a wider research programme, I do not regard the duration of fieldwork in the study as unjustifiably short.

A mixture of methods was adopted. I wished to gain access to a variety of natural settings in which curriculum was discussed and enacted, to get an awareness of the contextual variability of actions and accounts within the schools; and to relate pupils’ and teachers’ stated perspectives to their classroom practice. This, it seemed to me, called for observation of a range of natural settings — classroom interaction, staff meetings, parents’ evenings, etc. — and interviews with the leading participants — heads, teachers and pupils.

Examining such a range of settings across two schools entailed making difficult decisions about data sampling within the field. As Hammersley and Atkinson, (1983, p. 46) point out, there are three dimensions to consider within such sampling: time, people and context. The sampling of contexts has just been examined; time and people will be dealt with now. In terms of time within the school year, given the initial research intention to follow a group of pupils through into secondary (upper school) in the autumn term, the fieldwork had to be compressed into the summer term. This explains the unusually intensive nature of the fieldwork programme. I suspected that kind of intensity might create difficulties: insufficient time out of the field for analytical reflection on the data, for progressive focusing on to more closely defined issues, for sampling of contexts according to emerging theoretical concerns and so on (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Most of the analysis was, as a result, done after fieldwork, not during it. For these reasons, I would not normally recommend such a research strategy to other fieldworkers. However, even with the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to see, given the overall research purpose at the time, how things might reasonably have been otherwise.

Within the summer term, I allocated my time between the two schools according to an overlapping time frame (Schatzman and Strauss, 1973), undertaking three whole days fieldwork in each school in turn, so that all days, times of day and points of term were covered in each case.

In terms of people, I devoted the majority of my classroom observation time (around 75 per cent) to the third and fourth year groups, the ones closest to the point of upper school transfer, a major element of my initial research interest. To the extent that my final account of Riverdale's and Moorhead's curricula and their participants’ perception of it is more comprehensive for the third and fourth year groups, that is in part because of this initial research emphasis.

Twenty fourth year pupils (ten boys, ten girls), about to transfer to upper school, were also selected from each school at random, for interviewing. Both heads were interviewed, as were all thirteen staff at Riverdale middle school. No more than a 50 per cent staff sample could be interviewed there. Given that it was not yet known which particular factors would have the strongest bearing on differences in teachers’ perspectives, this sample was therefore selected at random.

My fieldwork role was less than that of a fully fledged participant but something more than entirely non-participant too (a term which, as Burgess (1982) points out, is in any case rather misleading, since the most fly-like, wall-bound observers tend to get drawn into the proceedings of the field from time to time). My overall aim was to minimize any participant role that approximated to that of teacher, since I needed to build open relationships with both teachers and pupils. Relationships of the latter kind often require fieldworkers to ditch their practical teaching role (D. Hargreaves, 1967)¹. My general strategy was to offer auxiliary help, particularly towards the end of fieldwork when most of my data had been collected, by accompanying school trips, supervising pupils going to the swimming baths and so forth. It seemed only fair to offer some practical assistance, however small, in return for the school's readiness to accommodate my research interests. What kind of person would a social researcher be who felt no such guilt nor the need to appease it in some way! Similarly, I offered individual pupils help with their schoolwork when it was sought, provided this was on a small scale and that it helped rather than hindered good field relations. Broadly speaking, then, this was the methodological approach I adopted within the school case studies.

For reasons of space, this outline has been a somewhat cursory one. But there are two issues arising from the fieldwork that I do want to discuss in more detail, for they were ones that had a major bearing on the course and direction of the study. The first concerns issues that were opened up as a result of the exploratory nature of the methodological approac...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction: The Research Process Geoffrey Walford
• 1 Past, Imperfect, Tense: Reflections on an Ethnographic and Historical Study of Middle Schools. Andy Hargreaves
• 2 Research Role Conflicts and Compromises in Public Schools Geoffrey Walford
• 3 Studying and Restudying Bishop McGregor School Robert G. Burgess
• 4 Studying Children’s Perspectives—A Collaborative Approach Andrew Pollard
• 5 Theory and Practice in Fieldwork Research: Some Personal Observations in Perspective Denis Gleeson and George Mardle
• 6 Issues and Dilemmas in Action Research Judith Byrne Whyte
• 7 After ‘Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress’: Issues in Dissemination and Theory Development Neville Bennett
• 8 Longitudinal Survey Research into Progress in Secondary Schools, Based on the National Child Development Study Jane Steedman
• 9 Constructing a Public Account of an Educational System Peter Burnhill, Andrew McPherson, David Raffe and Nils Tomes
• 10 No Best Method—Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Sociology of Education Ronald King
• 11 Developing Theory in the Sociology of Music Education Graham Vulliamy
• 12 On Becoming a Feminist in the Sociology of Education Miriam E. David
• 13 Theory and Practice in Sociology of Education Patricia Broadfoot
• A Guide to Further Reading
• Notes on Contributors
• Index