Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education [1st ed.] 978-3-319-49138-7, 978-3-319-49140-0

Table of contents :
Front Matter....Pages i-xi
Introduction: Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education....Pages 1-13
Front Matter....Pages 15-15
(Il)Legitimate Knowledge in English Language Education Research....Pages 17-28
Narrative Language and Literacy Education Research Within a Postcolonial Framework....Pages 29-43
Stranger in a Strange Land: Conducting Qualitative Literacy Research Across Contexts....Pages 45-57
Ethics in Qualitative Language Education Research....Pages 59-73
Front Matter....Pages 75-75
Classroom Ethnography on Critical Language and Literacy Teaching and Learning....Pages 77-90
So Many Data, So Much Time: Living with Grounded Theory in a Rhetorical Autoethnography....Pages 91-104
Action Research as Iterative Design: Implications for English Language Education Research....Pages 105-120
Conversation Analysis and Language/Literacy Teacher Identity Construction in Interviews....Pages 121-135
Front Matter....Pages 137-137
Critical Practitioner Research in Language Education Under Difficult Circumstances....Pages 139-155
Reflections on Qualitative Research with English Language Learner Youth in Restrictive Language Contexts....Pages 157-170
Poetic Distillation: Artistic Transcription Analysis in Autoethnographic Literacy Research....Pages 171-188

Citation preview

Educational Linguistics

Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini Editor

Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education

Educational Linguistics Volume 29

Series Editor Francis M. Hult Lund University, Sweden Editorial Board Marilda C. Cavalcanti Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil Jasone Cenoz University of the Basque Country, Spain Angela Creese University of Birmingham, United Kingdom Ingrid Gogolin Universität Hamburg, Germany Christine Hélot Université de Strasbourg, France Hilary Janks University of Witwatersrand, South Africa Claire Kramsch University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A Constant Leung King’s College London, United Kingdom Angel Lin University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Alastair Pennycook University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Educational Linguistics is dedicated to innovative studies of language use and language learning. The series is based on the idea that there is a need for studies that break barriers. Accordingly, it provides a space for research that crosses traditional disciplinary, theoretical, and/or methodological boundaries in ways that advance knowledge about language (in) education. The series focuses on critical and contextualized work that offers alternatives to current approaches as well as practical, substantive ways forward. Contributions explore the dynamic and multilayered nature of theory-practice relationships, creative applications of linguistic and symbolic resources, individual and societal considerations, and diverse social spaces related to language learning. The series publishes in-depth studies of educational innovation in contexts throughout the world: issues of linguistic equity and diversity; educational language policy; revalorization of indigenous languages; socially responsible (additional) language teaching; language assessment; first- and additional language literacy; language teacher education; language development and socialization in non-traditional settings; the integration of language across academic subjects; language and technology; and other relevant topics. The Educational Linguistics series invites authors to contact the general editor with suggestions and/or proposals for new monographs or edited volumes. For more information, please contact the publishing editor: Jolanda Voogd, Senior Publishing Editor, Springer, Van Godewijckstraat 30, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5894

Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini Editor

Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education

123

Editor Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini Faculty of Literature, Languages and History Department of English Language and Literature Alzahra University Tehran, Iran

ISSN 1572-0292 ISSN 2215-1656 (electronic) Educational Linguistics ISBN 978-3-319-49138-7 ISBN 978-3-319-49140-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963685 © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

Introduction: Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini

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Part I Theoretical Considerations 2

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(Il)Legitimate Knowledge in English Language Education Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ruanni Tupas

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Narrative Language and Literacy Education Research Within a Postcolonial Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brenton Doecke, Desvalini Anwar, and Bella Illesca

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Stranger in a Strange Land: Conducting Qualitative Literacy Research Across Contexts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Todd Ruecker

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Ethics in Qualitative Language Education Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher Anderson

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Part II Methodological Approaches 6

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Classroom Ethnography on Critical Language and Literacy Teaching and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sunny Man Chu Lau

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So Many Data, So Much Time: Living with Grounded Theory in a Rhetorical Autoethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bob Broad

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Action Research as Iterative Design: Implications for English Language Education Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Anne Burns and Pamela McPherson v

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Contents

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Conversation Analysis and Language/Literacy Teacher Identity Construction in Interviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Stephanie Anne Shelton and Peter Smagorinsky

Part III Research in Action 10

Critical Practitioner Research in Language Education Under Difficult Circumstances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Gordon Blaine West and Graham Crookes

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Reflections on Qualitative Research with English Language Learner Youth in Restrictive Language Contexts . . . . . . . . . . 157 Daisy E. Fredricks

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Poetic Distillation: Artistic Transcription Analysis in Autoethnographic Literacy Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Peggy Albers, Jerome C. Harste, and Teri Holbrook

Contributors

Peggy Albers Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA Christopher Anderson School of Language Studies and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK Stephanie Anne Shelton Department of Educational Studies in Psychology, Research Methods, and Counseling, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA Desvalini Anwar Universitas Negeri Padang, Padang, Indonesia Bob Broad Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA Anne Burns University of New South Wales, Anzac Parade, Kensington, NSW, Australia Graham Crookes University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA Brenton Doecke Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia Daisy E. Fredricks Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA Jerome C. Harste Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA Teri Holbrook Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA Bella Illesca Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Sunny Man Chu Lau School of Education, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Canada Pamela McPherson University of New South Wales, Anzac Parade, Kensington, NSW, Australia

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Contributors

Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini Faculty of Literature, Languages and History, Department of English Language and Literature, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran Todd Ruecker University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA Peter Smagorinsky Department of Language and Literacy Education, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Ruanni Tupas National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore Gordon Blaine West Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, South Korea

About the Authors

Peggy Albers is a professor of language and literacy education. Her research interests include visual discourse analysis, online professional development, and teacher education. Peggy is also a potter who focuses on functional and sculptural work. Christopher Anderson is a senior lecturer in language and communication at Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK where he directs the English Language and Communication BA program. He has been involved in second language teacher development in countries including Mexico, Morocco, Bahrain, UAE, Jordan, and China. Stephanie Anne Shelton is an assistant professor of qualitative research in the Department of Educational Studies in Psychology, Research Methods, and Counseling at the University of Alabama. Desvalini Anwar (PhD) teaches English at Universitas Negeri Padang, Indonesia. Her research interests include English language and literature pedagogy in EFL settings, teacher identity and change, standard-based reforms, and culture studies. Bob Broad teaches at Illinois State University in the USA. His research focuses on writing, writing assessment, and qualitative research methods. Anne Burns is a professor of TESOL in the School of Education, University of New South Wales, Australia, with extensive experience in qualitative and action research. Graham Crookes is professor at the Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaii. His main research interest is critical language pedagogy.

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About the Authors

Brenton Doecke is an honorary professor at Deakin University, Melbourne. He has published widely in the fields of English curriculum and pedagogy and teacher education. Daisy Fredricks is an assistant clinical professor of applied linguistics and language education at the University of Maryland College Park. Her current research focuses on the daily instructional practices of preservice ESOL teachers and youth response to such practices. Jerome C. Harste is a professor emeritus at Indiana University and is an expert in early written language literacy learning that pushed the field of literacy education toward a socio-psycholinguistic theory of literacy learning. Jerry is also a water media artist who holds signature status in the Missouri Watercolor Society. Teri Holbrook is an associate professor of literacy and language arts at Georgia State University. Her research looks at how arts-infused and digital composition alters notions of literacy education, academic and literary writing, and qualitative inquiry. Bella Illesca is an English teacher in secondary and tertiary English education. She has published articles and book chapters on English teaching and sociocultural diversity and is currently completing her PhD at Deakin University, Melbourne. Sunny Man Chu Lau is an associate professor at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada. Her research explores the engagements of students’ bi-/plurilingual competence in critical literacy learning. Pamela McPherson is a TESOL researcher who uses action research methodologies to capture learners’ perspectives on language learning. Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini is an assistant professor of the Department of English Language and Literature at Alzahra University in Tehran, Iran. His research areas include sociopolitics of (English) language education, qualitative research methodology, and critical studies of discourse in society. Todd Ruecker is an assistant professor of English with an emphasis in second language writing at the University of New Mexico. He has published two books as well as articles in a variety of journals including TESOL Quarterly and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. Peter Smagorinsky is distinguished research professor of English education in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia.

About the Authors

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Ruanni Tupas is an applied sociolinguist at the English Language and Literature Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Gordon Blaine West is an assistant professor working in the Young Learner TESOL program at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea. His main interest is in critical pedagogy and research.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini

Qualitative research continues to remain a relatively small stream rather than a major trend of inquiry in the area of language education. In research on teaching additional languages, most visibly developed in the area of teaching English to speakers of other languages, statistical studies appear to be favored over other research approaches (Benson et al. 2009; Mirhosseini and Samar 2015; Richards 2009). Half a century ago, in the early days of the field of English language teaching as an emerging independent discipline, qualitative inquiry was almost absent from the entire bulk of data-based studies in major journals of the field published then. A brief overview of issues of such journals as Modern Language Journal, Language Learning, and TESOL Quarterly in the 1960s depicts this absence. Other journals which started to appear in the following two decades naturally followed the same research trend. It was only from the 1980s that some of these journals and some younger ones like Applied Linguistics started to recognize a thin line of ethnographic research which grew relatively stronger in the past two decades (e.g. Chaudron 1986; Cleghorn and Genesee 1984). Reviews of qualitative studies in major journals of the field of language teaching depict that they are still overshadowed by statistical research approaches. An overview of qualitative research in language teaching and learning revealed that during the 10-year period of 1997–2006, in ten major journals of the field qualitative studies amounted to 22 % of the total number of published articles (Benson et al. 2009). It was also reported that between 2000 and 2007 the representation of qualitative research in fifteen main journals related to the field of language teaching ranged from less than 10 % up to around 25 % in journals with the

S.-A. Mirhosseini () Faculty of Literature, Languages and History, Department of English Language and Literature, Alzahra University, Deh-e Vanak, 1993891176, Tehran, Iran e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_1

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highest qualitative-friendly attitude (Richards 2009). One may argue, therefore, that qualitative research continues to be of lower visibility in the field. Research on some aspects of language education such as sociocultural concerns and policy-level issues may be more qualitatively-oriented. Moreover, some journals and academic communities are more open to qualitative research than others. However, even today no specifically-qualitative journal is published in the area of language education. It is true that there is no such journal carrying the word quantitative in its title either, but there are journals working on the basis of a covert quantitative-oriented policy of publication. In many other journals that are open to qualitative studies, statistical approaches are taken for granted as justified beforehand and referees focus on the quality of the study, but in the case of a qualitative research submission, the legitimacy of a qualitative approach tends to be the primary aspect to be judged (Mirhosseini 2011). Therefore, although there are qualitative-friendly journals in the field, hardly do they prioritize qualitative inquiry and, of course, there is no qualitative-only journal in the broad area of language education. This lower visibility and accessibility of qualitative language education research may also be observed in the case of the minority of books that specifically focus on qualitative language education inquiry. There may be about half a dozen book-size publications carrying the word qualitative or a similar term along with language education or applied linguistics – if considered pertinent to the realm of language teaching – in their title. One may think of Qualitative Inquiry in TESOL by Keith Richards (2004) as an early example and books by Heigham and Croker (2009), Davis (2011), Zacharias (2012), and more recently, the book by Duff (2013) as well as the volume edited by Barkhuizen et al. (2014) and the one by Gabrys-Barker and Wojtaszek (2014). Apart from difficulty in publishing, qualitative researchers in language education, like many other fields of social sciences, can face “difficulty in getting funding” and grapple with “being ignored by policy makers”, since qualitative findings are “not regarded as solid empirical research” (Morse et al. 2002, p. 4). Funding organizations in educational research tend to require quantitative methods or at least push for the application of mixed methods approaches which normally implies the dominance of quantitative research. Considering the theoretical and academic environment surrounding language teaching research, it would not be surprising to observe institutional funding sources of the field continuing to push for positivist methodologies and standards, like other fields of inquiry (Cheek 2005; Ferrini 2015; Fuchs 2014). This can be force for the further extension of quantitative approaches and over-reliance on statistical research procedures. *** As my own background is in the education of English as a foreign language, my opening discussion has concerned research in language teaching as distinct from first language literacy education. The positivistic inclination argued to exist in the language education research arena might need further argument in relation with research traditions in the area of literacy education that has most vastly developed

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in the case of teaching reading to English-speaking children. Although different components of the discourse on literacy have been discussed, a distinction between two major conceptions of literacy research would be relevant here: In the sense of teaching reading and writing in language arts classes, it has by some accounts existed for about one and a half century (Martin et al. 2012). However, in the sense of socially-sensitive “changing views of reading and writing”, the area of literacy studies has been argued to have appeared less than four decades ago (Barton 2007, p. 22), with Language and Literacy: The Sociolinguistics of Reading and Writing by Michael Stubbs (1980) being one of the first key titles. In the former sense, it may be assumed that the landscape of qualitative research methodology in literacy education is roughly the same as the one depicted above for language education research, since such methodological inclinations are rooted in positivistic epistemologies that dominate the broader field of educational research and even more broadly the entire landscape of social sciences (see, for example, Anderson 1998; Kincheloe 2008). Concerns similar to those in language education may as well be raised about the politics of publication and funding in literacy scholarship in the first sense. Also similarly, the small number of books specifically projecting terms related to qualitative research traditions and literacy in their title may be an indication of the marginality of qualitative inquiry on teaching mother tongue reading and writing. Volumes published in the Language and Literacy Series of Columbia University’s Teachers College Press are among the rare cases of such books (e.g. Kamberelis and Dimitriadis 2004; Schaafsma et al. 2011). This is by no means surprising as the epistemological foundations of the dominant cognitivelyoriented trends in teaching and researching reading and writing are well in line with epistemological underpinnings of experimental research. The latter conception of literacy, however, is essentially rooted in interpretive and critical epistemological standpoints. Therefore, in line with such epistemologies, literacy studies of this type are ethnographic in nature, as reflected in classic works associated with them (e.g. Freire and Macedo 1987; Heath 1983; Street 1984). However, even in this predominantly qualitative research area, books specifically addressing the theory and methodology of literacy inquiry are scarce. Not many specifically relevant research methodology books can be named (e.g. Albers et al. 2013; Heath et al. 2008), although the qualitative focus in general literacy research methodology books (e.g. Duke and Mallette 2011; Kamil et al. 2000) is stronger than that of general methodology texts in language education research (e.g. Dornyei 2007; Nunan 1992). Moreover, a further concern with this category of literacy research is that inquiry in this area tends to be overly monocultural and primarily centered in the intellectual atmosphere of English-speaking contexts. Therefore, putting literacy chapters together with language education discussions in a single volume is based on a triple justification: First, the epistemological problematization which underlies the overall atmosphere of the entire volume – and is further discussed in the next section of this chapter – applies to both mainstream language education and the mainstream reading/writing conception of literacy. Regardless of the differences in the focus of language education with that of teaching first language reading and writing, the fundamental concerns in

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these areas are the same. Common between them are aspects of the phenomenon of language in the spoken or written form and also issues of human learning. Including contributions by researchers from both areas not only provides the space for presenting more diverse researching perspectives and practices, but also calls for a consideration of language and literacy issues at more fundamental epistemological and methodological levels in both areas. Second, to readers in the area of language education, including teaching English as a second or foreign language, the sociocultural and critical conception of literacy reflected in literacy oriented chapters of the volume may well illustrate diverse and deeply-qualitative images of research. Such images which are beyond the dominant competency-based streams of language education are normally perceived to be outside the area of language education and are, therefore, not widely known to the field. However, adopting a position that has already been discussed in a few cases (Hornberger 2003; Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester 2000), this book attempts to demonstrate that language education and literacy studies are deeply interwoven areas of scholarship. Therefore, the wider perspectives of qualitative research reflected in such literacy studies can be meaningfully expected to contribute to research in the field of language education. Finally, for readers with research interests in the area of literacy and even those inclined to socially-sensitive and ethnographic literacy studies, the sociocultural and contextual diversity reflected in language education chapters may appear contributive. Reading familiar literacy studies along with language education chapters representing various cultural settings and language groups may be an invitation for considering more diverse sociocultural challenges than the ones normally represented in literacy research, even those in critical literacy studies. Overall, merging language and literacy education in this volume may act as an invitation to the two sister areas – especially for language education scholars – to recognize one another as a related area of scholarship and also as a call for both of them to enrich educational and researching theories and practices in their own field with embracing the wisdom generated in the other one. *** Within this landscape of attitudes towards qualitative research approaches in language and literacy education, a major aim of the present volume is to voice the need for the further recognition and visibility of qualitative inquiry in the field. Overall, the chapters invite our research community to revisit trends and traditions in studies on language and literacy teaching and learning and, therefore, the book may be received as a call for further re-affirmation of the usefulness and necessity of qualitative research. The volume, however, intends to move beyond a mere call for further attention to qualitative research. Apart from the theoretical, methodological, and practical focus of different chapters, the contributions collectively construct at least two main positions regarding the nature of qualitative research in language and literacy education: first, a need for understanding qualitative research in this broad area as an epistemological necessity rather than a mere technical reaction to the

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shortcomings of statistical studies, and second, the vitality of adopting conceptions of language, literacy, and learning which are epistemologically congruent with a qualitative research stance. I discuss these positions below: One justification for shifting to qualitative approaches might be facing the reality that decades of mainly-quantitative research in the field has hardly created satisfying bodies of real-world-relevant knowledge, arguably like the case of other similar disciplines (Erickson 2011). For example, it may be argued that despite the publication of literally thousands of studies on various aspects of teaching English to speakers of other languages, they are difficult to argue to have truly promoted our fundamental understanding of major issues of language learning and our real-life acts of teaching (see, for example, Genesee et al. 2006). In areas like second language acquisition (SLA) and language testing as exemplars of strongly quantitative research areas, the bulk of technical terminology is more diverse today than three or four decades ago. Nonetheless, what academics and practitioners know today about the main questions of SLA hardly goes beyond conjectures of the 1970s, and the fundamental understanding of assessing the knowledge of language has hardly moved beyond what was reflected in proficiency tests in the 1980s. Such dissatisfaction with mainstream quantitative research in terms of creating in-depth understanding and knowledge may appear to be enough justification for a “shift towards more pragmatic approaches” and “focusing on practical issues rather than conceptual debates” (Richards 2009, p. 149) and for seeking alternative research approaches that may prove more fruitful. However, true inquiry does need to move beyond such a reactionary attitude. Searching for alternatives just to compensate for the stagnation of statistical methods or to fill the gaps in quantitative studies, without understanding epistemological foundations of research in social sciences, may succeed in producing yet further bodies of publications but could fail in shaping the profound transformation and progress required in language and literacy education research. Rather than following the footsteps of hard-science in the application of positivist methods and stitching their gaps with ethnographic techniques, we need to realize that fundamentally different types of knowledge and different ways of knowing – in-depth, contextually-situated, practically-relevant, and sociopolitically-positioned – are needed to re-shape inquiry in social science fields like language and literacy education (Alvesson and Karreman 2011; King and Mackey 2016; Kress 2011). As for applying epistemologically congruent conceptions in qualitative inquiry in the field, the concern is about employing data collection instruments and technical procedures associated with ethnographic traditions and juxtaposing them with epistemologically different or even opposing conceptions of language and learning. An imperative of meaningful qualitative language and literacy education research is adopting understandings of language and conceptions of learning in harmony with qualitative research perspectives. A research position that defies variables and experimental control and relies on life-like, contextual, holistic, interpretive, subjective, and socially-situated exploration and knowledge building, naturally needs to view language and learning from the same epistemological perspective.

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Reactionary qualitative research that just scratches the surface of mainstream experimental studies at the level of methods and techniques may be susceptible to the pitfall of forging amalgamations of qualitative-looking procedures with epistemologically opposing traditional conceptions of language and learning. Methodological approaches associated with qualitative research are founded on naturalist, contextual, and interpretivist epistemological positions but conceptions of formalist linguistics and cognitive psychology rely on positivist epistemologies. Merging the two epistemological orientations would be hardly meaningful. For example, one may encounter apparently qualitative studies applying ethnographic methods in investigating out-of-context vocabulary memorization practices but the very structuralist and fragmentationist underpinning of conceptions of language skills and components is incongruent with the epistemological bases of ethnographic research (Mirhosseini and Samar 2015). The same may apply to qualitative studies of strictly phonics-based views of teaching reading or mechanics-oriented approaches to writing instruction. The need for avoiding inherently paradoxical research necessitates embracing alternative views of language and learning. For a conception of language in line with a qualitative epistemology, methodology, and practice, one needs to move beyond the bounds of language and literacy as mere instrumental communication tools perceived in terms of skills, components, and codes. Qualitative language and literacy research needs to embrace an understanding of language as a holistic and contextual phenomenon and a socioculturally loaded and politically sensitive practice (e.g. Pennycook 2001, 2010). As for learning, beyond strict conceptions of cognitive psychology, qualitative inquiry in the field should invite epistemologically congruent constructivist, naturalist, and necessarily social understandings of teaching and learning (e.g. Fasheh 1990; Graves 1999). To take this discussion into the related concern of mixed methods research, one may argue that if research issues are considered at the level of epistemology, and if the meaning of knowledge and knowledge creation in the research process is revisited (Hughes and Sharrock 1997; Loftus and Rothwell 2010), mixed methods research and the recent attention to it (Hashemi 2012; Riazi and Candlin 2014) may need to be treated with caution. The familiar research norms in our field and context mostly tend to focus on methods and technicalities, and to be less considerate of the more important epistemological levels of research (Mirhosseini 2017; Snape and Spencer 2003). However, one may argue that – apart from mixing simple techniques, like using observations and tests together – mixing the two epistemological stances such as the following two ones would be all but out of question: knowledge is to be scientific, objective, and universally generalizable and should surrender to replicable tests; and knowledge is to be contextual, subjective, and multifaceted and should be locally, contextually, and personally specific and relevant. Therefore, contributions to this volume attempt to extend the discussion of and attention to qualitative research in language and literacy education as well as to address both of the main concerns discussed above. On the one hand, they depict the richness and depth of qualitative inquiry in exploring the human nature of research concerns in the field beyond a mere reactionary stream or a fashion.

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On the other hand, they portray views and understandings of language, literacy, and learning that are inherently qualitative in nature and are epistemologically congruent with the nature of qualitative research. The chapters address aspects of epistemological perspectives, methodological concerns, and practical procedures in qualitative research within the theoretical and practical context of language and literacy education based on examples of specific language and literacy education involvements rather than generic examples of other fields of social sciences. *** After this introductory chapter, eleven other chapters are presented in three parts: Theoretical Considerations, Methodological Approaches, and Research in Action. Although all chapters include discussions of theoretical, methodological, and practical aspects of research, chapters in each part tend to dwell more on the concerns reflected in the title of that particular part. There is no one to one match between chapters in the three parts of the book in terms of topics they cover, that is, one should not expect theoretical considerations debated in part one to be followed up in terms of methodology and then in terms of procedures in the next two parts. Moreover, because of the difference of the three parts in terms of focus (i.e. theory, methodology, and action) and also because of the contextual nature of qualitative discussions (inviting personal involvement and favoring flexibility) one cannot expect a unified and standard format of presentation. Therefore, the coherence of the three parts and the eleven chapters should be sought in their internal arguments rather than style and presentation. In the rest of this chapter a brief overview of the three parts of the volume is presented and the overall structure of the book and some interconnections among the chapters are explained. ‘Part I’ raises some theoretical concerns that are rarely debated in the specific context of language and literacy research. The theoretical issues addressed in the four chapters of this part are obviously far from exhaustive, but do address fundamental considerations that may contribute to more profound understanding of qualitative research and may be conducive to further theoretical debates aimed at enriching research perspectives in the field. Epistemological legitimacy and the recognition of qualitative findings as legitimate knowledge; sociopolitical situatedness of qualitative inquiry; challenges of contextualized naturalist research; and qualitative-research-specific ethics particularly considered in language and literacy education research are the theoretical considerations dealt with in this part. In Chap. 2 as the first chapter of this part, Ruanni Tupas discusses the legitimacy of research approaches and knowledge created through qualitative research in the context of disciplinal demands of rigor and sophistication. He describes the discourses and processes of knowledge legitimization in language education research and disciplinal thinking about what research counts and what does not and, in the process, what knowledge is deemed legitimate in the field. The chapter argues that with alternative epistemological positions outside the bounds of traditional positivist attitudes and in light of alternative ways of framing knowledge, a considerable part of the normally discredited knowledge could also be legitimate.

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The contribution of the chapter to understanding qualitative language and literacy research is in problematizing how the ideological stance towards what counts as credible research determines the actual research scene and why the landscape of politics of knowledge and knowledge creation and dissemination needs to be more inclusive and diverse. The next two chapters highlight the consideration that qualitative research is indispensably situated in sociopolitical contexts as well as in specific local settings. The chapter by Brenton Doecke, Desvalini Anwar, and Bella Illesca emerged out of their own dialogue in processes of qualitative research. Illustrating the situatedness of their qualitative studies in certain cultural, social, historical, and political situations in different countries, they argue that in education, such issues are played out in narratives and that recognizing the narrative interplay of these elements provides alternative ways of inquiry that are more congruent with the complexities of real-life language and literacy education. Addressing another aspect of the concern over contextual situatedness of qualitative inquiry, Todd Ruecker in his chapter deals with the notion of context in a more practical sense of actual research settings and discusses challenges of engaging in qualitative research beyond the confines of academia and negotiating the politics of unknown research contexts. He relies on his lived experiences of literacy research in two challenging settings to explore the issue of researcher positionality and the fuzzy nature of conducting qualitative research across contexts. Chapter 5 is the last chapter of the first part of the book in which Christopher Anderson problematizes ethics in qualitative research. He discusses the concern of the institutionalization of ethics in academic research and highlights the particular place of ethical considerations in qualitative studies. However, he argues, ethics has had a peripheral role in language education research. Anderson describes an actual instance of ethnographic research to illustrate ethical issues that may emerge in qualitative studies of language education. Calling for a view of ethics as more than a bureaucratic exercise in institutional research and as essential to the research process, he argues that it is also part of the process of legitimization of credible inquiry practices and findings. The chapter is a rare contribution exploring the issue in the specific context of language teaching research that invites for more engagement with ethics in qualitative inquiry in the field. ‘Part II’ explores issues of the design and implementation of language and literacy education research within the framework of some of the major established qualitative research traditions. The four chapters in this part focus on the methodological approaches of ethnography, grounded theory, action research, and conversation analysis and the two approaches of autoethnography and ethnomethodology are also briefly dealt with. The chapters do reflect some theoretical and epistemological considerations like the ones discussed in ‘Part I’ and they do also showcase actual studies like the ones presented in ‘Part III’. However, the distinctive feature of chapters in this part is that they bring some of the most well-known traditions of qualitative inquiry into the realm of language and literacy education and depict instances of how these approaches may provide coherent overall frameworks for research in this area.

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The approach which Sunny Man Chu Lau explores in Chap. 6 is classroom ethnography. She discusses ethnographic research approaches in the context of critical education and in relation with sociopolitical views of learning and teaching in language and literacy education research. The chapter extensively discusses how ethnographic studies may help in exploring cultural and social processes that mainstream quantitative approaches marginally address. As well-known as ethnography in qualitative research is the analytical approach of grounded theory which is dealt with in the next chapter by Bob Broad. He draws on a long-term ongoing literacy study to illustrate aspects of coding processes and procedures based on a grounded theory perspective. The chapter also discusses issues of social functioning of writing in creating and maintaining identities and also, as a secondary concern, presents glimpses of autoethnography as yet another qualitative methodological approach and how it may be realized in literacy education research. Anne Burns and Pamela McPherson, based on an actual classroom participatory action research, discuss the notions of paradigm, methodology, design, and method within the iterative processes associated with an action research approach. The chapter tries to depict the iterative nature of this approach and the authors argue that researchers who adopt action research need to avoid a simplistic reading of the traditional cyclical models and, instead, to see it as offering dynamic and emergent designs that provide the space for researchers to deal with complexities as well as possibilities in research. The final chapter of the second part of the book by Stephanie Anne Shelton and Peter Smagorinsky deals with conversation analysis in light of its parent approach of ethnomethodology. They discuss some theoretical issues in conversation analysis and present actual examples from a conversation analytic study in literacy education. Recognizing that conversation analysis has had little presence in language and literacy education, the chapter argues that it is a rich methodological approach with great potential for application in the field. The final part titled Research in Action includes three chapters that illustrate aspects of actual instances of qualitative language and literacy education research in different contexts and with different focuses. Despite the relative prevalence of the labels of qualitative traditions, frameworks, and approaches like the ones discussed in the previous part, the actual practice of qualitative inquiry tends to blur their delineated boundaries and research in action is usually quite eclectic, pragmatic, and full of “messiness and inelegance” (Leung et al. 2004, p. 263). Therefore, the chapters in ‘Part III’ present some instances of real-life qualitative research in line with theoretical and epistemological orientations associated with qualitative social science inquiry some of which are discussed in the first part of the volume. These chapters practically illustrate aspects of epistemological views of language, literacy, and learning congruent with qualitative research and also depict some innovative and potentially fruitful ways of conducting qualitative studies in actual research settings. Chapter 10 is the first chapter of this final part of the book in which Gordon West and Graham Crookes discuss some critical perspectives in the context of qualitative teacher research in teaching English to speakers of other languages in Korea. The chapter argues that research in critical English language education should be

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conceptually, methodologically, and contextually consistent with the critical nature of the educational practices of concern. In the penultimate chapter Daisy Fredricks focuses on qualitative fieldwork on elementary school English language teaching and learning in a setting of English-only language education policy in the United States. The study reported in the chapter was founded on critical applied linguistics perspectives and employed a variety of qualitative research procedures including interview, observation, audio-recording, and fieldnotes. The chapter illustrates the application of a multilayered qualitative approach in exploring issues of language ideologies, language education policies, and classroom practices in the context under consideration. Finally, Peggy Albers, Jerome Harste, and Teri Holbrook in Chap. 12 present a discussion that bursts the bounds of known methodologies, conceptions, and even procedures and techniques associated with qualitative traditions to portray an innovative image of progressive qualitative inquiry in literacy research. Clearly positioning themselves as artists as well as literacy scholars, the authors extend the conception of literacy beyond words and well into the realm of images. Problematizing the lack of nuance and depth and the absence of joy and pleasure in much of academic research methods, including those considered qualitative, they describe an adventurous research approach that seeks to disrupt commonplace notions of data analysis and to highlight the critical and the aesthetic for purposes of expanding notions of literacy, literacy teaching, and literacy research. *** It goes without saying that the volume does not claim to have exhausted the theoretical, methodological, and procedural issues in qualitative language and literacy education research. There are plenty of theoretical and epistemological concerns that are not addressed, including ontological orientations in research, cross-cultural issues in qualitative inquiry, and the politics of research funding; there are methodological approaches that are left out, such as phenomenology and discourse analysis; and there are numerous practical aspects that could have been dealt with. The inclusion of contributions from scholars based in other parts of the world; addressing research considerations related to different minority groups; and exploring the teaching of other languages are some ideas that were not very difficult to think of. However, these ideas, rather than indicating shortcomings of the volume, highlight the tremendous scope, depth, and diversity of issues in qualitative language and literacy education research. Viewing the huge bulk of potential topics to be covered; considering the fact that “there’s a world to cover out there” (Allan Luke 2014, personal correspondence) about qualitative research in language and literacy education; and noticing that the field-specific theory and methodology of qualitative research is not widely discussed, the volume may be received as one needed step forward. One may not expect great things to happen in the wake of the appearance of a single book but hope may be raised: hope for understanding research issues at a deeper epistemological level rather than mere technicalities; hope for extending understandings of language and

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learning to wider horizons, epistemologically congruent with naturalist research; hope for merging the knowledge created in unnecessarily fragmented camps of language teaching and literacy education; and hope for breathing new life into language and literacy education through living life-like acts of inquiry in real-life contexts of teaching and learning language and literacy and with the aim of gaining truly meaningful knowledge and wisdom.

References Albers, P., Holbrook, T., & Flint, A. (Eds.). (2013). New methods of literacy research. New York: Routledge. Alvesson, M., & Karreman, D. (2011). Qualitative research and theory development: Mystery as method. London: Sage. Anderson, G. (1998). Fundamentals of educational research (2nd ed.). London: Falmer Press. Barkhuizen, G., Benson, P., & Chik, A. (2014). Narrative inquiry in language teaching and learning research. New York: Routledge. Barton, D. (2007). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Benson, P., Chik, A., Gao, X., Huang, J., & Wang, W. (2009). Qualitative research in language teaching and learning journals, 1997–2006. The Modern Language Journal, 93(1), 79–90. Chaudron, C. (1986). The interaction of quantitative and qualitative approaches to research: A view of the second language classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 20(4), 709–717. Cheek, J. (2005). The practice and politics of funded qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 387–409). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Cleghorn, A., & Genesee, F. (1984). Languages in contact: An ethnographic study of interaction in an immersion school. TESOL Quarterly, 18(4), 595–625. Davis, K. A. (Ed.). (2011). Critical qualitative research in second language studies: Agency and advocacy. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. Dornyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics: Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duff, P. (2013). Ethnographic research in applied linguistics: Exploring language teaching, learning, and use in diverse communities. London: Routledge. Duke, N. K., & Mallette, M. H. (Eds.). (2011). Literacy research methodologies (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press. Erickson, F. (2011). A history of qualitative inquiry in social and educational research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 43–59). London: Sage. Fasheh, M. (1990). Community education: To reclaim and transform what has been made invisible. Harvard Educational Review, 60(1), 19–36. Ferrini, C. (2015). Research “values” in the humanities: Funding policies, evaluation, and cultural resources. Humanities, 4, 42–67. doi:10.3390/h4010042. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey. Fuchs, M. Z. (2014). Research infrastructures in the humanities: The challenge of ‘visibility’ and ‘impact’. In A. Dusa, D. Nelle, G. Stock, & G. G. Wagner (Eds.), Facing the future: European research infrastructures for the humanities and social sciences (pp. 121–134). Berlin: SCIVERO Verlag. Gabrys-Barker, D., & Wojtaszek, A. (Eds.). (2014). Studying second language acquisition from a qualitative perspective. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Genesee, F., Lindholm-Leary, K. J., Saunders, W. M., & Christian, D. (Eds.). (2006). Educating English language learners: A synthesis of research evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graves, D. H. (1999). Bring life into learning: Create a lasting literacy. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Hashemi, M. R. (2012). Reflections on mixing methods in applied linguistics research. Applied Linguistics, 33(2), 206–212. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, S. B., Street, B., & Mills, M. (2008). On ethnography: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College Press. Heigham, J., & Croker, R. A. (Eds.). (2009). Qualitative research in applied linguistics: A practical introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hornberger, N. H. (2003). Continua of biliteracy: An ecological framework for educational policy, research, and practice in multilingual settings. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hornberger, N. H., & Skilton-Sylvester, E. (2000). Revisiting the continua of biliteracy: International and critical perspectives. Language and Education, 14(2), 96–122. Hughes, J., & Sharrock, W. (1997). The philosophy of social research. London: Longman. Kamberelis, G., & Dimitriadis, G. (2004). On qualitative inquiry: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College Press. Kamil, M. L., Mosenthal, P. B., Pearson, P. D., & Barr, R. (Eds.). ( 2000 ). Handbook of reading research (Vol. III). New York: Routledge. Kincheloe, J. (2008). Knowledge and critical pedagogy: An introduction. New York: Springer. King, K. A., & Mackey, A. (2016). Research methodology in second language studies: Trends, concerns, and new directions. The Modern Language Journal, 100(Supplement), 209–227. Kress, T. M. (2011). Critical praxis research: Breathing new life into research methods for teachers. Dordrecht: Springer. Leung, C., Harris, R., & Rampton, B. (2004). Living with inelegance in qualitative research on task-based learning. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical pedagogies and language learning (pp. 242–267). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loftus, S., & Rothwell, R. (2010). The origins of qualitative research: The importance of philosophy. In J. Higgs, N. Cherry, R. Macklin, & R. Ajjawi (Eds.), A discourse on qualitative methodologies (pp. 19–30). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Martin, N. M., Selena Protacio, M., Huang, H.-Y., Kuo, N.-C., & Harman, D. K. (2012). Historical development of literacy research. In The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. doi:10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0506. Mirhosseini, S. A. (2011). Who accepts? Who rejects?: The case of a rejected paper in applied linguistics. In F. Salager-Meyer & B. Lewin (Eds.), Crossed words: Criticism in scholarly writing (pp. 153–172). New York: Peter Lang. Mirhosseini, S. A. (2017). ‘Scientism’ as a linchpin of oppressing isms in language education research. In D. J. Rivers & K. Zotzmann (Eds.), Isms in language education: Oppression, intersectionality and emancipation. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Mirhosseini, S. A., & Samar, R. G. (2015). Ideologies of English language teaching in Iranian academic research: Mainstream, alternative, and beyond. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 12(2), 110–136. doi:10.1080/15427587.2015.1032071. Morse, J. M., Barrett, M., Mayan, M., Olson, K., and Spiers, J. (2002). Verification strategies for establishing reliability and validity in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1(2), Article 2. Retrieved October 4, 2014 from, http://www.ualberta.ca/ ijqm/ Nunan, D. (1992). Research methods in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah: Laurence Erlbaum. Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. London: Routledge.

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Riazi, A. M., & Candlin, C. N. (2014). Mixed-methods research in language teaching and learning: Opportunities, issues and challenges. Language Teaching, 47(2), 135–173. doi:10.1017/S0261444813000505. Richards, K. (2004). Qualitative inquiry in TESOL. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Richards, K. (2009). Trends in qualitative research in language teaching since 2000. Language Teaching, 42(2), 147–180. Schaafsma, D., Vinz, R., Brock, S., Dickson, R., & Sousanis, N. (2011). On narrative inquiry: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College Press. Snape, D., & Spencer, L. (2003). The foundations of qualitative research. In J. Chie & J. Lewis (Eds.), Qualitative research practice: A guide for social science students and researchers (pp. 1–23). London: Sage. Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stubbs, M. (1980). Language and literacy: The sociolinguistics of reading and writing. London: Routledge and Kegan. Zacharias, N. T. (2012). Qualitative research methods for second language education: A coursebook. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Part I

Theoretical Considerations

Chapter 2

(Il)Legitimate Knowledge in English Language Education Research Ruanni Tupas

A manuscript I recently sent to a top-tier journal for review was rejected. One of the two referees took note of the powerful introduction which, to her, raised hopes for a well-written paper. However, in the end, the paper failed to impress the referee because there was no discussion of methodology. I was ready to find out why it was felt that the paper needed a methodology, but the review was cut short, I suspect because the referee felt reading the paper was a waste of precious time. We can dismiss this review as uncommon and idiosyncratic, maintaining that by and large reviewers give more constructive and substantive feedback on manuscripts submitted to journals. This chapter, however, argues that the problem with this particular review is not simply that it is very short but, more importantly, that it assumes that the manuscript is not worth reading because it has no methodology. This particular stance towards knowledge production – or what counts as legitimate knowledge and what does not – is not an isolated one. In fact, it is a widespread view of what constitutes research in the social sciences and, more specifically, in language education, even including work that is broadly viewed as qualitative in nature. An overdependence on methods is sweeping much of the academic world, and this is in no way surprising; “new technologies for valuing research coopt academic values of peer-review, evidence and research” (Mills and Ratcliffe 2012, p. 152), meaning that the commoditization of knowledge in competitive markets outside the academe demands that the research predispositions of scholars and students be (re)aligned with a scientific habitus – disciplined, rigorous, and methodical – in order for them to be credible and for their research to be marketable. This has resulted in some forms of knowledge being devalued because they emerged out of purportedly unscientific modes of inquiry. The challenge for qualitative

R. Tupas () National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 54H Nanyang View, 06-15, Singapore 639669, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_2

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research today is how to address this market-mediated need for scientific research without losing “its radical possibilities to produce knowledge differently” (St. Pierre 2011, p. 613). Reflecting on the process as a means of sense-making, my manuscript was perceived as unworthy of publication because it failed to deploy any acceptable method, thus the knowledge produced in it was illegitimate and untrustworthy. There was no mention of the paper’s key argument, whether or not it was sensible; in fact, there was not a word about the content of the paper itself. The referee was clearly looking for methodology but, in the process, overlooked my argument. I would like to refer to this as an example of the delegitimization of knowledge in (English) language education research. This chapter explores various ways of producing or legitimizing knowledge, and not determining which ways are better than others. It does not argue that my way of arguing – or more formally, producing knowledge – is superior to other ways. I contend that any kind of research is potentially good as long as it is judged within its own standards and belief systems. The trajectory is drawn from my own experience with research in English language education during which departures from dominant ways of doing research have resulted in the devaluing of particular arguments and, in one instance, loss of research funding. In what Apple (1999) calls “the institutionalized and increasingly marketized hierarchies of legitimate knowledge” (p. 345), knowledge and arguments generated without methods are at the bottom of the hierarchies and, worse, may be rejected altogether.

Democratizing Knowledge Production First of all, any lack of methods requires unpacking. A research paper may be polemical or conceptual in nature, but some people do not call it a research paper on grounds that any research must have a clearly stated research design at the onset of the scholarly investigation. These days, “theoretical work is facing a hard time” (Tanggaard 2013, p. 410). Moreover, it is also possibly the case that the referee views methods as those which assume a “defined and regular plan” (p. 409) or those that appear in “the checklist” or “the guideline” (Denzin 2009, p. 148), but exclude those which account for unpredicted ‘data’ which have emerged from the process of doing research itself. In other words, some methods may have been described both in “at best retrospective” way and as “a kind of subsequent rationalization of what was done” (p. 409). The researcher follows the object of the study even if this departs from pre-set methods, and this becomes the method itself; the process of following and collecting data through various distractions (Tanggaard 2013) and serendipities (Morrissey 2014). And yet, there may still be another way to clarify a research paper’s so-called lack of methodology. It is also possible that prior to the writing of the paper itself, there was really no data to speak of, if by this we mean evidence or facts engendered by a formal research investigation. In this sense, data collection “is not a separate

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process that starts only after the research project is designed, but something we all constantly do as living human beings with memories” (Brinkmann 2012, p. 13). In other words, the writing itself is both a method of collecting data and a means of theorizing based on such data. The writing process, broadly defined, could have begun with a crack or by entering a crack (cf. Henderson 2014) in interaction or thinking from which emerged everyday life materials (Brinkmann 2012). By writing about everyday life materials, one begins to collect data and theorize about them; thus the paper cannot describe a research design in a traditional way because there was no such a thing to begin with prior to the actual writing of the paper. Writing, method, and theory are inseparable from each other because writing itself “is a method of inquiry” (Brinkmann 2012, p. 13). In our traditional understanding of what constitutes research, the writing itself is an act after the fact, so to speak. One can engage in “thinking-in-writing” (Athanases and Heath 1995, p. 282), thinking through data as one writes, but the fundamental assumption here is that research has already been completed and the task of writing is to make sense of all of it. In the sense of this chapter, writing is constitutive of research itself, responsible for the creation of data, evidence and knowledge; its central aim is to “understand the world better” (Brinkmann 2012, p. 4, italics as original). This is writing-as-research. Thus, it is not that some papers have no methodology, but that scholars and writers operate on radically different understandings of what methodology is. In most instances, methods are tools of inquiry; in some cases, inquiry is a methodological tool. All deploy different epistemologies (or different assumptions about the nature of knowledge and how it is produced), and thus are deeply implicated in the politics of evidence and knowledge production. As mentioned above, democratizing knowledge production means opening up or embracing all potential pathways to creating knowledge. It is not simply constrained by a narrow view of what constitutes research and evidence and, thus, legitimate knowledge, especially if this narrow view privileges scientific tools in the study of human life (Denzin 2009) or panders to the desires and predilections of the knowledge economy (Mills and Ratcliffe 2012). Moreover, democratizing the production of knowledge through research is also not simply about the debate between quantitative and qualitative forms of research, although English language education and applied linguistics have had about two decades of sustained discussion regarding this (Athanases and Heath 1995; Davis 1995; Lazaraton 1995). It is true that the intellectual tide against qualitative work is strong, perhaps even stronger now because of state- and market-driven emphasis on research based on “scientific rigor” (Lazaraton 1995, p. 462) drawn from statistics, graphs, and numbers. However, the valorization of methodology – or methodology as typically viewed in academic research – has even become more pervasive in qualitative work as well, especially as it relates to an understanding of methods as tools for data collection, precisely as a defensive response to the criticism that qualitative methods are not scientific enough because they do not lend themselves to “step-by-step instruction” (Henze 1995, p. 595), and thus are imprecise and untrustworthy. It is worthwhile to transcend the quantitative–qualitative debate and recast the conversation along the lines of how knowledge is legitimized in academic

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work, specifically English language education research in the case of this chapter. Thus, in the next section, I describe one account of how knowledge is produced but, in the end, delegitimized because of so-called incommensurable beliefs about the nature of research, evidence, and knowledge.

Writing as Data Gathering and Theorizing My students in a business English and communication class were in the middle of a group discussion concerning intercultural communication. They were discussing a dialog between participants of different nationalities, and their job was supposed to make sense of the different but sometimes overlapping styles of communication. One student asked why the names of the participants were provided because, according to him, these gave away their respective nationalities. Consequently, their group was forced to engage in stereotyping while making sense of the intercultural moments in the interaction. Was this not what the whole exercise was trying to avoid? His point was that if the participants in the dialog were not named, he and his classmates would have probably produced a more complex and robust analysis of the dialogue. A critical understanding of intercultural communication was already introduced to and impressed upon them in lectures in earlier sessions prior to the group discussion, but it was obviously still lost on me as I designed materials for the course. In hindsight, the student was critiquing the “concretization of nations” through materials design (Ono 2010, p. 88) which “pushes us in the direction of a ‘dictatorship’ of the cultural by reducing the individual to his/her cultural membership” (Abdallah-Pretceille 2006, p. 476). My student’s question highlighted the durability of essentialism and stereotyping in intercultural communication, even in the context of a critical approach to language pedagogy. Despite conscious attempts to demolish stereotypes in English language classrooms, essentializing tendencies continue to sustain classroom practice, such as materials development. After the class, I went back to all remaining exercises and activities and revised them according to the student’s seemingly simple but immensely profound commentary on my materials. In the next tutorial session, the students discussed intercultural issues again but now using the revised materials. This time, I turned the tables on them. In one exercise, students were making sense of a dialog between two participants, with one of them (Participant B) exhibiting a very direct and quite confrontational style of communication. During the class discussion, I observed that all of those who articulated their thoughts about the dialog would repetitively refer to this participant as a he even if both participants were no longer named but simply referred to as ‘Speaker A’ and ‘Speaker B’. After a few minutes of discussion, I asked them why they thought ‘Participant B’ was male. The momentary silence I generated after my question pushed the students to confront their own stereotypes and biases.

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Amidst all these practices of self-criticism and critical reflection, all lecturers in my institution were required to demonstrate reflective teaching; we were compelled to show evidence of good teaching practice by reflecting on what we do in the classroom and to translate such reflection into better teaching and learning. During appraisal time, reflective teaching was necessary to prove that we were constantly engaged in improving our teaching. Thus, I began writing down – or reflecting on – what had transpired in my class for two weeks. I resolved to continue to work on these points in the next semester by making sweeping changes to all my materials, especially those concerning lessons in intercultural communication. In the next semester, I was not only ready to use my revised materials, but I also became consciously aware of the need to capture students’ responses to specific exercises and activities. Thus, while I continued reflecting on these classroom realities, I was also reconstructing interactions between students and myself on my computer after every session. I could not audio-record or videotape the discussions for lack of permission to do so and, therefore, reconstructing the exchanges out of memory was the only viable alternative. My aim here was hopefully to capture some nuances in students’ thinking about the intercultural materials as part of my desire to show reflective teaching. At this time, I was not in any way concerned about the theoretical or conceptual implications of the issues I was reflecting on; I was simply concerned about how to pull all my thoughts and experiences together in writing to demonstrate reflective teaching. In hindsight, Brinkmann (2012) would call these everyday life materials, except that I had no theory to give them some conceptual coherence, because these were materials drawn from my everyday life as a teacher mediated by objects, situations, and events such as classroom exercises that I revised (objects), classroom dialogs (situations), and students’ questions and answers which change the course of interaction and thinking in class (events). Consequently, I began developing my teaching portfolio by writing about my experience designing and revising my intercultural communication materials. As I was writing, however, I came face-to-face with far bigger issues implicated in my work. For example, I was beginning to think critically about the complex nature of materials development, slowly being drawn towards the position that one need not make massive changes to course materials in order to make a profound impact on student learning. This position developed into what I would call insertions and interruptions in teaching and learning which basically take the view that small and seemingly insignificant changes to materials (such as deleting names of dialog participants) could transform lives in the classroom (see Tupas 2010). These insertions and interruptions are now central to the articulation of my philosophy of teaching. On the other hand, writing about my experience also pushed me to unpack the nature of intercultural education, especially one that explicitly takes on a critical stance against cultural essentialism and ethnocentrism. Through my reflection in writing, I began to realize that even politically progressive intercultural education frameworks do not necessarily translate into progressive or critical interculturalism in the classroom. From my own experience, interculturalism in practice is far more

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complex than is envisioned by broad agendas and frameworks. All these ideas and realizations emerged out of my writing which served as a tool to help me create knowledge. Increasingly, I became even more disturbed but, at the same time, more stimulated by the argument emerging from my writing. This argument about the messiness of intercultural education in practice was, of course, not the reason for writing. On the contrary, it was through writing that the argument took shape. This was how my writing as a form of inquiry served as a methodological tool. I was then convinced at the time that there was more to my writing than simply doing a reflective piece of work. Thus, I decided to follow my argument by locating it in the literature in the area of intercultural communication studies, identifying research gaps that could make my argument potentially more compelling, and describing the process through which my main argument emerged. Whereas writing in scholarly work typically serves as a platform for the articulation and presentation of research findings, thus practically making writing uninvolved in the determination of the right methods, the collection of data, and the theorization process (because all this is presumed to have been determined before the act of writing), the kind of writing I was engaged in was thoroughly implicated in the research process itself. It produced an argument, and in the process of developing it, I also began to collect data. What were, otherwise, raw everyday life materials (e.g. reconstructions of class discussions and the revised materials), became the evidence that would support my argument. Thus, as I developed and pursued my argument, hoping to strengthen it theoretically as I dug deep into critical pedagogy and intercultural communication studies, I was thinking backwards as I attempted to provide “a kind of subsequent rationalization” (Denzin 2009, p. 409) of my writing as a methodological tool for the extraction of truth and knowledge from everyday life.

The Politics of Research, Evidence, and Knowledge The paper that emerged from my reflective practice described above was submitted to an international refereed journal for possible publication. After three months of waiting, I received the referees’ report rejecting the paper. The feedback was long and detailed but the rejection hinged mainly on a critical point about the paper: it had no research design, thus my evidence was anecdotal, weak, and unreliable. Interestingly, I already anticipated this point of contention so I painstakingly described how I got to the framing of the paper. I argued that the absence of a research design was in fact one of the positive qualities of the paper. The data used was not subjected – as is typically expected – to a precise and rigorous methodology framed within a clearly drawn out theoretical framework, supported by a research problem and some research questions. In other words, the data was (in principle, at least) uncontaminated by a formal research agenda or a theoretical framework. Instead of a research agenda framing the data and how it was/should have been read, it was the writing itself, conceptualized earlier as a method of inquiry, which

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generated the data and also led to the framing of the argument of the paper. In this case, it might have been that instead of data simply being used to illuminate theory, such writing-generated data helped produce theoretical insights or knowledge. The description of the research process above does not in any way say much about the quality of the paper, but more so about the significance of my argument. However, the decision to reject the paper focused on its lack of a research design, thus making my evidence anecdotal at best. One of the referees, in fact, was more scathing when explaining the point about the improbability of the data, insinuating that I manufactured it, especially the one concerning my reconstruction of classroom interaction after each session (for lack of permission to record it as I mentioned above). For the purpose of argument, we can assume that the referees were right and justified about the shortcomings of the paper. However, what is crucially important to highlight here is the fact that both referees, despite writing long reviews, did not focus on the argument or the content of my paper. The two reviews did not acknowledge (or question) the significance of my argument; thus, both referees did not engage the paper (or me as the author) on the level of content and argument. Whatever knowledge produced in the paper was valueless or insignificant because the paper did not begin with a well-framed research design from which appropriate methods of research could have emerged. How then, can we make sense of the referees’ decision not to discuss the paper’s arguments? First, we can possibly explain it within Janesick’s (1994) notion of methodolatry which is “a combination of method and idolatry, to describe a preoccupation with selecting and defending methods to the exclusion of the actual substance of the story being told” (Janesick 1994, p. 215). This notion has been interpreted as “a privileging of methods over all other inquiry considerations” (Tafaghodtari 2009, p. 274), thus resulting in “researchers losing sight of the subject matter” (Brinkmann et al. 2014, p. 38) which, in turn, results in freeing inquiry rather than inspiring it. As has been emphasized early on in the chapter, my aim is not to pit one research tradition against another (e.g., quantitative against qualitative) or to discredit our general understanding of research work as grounded in “a previously developed logical strategy, which can then be implemented faithfully” (Tafaghodtari 2009. p. 278). Rather, my aim is to highlight the general lack of openness to knowledge produced through means other than what is typically expected. This problem transcends the quantitative–qualitative divide because both, despite operating on radically different epistemologies concerning the nature of knowledge, share broadly the same assumption about how knowledge should be produced and share the perspective that it must begin with a well-crafted research design, thus the presentation of findings must be able to account for this in the writing. Dörnyei (2007), for example, has “never heard of, say, a poem being accepted for a post-graduate dissertation/thesis in applied linguistics” (p. 294). This statement is generally accurate and is thus indicative of our conservative collective stance towards qualitative research work and presentation of findings, as noted by Tafaghodtari (2009). This points us to a rather obvious observation that in applied linguistics and other related areas in language education, any future possibility

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of unorthodox qualitative reports in the field of applied linguistics” (Tafaghodtari 2009, p. 277) “is disregarded” (p. 277). In other words, a conservative stance towards academic inquiry is not necessarily the issue here. After all, the whole field of applied linguistics and related areas are still focused on the question of methods in research (Aronin and Hufeisen 2009; Brown 2004; Gao et al. 2001; Polio 2001; Wodak and Meyer 2009). Rather, the issue is how such a dominant political and ideological stance consequently congregates around “the worship of method” (Brinkmann 2012, p. 48) which forecloses the possibility of knowledge to emerge through other modes of inquiry. Thus, an “appeal to different distinctive criteria is one way of warranting the range of innovative ways of going about research” (Parker 2004, p. 2). The key question for researchers should be about the criteria by which they should be judged, which they must endeavor to explain to themselves and to their readers. The question is a far more inclusive take on what counts as research, and thus treats knowledge generated through atypical modes of inquiry as potentially legitimate, not irreparably flawed. This brings us to another related and critical point in this chapter: the question of power in the determination of knowledge and evidence in research. Denzin (2009) leaves no doubt as to the central role of power in the generation of knowledge in academic research: the politics and political economy of evidence is not a question of evidence or no evidence. It is rather a question of who has the power to control the definition of evidence, who defines the kinds of materials that count as evidence, who determines what methods best produce the best forms of evidence, whose criteria and standards are used to evaluate quality evidence. (p. 142)

Simply put, when readers (such as referees of manuscripts) ignore the content or argument of a paper due to lack of or dubious evidence, this could mean that they are operating on a particular understanding of what counts as evidence. It does not automatically mean that the research is devoid of evidence. The danger here – and it is usually the case – is when readers cast judgments on the quality of research based on a particular view of evidence without demonstrating a critical self-awareness of the politicized and self-interested nature of their evaluation (Athanases and Heath 1995). Denzin (2009), for example, contends that evidence-based discourse, largely influenced by a global audit culture, saturates much of our work as researchers nowadays, and has become an intruder in qualitative research which can no longer be ignored. Earlier in this chapter, the initial motivation for writing down my thoughts about my classroom practice was the need to show evidence of good and reflective teaching. Apparently, an audit culture has become prevalent in the academic world as well where teachers and scholars are subjected to extreme measures of accountability such as the gathering of evidence to prove that one has been a good teacher. When I developed the reflective paper into a full-blown academic paper, it was rejected by reviewers because of what they perceived as the problematic nature of my data. The point here is that talk about evidence is implicated in a “global conversation” about “the evidence-based research movement” (Denzin 2009, p. 139)

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which sustains and translates into evidence-based policy (Juntti et al. 2009), evidence-based classroom practice (Mitchell 2000), evidence-based education policies (Slavin 2002), and evidence-based language teaching (Kamps et al. 2007). This movement pushes everyone towards a view of evidence which rests on the assumption that scientific knowledge is superior to all kinds of knowledge because it is objective and free “from distorting factors that may alter the way that the object of study is detected, measured and reported” (Juntti et al. 2009, p. 208). In this kind of conversation, experiences and stories as good evidence and sources of legitimate knowledge and argumentation are, of course, deemed unscientific and unreliable (Spigelman 2001; Telles 2002). There is certainly no singular discourse about evidence, in the same way that no one government or institution owns the word science but there are nevertheless “global efforts to impose a new orthodoxy on critical social science inquiry : : : a hegemonic politics of evidence [which] cannot be allowed” (Denzin 2009, p. 155). Similarly, such politics of evidence is also implicated in the commoditization of knowledge that sweeps much of the world today as well, and this reality has had deep and penetrating implications for research practice. Most governments orient their economies towards the accumulation of knowledge that is both scientific and marketable. This has led to the view of social research as commodity which, in turn, has led to debates about the viability of some methods over others. Research activities – and the survival of academic departments and institutions for that matter – must now be justified on monetary terms and added value and, therefore, individual interests of scholars and teachers become sources of inefficiency, while research methods that are labelled unpredictable are now suspicious and impractical (Mills and Ratcliffe 2012). While knowledge has become complex and opaque because the postmodern world has become even more unpredictable and messy and hardly anything can be deemed fully ideology-free, the pursuit of and competition for legitimate knowledge has nevertheless intensified because of its role in economic development. Thus, instead of sustained and engaged dialog on knowledge, the easier and more practical recourse for many is to recast the conversation along debates over which methods can produce the most desirable, reliable, and marketable knowledge. This explains why we are seeing books and courses on research methods offering a fast-food approach, risking “compartmentalization of research into easy digestible bit(e)s, not lasting long” (Tanggaard 2013, p. 411). Many scholars and researchers have now been sensitized to “the apparent need for reference-points and typologies of data–handling in order to make research publishable”, thus “locking the researcher into using only ascribed methods while more creative thinking, digressions and the simple following of the object of the research at the expense of procedure are not happening and/or are seen as something to hide” (Tanggaard 2013, p. 411). In other words – and here I go back to the core argument of this chapter – in our quest for new knowledge “the content, or the craft of research, tends to slip away” (p. 411).

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Conclusion I would like to end my chapter with another research vignette. Several colleagues of mine and I endeavoured to explore academic writing as situated practice through the various ways students approach a particular academic writing task in a Singapore Studies module. Our research team, composed of teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses, wanted to undertake the research in order to (re)draw the link between what we teach in class and what our students actually do in their academic subjects. The nature of our research was broadly qualitative in nature, in fact pretty standard or typical in our approach to knowledge generation: we conducted semi-structured interviews with six undergraduate students, examined their individual written narrative accounts of the writing process, observed lectures and tutorial sessions relevant to the essay assignment, and attended a norming exercise of tutors marking the essays. We initially applied for institutional funding as our research was directly investigating student learning which was one of the key research thrusts of our institution. Despite various representations and dialogs, however, the project did not receive any funding. Although there were questions about generalizability, reliability, and other related issues which betrayed the approving team’s quantitative bias, one of the criticisms of our research design that stood out had to do with the absence of a think-aloud protocol in our menu of methods. If we were to conduct a qualitative, ethnographically-inspired type of research, we were told, a think-aloud protocol had to be part of it. To cut the story short, there were deep reservations about our research design which eventually led to its failure to get institutional funding. Our team nevertheless went on to conduct the research for one semester, initiating a cross-faculty discussion and using our findings to make changes to our EAP materials. One can argue that this case was an isolated case. But even among the experts, there are seemingly irreconcilable understandings about research. Henze (1995, p. 596), for example, puts Berg (1989) to task for implying that interviewing and unobtrusive measures are not ethnographic, and “for relegating ethnography to the status of a data collection technique when in fact it is a methodological approach that encompasses many data collection techniques”. Nevertheless, the impact of such an ideological stance towards what counts as research upon the material conditions of research and teaching was palpable and immediate: we were denied funding. The point of contention was fundamentally the same as my experience with my manuscript, although this time we actually had a recognizable research design; the knowledge we attempted to produce was deemed irrelevant or problematic because of a particular bias towards what counts as good, reliable, and credible research. This example reminds us that the politics of knowledge, evidence and research is fought on all levels of life and work. The everyday obstacles to knowledge production shape our lives as teachers, students, and scholars in profound ways. To demolish these obstacles, we should not only embrace “the personal and experiential as credible forms of scholarly evidence” (Spigelman 2001, p. 75) to broaden the space of democratic production of knowledge. More importantly, we must

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subject all knowledge, including ours, to serious critique. Our search for legitimate knowledge through objective and scientific means in research is far from being objective and disinterested. The immediate casualty of methodolatry is illegitimate knowledge. Ironically, in our search for legitimate knowledge, we have shunned our attention away from it and, instead, hid around the cloak of the predictability of the research process. We have been preoccupied with rationalizing how we create knowledge without realizing that we have also become the major obstruction to its creation and development.

References Abdallah-Pretceille, M. (2006). Interculturalism as a paradigm for thinking about diversity. Intercultural Education, 17(5), 475–483. Apple, M. (1999). What counts as legitimate knowledge? The social production and use of reviews. Review of Educational Research, 69(4), 343–346. Aronin, L., & Hufeisen, B. (2009). Methods of research in multilingualism studies. In L. Aronin & B. Hufeisen (Eds.), The exploration of multilingualism (pp. 103–120). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Athanases, S. Z., & Heath, S. B. (1995). Ethnography in the study of the teaching and learning of English. Research in the Teaching of English, 29, 263–287. Berg, B. L. (1989). Qualitative research methods for the social sciences. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Brinkmann, S. (2012). Qualitative inquiry in everyday life: Working with everyday life materials. London: Sage. Brinkmann, S., Jacobsen, M. H., & Kristiansen, S. (2014). Historical overview of qualitative research in the social sciences. In P. Leavy (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of qualitative research (pp. 17–42). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, J. D. (2004). Research methods for applied linguistics: Scope, characteristics, standards. In A. Davies & C. Elder (Eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 476–500). Malden: Blackwell. Davis, K. A. (1995). Qualitative theory and methods in applied linguistics. TESOL Quarterly, 29(3), 10–36. Denzin, N. K. (2009). The elephant in the living room: Or extending the conversation about the politics of evidence. Qualitative Research, 9(2), 139–160. Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gao, Y., Li, L., & Lü, J. (2001). Trends in research methods in applied linguistics: China and the West. English for Specific Purposes, 20(1), 1–14. Henderson, L. (2014). Entering a crack: An encounter with gossip. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(7), 823–836. Henze, R. C. (1995). Book review: Guides for the novice qualitative researcher. TESOL Quarterly, 29(3), 595–599. Janesick, V. J. (1994). The dance of qualitative research design: Metaphor, methodolatry, and meaning. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research. Sage: Thousand Oaks. Juntti, M., Russel, D., & Turnpenny, J. (2009). Evidence, politics and power in public policy for the environment. Environmental Science and Policy, 12, 207–215. Kamps, D., Abbott, M., Greenwood, C., Arreaga-Mayer, C., Wills, H., Longstaff, J., et al. (2007). Use of evidence-based, small-group reading instruction for English language learners in elementary grades: Secondary–tier intervention. Learning Disability Quarterly, 30(3), 153–168.

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Lazaraton, A. (1995). Qualitative research in applied linguistics: A progress report. TESOL Quarterly, 29(3), 38–55. Mills, D., & Ratcliffe, R. (2012). After method? Ethnography in the knowledge economy. Qualitative Research, 12(2), 147–164. Mitchell, R. (2000). Applied linguistics and evidence–based classroom practice: The case of foreign language grammar pedagogy. Applied Linguistics, 21(3), 281–303. Morrissey, D. (2014). An autoethnographic inquiry into the role of serendipity in becoming a teacher educator/researcher. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(7), 837–849. Ono, K. (2010). Reflections on ‘problematizing “nation” in intercultural communication Research. In T. Nakayama & R. Halualani (Eds.), The handbook of critical intercultural communication (pp. 84–97). West Sussex: Wiley–Blackwell. Parker, I. (2004). Criteria for qualitative research in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1(1), 1–12. Polio, C. (2001). Research methodology in second language writing research: The case of text– based studies. In T. Silva & P. K. Matsuda (Eds.), On second language writing (pp. 91–115). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Slavin, R. E. (2002). Evidence-based education policies: Transforming educational practice and research. Education Researcher, 31(7), 15–21. Spigelman, C. (2001). Argument and evidence in the case of the personal. College English, 64(1), 63–87. St. Pierre, E. (2011). Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 611–626). Los Angeles: Sage. Tafaghodtari, M. (2009). Qualitative inquiry: New alternatives for the applied linguist (Comparative book review). Language Teaching, 42(2), 272–282. Tanggaard, L. (2013). Troubling methods in qualitative inquiry and beyond. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 9(3), 409–418. Telles, J. A. (2000). Biographical connections: Experiences as sources of legitimate knowledge in qualitative research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(3), 251–262. Tupas, T. R. F. (2010). Insertions, interruptions: Strategies in challenging stereotypes in the classroom. ELTWO: English Language Teaching World Online, 2, 1–11. Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (Eds.). (2009). Methods of critical discourse analysis (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Chapter 3

Narrative Language and Literacy Education Research Within a Postcolonial Framework Brenton Doecke, Desvalini Anwar, and Bella Illesca

(i) This chapter emerged out of conversations that Desvalini and Bella enjoyed with Brenton while they were engaged in doctoral research on language and literacy education under his supervision. Desvalini comes from the multilingual community of Padang, in West Sumatra, where she speaks both Bahasa Indonesia and Minang, switching her language depending on the people with whom she is interacting. She has learnt English since she was in school. Bella was born in Chile, migrating with her family to Australia when her father was forced to flee the country because of Pinochet’s coup in 1973. She speaks both Spanish and English. Brenton’s mother tongue is English, but some of his most vivid childhood memories are of the words and phrases that his father’s family exchanged when they spoke together in German. As the product of a Sprachinsel comprising the German Lutheran communities that settled in South Australia during the nineteenth century, throughout his life he has remained sensitive to the interface between German and English as his family experienced it. Therefore perhaps it is hardly surprising that when we talk to one another about our research, we are mindful of the role that English is playing in our conversations. We often find ourselves monitoring the words that we are speaking, dwelling on

B. Doecke () Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Melbourne Burwood Campus, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, VIC, 3125 Australia e-mail: [email protected] D. Anwar Universitas Negeri Padang, Padang, Indonesia B. Illesca Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_3

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colloquial expressions and figurative language that do not easily lend themselves to translation. We are also conscious of the silences that exist between us, signifying dimensions of our experiences that elude the capacity of any language to represent them. For all that might be said about the ‘challenges and possibilities’ of English as a lingua franca (Clyne and Sharifian 2008), our cross-cultural dialogue does not mean that we have been able to transcend a sense of the differences between us by using English (cf. Bakhtin 1981/1987, p. 293). The fact that the medium for communication between us has been English underlines the hierarchized nature of the setting in which our conversations have taken place. This has been felt especially strongly by Desvalini, an international student of language studies who stayed in Australia on a visa. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin remark in their landmark study of postcolonial literatures, language is “the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated”, imposing Western understandings of truth, order, and reality that delegitimize the experience and knowledge of people in the East and other regions colonized by European powers (Ashcroft et al. 1989, p. 7; cf. Said 1978). Desvalini’s efforts to develop a command of the conventions of academic English have simultaneously involved a sense of conflict with the very notions of truth, order, and reality of an Anglophone academy. She has been struggling with the knowledge and power invested in the English language, even as she has been learning to use English in order to research the significance that English literature might have for teachers and students in a post-colonial society like Indonesia. But the story that Ashcroft and his coauthors tell is more than one of continuing oppression of formerly colonized people through English and globalization. Their study celebrates the capacity of colonized people to speak back to the center, constructing representations of their experiences on their terms, even when they might be using the language of the colonial oppressor. Vis-à-vis the spread of English and its privileging within the academy, Desvalini has likewise sought to cultivate a sensitivity to other voices, both ‘voices of collective remembering’ (Wertsch 2002) or what Ngugi wa Thiong’o characterizes as a “people’s collective memory bank” (1998, p. 59), and the voices of family, friends, and other acquaintances that echo in her memories of life in Padang and in the conversations her interviewees have offered her. And while she has conducted her inquiry in English, it has also involved what Canagarajah (2013, p.6ff) calls ‘trans-lingualism’, namely a combination of Minang, Bahasa Indonesia and English in her efforts to represent her experiences as an English teacher in Padang. Her attempts to tap into this “plurality of consciousnesses” (Bakhtin 1984, p. 6) explains why she has been using alternative forms of inquiry, exploring the potential of storytelling as a means to challenge the truth claims made by conventional forms of research, thus resisting how she and other people from Asian cultures are constructed by the West. She has chosen a form for her inquiry that matches the content of her research, writing stories about her education and upbringing, and soliciting further stories from interviewees (like her, teachers of literature in English who work in universities in Padang) about their own education and upbringing that allow her to construct an image of how they and their community have been caught

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up in a process that defies the universalizing pretensions of Western knowledge (cf. Cavarero 2000, p. 13). This is in order to understand their commitment to teaching literature in English in a postcolonial society like Indonesia. She and her interviewees have been drawing on the diverse cultural and linguistic resources that they have at their disposal to give meaning to their experiences, switching between English, Bahasa Indonesia, and Minang, as they reflect on their pasts, their presents, and their futures, and the intersections between their lives and larger socio-historical changes in Padang and Indonesian society as a whole. Through our conversations with one another, we have come to recognize how our identities have been shaped by significantly different colonial histories. Indonesia was originally colonized by the Dutch and its struggle for independence involved unification through Bahasa Indonesia in tension with the languages and dialects of communities throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Australia was a settler colony and part of the British Empire, and has since become a multicultural society characterized by tensions between minority community languages and the hegemony of English – tensions that Bella lived when she arrived in Australia as a Spanish-speaking child who then had to find a pathway in the relentlessly Anglophone culture of the Australian school system. Brenton’s childhood memories involve an awareness of how place names in South Australia were changed when Australia found itself at war with Germany, and some German families Anglicized their surnames in order to avoid the stigma of being branded as Huns. English for this community (to borrow from Fishman’s characterization of the status of English in an immigrant society like the United States) was ‘superimposed over layers of guilt’ due to the ‘rejection’ of their mother tongue (Fishman 1968, p. 52). Both Indonesia and Australia, however, lend themselves to analysis with respect to the way language shapes culture and national identity, including recognition of the deeply felt personal struggles that people experience as they seek to give meaning to their lives through the stories they share with one another, while grappling with a society that is indifferent to the survival of the cultures and languages in which they have grown up. As the products of these contrastive histories, we see this chapter as an opportunity to articulate a framework for qualitative research on language and literacy that enables us to tell our stories anew, in a way that crucially engages with our own subjectivities and the distinctive socio-cultural conditions that have made each of us. What follows might apply to the work of researchers in a range of fields, but it is especially relevant to inquiring into the complexities of language and literacy education. As both educators and researchers, our commitment is to understanding the way language mediates our experiences and our interaction with one another. To cultivate a reflexive awareness of how language has shaped us through telling stories that reconstruct the relationship between language and experience at formative moments in our lives is a precondition for understanding and supporting our students’ own growing awareness of language and their capacity to use it in socially productive ways. We are exploring the potential of storytelling to represent knowledge and experience creatively and analytically, thus providing a vital framework for facilitating the exchanges that occur within educational settings.

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(ii) The broad theme of this chapter is the heuristic value of storytelling as it might be applied to language education in postcolonial settings, thus enhancing our capacity as language educators to critically engage with existing social conditions for the benefit of the students we teach. We have each been using narrative for the purposes of research, and our primary aim is to grapple with methodological issues arising from the dialogue that we have enjoyed across the cultures and beliefs that divide us, thereby producing a better understanding of the potential of narrative for inquiry and social critique. This is in contradistinction to claims that are typically made on behalf of narrative inquiry in the West (and specifically in the Anglophone academy), which do not typically engage with the cross-cultural contexts that we have just evoked. Although we affirm the achievement of those researchers who locate their work within the field of narrative inquiry (our own work has emerged out of a dialogue with theirs and is thus indebted to it), it is useful for our purposes to critically engage with their writing in order to articulate how we bring theory and practice together in our research. There is no doubting the passion that proponents of narrative inquiry within the field of educational research bring to their criticisms of conventional forms of inquiry. Against the fetish of measurement, they have sought to develop a mode of inquiry that might do justice to experiential dimensions that are lost when complex social situations (such as classrooms) are reduced to the false certainty of numbers (see Carter 1993, p. 5; Clandinin and Connelly 1995, 2000; Connelly and Clandinin 1990; Clandinin 2007). Clandinin and Connelly’s exhortation to ‘think narratively’ (2000) undoubtedly has appeal to educators who know that an ineluctable condition for meaningful communication to occur in classrooms is for everyone to respect the histories that others bring to class. As opposed to a mindset that is fixated on measuring performance, as reflected in a de-humanizing lexicon that features abstract neologisms like value-add and effect size, educators and researchers who are disposed to listen to the stories that children bring with them to school (not to mention the other stories that form the fabric of social life in a school) cultivate an ever-increasing sensitivity towards the way people tell stories in an attempt to communicate with one another and to give shape to their experiences in story form. Their work is thus relevant to language educators in their struggle with standardized testing. Yet this very “turn from number to word data”, to borrow a phrase from an essay by Pinnegar and Daynes (2007, p. 15) that opens a lively collection of essays on narrative inquiry, perhaps elides the fact that words are always-already there. For all the reifying capacity of numbers to obscure the complex ways that people use language to negotiate social relationships, it is not as though we necessarily have to make a choice between words and numbers. What is at issue, rather, from the perspective of our own research as language educators working across cultural and linguistic boundaries, is a forgetfulness about language, which continues to mediate our relationships and the way we see and understand the world, even when we do not take account of it. Forgetfulness of language is an especially strong feature of

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Anglophone cultures, where people seem to think that everything the world over happens in English, and where people rarely show any awareness of how language mediates their negotiations with one another. Language pre-exists us, inextricably bound up with the social world into which we have been born and in which our consciousness of our actions and ourselves arises. Language, to borrow from Raymond Williams, always presupposes “a definition of human beings in the world”; it is the medium through which we grapple with the meanings of words like the world, reality, nation, self, identity (or indeed jargon like value add and effect size) (Williams 1977, p. 21; cf. Marx and Engels 1970/1973, p. 51). Naming the world is a condition for acting within it. These words all emerge out of a complex interplay between ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves, requiring us to cultivate a reflexive awareness of not only what we mean by these words but what other people might mean by them. To cultivate sensitivity towards the mediating role that language plays in our lives is to affirm the primacy of human sociability against neo-liberal ideology and the truth claims that it privileges. We see this as a crucial dimension of storytelling, namely that stories firstly comprise words and a speaking subject who adopts a standpoint visà-vis the world, when (as in the case of the people who participated in Desvalini’s project) the language a person chooses in order to tell a story becomes a matter of considerable significance (cf. Pavlenko 2007). An awareness of language as a social phenomenon – as something that is unthinkable outside a society in which people live and work together, caught up in the social relationships that constitute their everyday lives – is integral to an understanding of what people are doing when they tell stories to one another.

(iii) Pinnegar and Daynes (2007) usefully identify four turns in the emergence of narrative inquiry vis-à-vis the assumptions that have characteristically underpinned research in education and the social sciences more generally: turns in the “relationship of researcher and researched” (p. 9), “from numbers to words as data” (p. 15), “from the general to the particular” (p. 21), and “blurring knowing” (p. 25). These turns, as they articulate them, all speak to our own experiences as researchers, as we have sought to engage with people on an equal footing in their own cultural settings, affirming the uniqueness of those settings as something that eludes the generalizing sweep of so-called scientific research. Pinnegar and Daynes distinguish between scientific objectivity and the knowing that characterizes storytelling, which is always relational in character, involving personal engagement in the lives of other people and a recognition of how our own values and interests shape our interactions with them (p. 29). They use words like care, curiosity, and passion to characterize the standpoint of researchers involved in narrative inquiry, in contradistinction to the disinterested objectivity affected by researchers working within traditional scientific paradigms.

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Part and parcel of this critique of knowledge claims that rest on a hard and fast division between subjectivity and objectivity is an argument about a failure on the part of researchers within scientific traditions to be sufficiently reflexive with respect to their knowledge. Such reflexivity is a condition for making any truth claim – this is one of the lessons that stories teach us, requiring of readers a capacity to develop a sensitivity towards the way the world represented in a story is shaped by the standpoint from which it is told. In our view, however, this does not mean jettisoning words like science and knowledge, as is perhaps suggested by the notion of blurring knowing. Rather, it means investing those words with new meaning, exposing the false objectivism of those researchers who pretend that they can give an account of the world out there that is not shaped by their beliefs and values (cf. Burawoy 1998, p. 14; cf. Freeman 2007, p. 134). Any knowledge worth having is the product of sustained intellectual and imaginative work, rather than something that is immediately available to us. The starting point for all of us surely involves positing a common world, whatever the field of inquiry in which we operate and the beliefs and values into which we may have been socialized. We all live in the same world. What, then, do we make of it? This is to envisage a situation where people from a variety of disciplines, employing a range of approaches to inquiry, might come together and draw on the insights that each might make available in order to achieve socially worthwhile goals. The knowledges generated by economists or sociologists or historians can hardly be treated as extraneous to the experiences given to us, but must be judged for the insights they offer into the conditions under which people respond to all that life has to offer them, into how they feel and talk about their lives, and their motivations for doing what they do. These disciplines all have the capacity to illuminate the lives of people, even when they explore dimensions that exceed the boundaries of personal experience from day-to-day. The fact that such forms of inquiry give rise to abstractions that go beyond our everyday experience does not of itself render those abstractions alienating or life denying. No one has actually seen a class structure or indeed a society or national economy – as Benedict Anderson argues, the nation itself is an imagined community that far exceeds the capacity of people to “know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them” (Anderson 1983/1991, p. 6) – but this hardly discounts the analytical force of those categories when historians or sociologists apply them reflexively in an effort to understand complex social phenomena and the way human experience is mediated by larger contexts that exceed anyone’s capacity to grasp them. So for us it is important not to repress any recognition of social dimensions that do not lend themselves to being told in story form, even when we are using story telling as a form of inquiry. Rather than just thinking narratively, we need to exploit all the intellectual resources available to us in our efforts to understand and act upon the world. Instead of privileging narrative over other forms of analysis of social phenomena, it is necessary to bring all of them together, recognizing that one is a condition for the others, that our awareness of the differences between them enhances our capacity to exploit the potential of each. This chapter affirms the value

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of storytelling, but we feel that the capacity of storytelling as a vehicle for inquiry and social critique would be radically undermined were people not able to draw on other resources, other ways of engaging with the world (cf. Canagarajah 1996; Doecke and McClenaghan 2011, pp. 5–6). The other main way in which our approach differs from narrative inquiry, especially as it is conceptualized by Clandinin and Connelly, is through using the resources that have been developed by literary theorists in their attempts to understand the nature of narrative. Admittedly, a serious obstacle to a crossdisciplinary exchange of ideas between educational researchers and literary theorists has been created by the latters’ insistence on bracketing out anything deemed to be extra-linguistic, choosing to focus instead on the so-called play between signifier and signified within literary texts (cf. Ricoeur 1984, p. 48 and 79; see also Said 1984, p. 4). They thus locate literary texts in a realm apart from the purposes that ordinary people invest in stories, rendering their insights into the rhetorical features of a novel or short story irrelevant to any understanding of why people tell stories in their day-to-day lives. The theories and types of literary production that Ashcroft and his co-authors bring together as examples of ‘postcolonial texts’ provide a counterpoint to formal analysis of this kind, focusing attention on “how post-colonial writing interacts with the social and material practices of colonialism” (Ashcroft et al. 1989, p. 12). Edward Said has likewise rejected the “philosophy of pure textuality” that took hold in the West, which allowed critics to isolate ‘textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work’, thus turning their back on major ideological issues relating to the social contexts of the production and reception of literary works (Said 1991, p. 4). The ubiquity of storytelling shows that it is a proper object of scrutiny, an activity that lends itself to theoretical analysis of the kind in which literary theorists engage. Our own approach borrows their analytical categories (as they typically apply them in the interpretation of literary texts) in order to understand what people are doing when they share stories with one another in their everyday lives. So it is that “the allinforming process of narrative” has been invoked as “the central function or instance of the human mind” (Jameson 1981, p. 13), and storytelling has been posited as “a valid and perhaps ineradicable mode of human experience” (Eagleton 1981, p. 72). The ubiquitous character of narrative prompts Jameson and Eagleton to engage in formal analyses that explore the complex ways in which through story-telling we organize our experiences. However, as Verhesschen (2003) argues, such an approach never involves simply identifying stories with life itself, as with Clandinin and Connelly’s claims about the importance of thinking narratively in a world that they posit as comprising narratives, as though the plot of a story simply reflects events as they happen in real life. Stories comprise words, rather than experience, and as such they embody a standpoint vis-à-vis the world rather than a reflection of it, a standpoint that is only achieved through formally composing the narrative (cf. Verhesschen 2003, p. 458). This is another point of difference between our approach and that typically associated with narrative inquiry.

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(iv) The kind of formal analysis that we are gesturing towards does not diminish the personal dimensions of any story but enhances an appreciation of the complexities of the experiences being represented. We shall now return to our conversations that we mentioned at the start of this essay and the traces of our autobiographies that we gave there. We want to reflect again on what we have each invested in the stories that we have told, and on the selves that we have variously been constructing through our conversations. We shall do this by focusing on excerpts from writing by Desvalini and Bella in which they have each constructed moments from their pasts from the standpoint of an I-narrator. Spying on aBuleFamily (Desvalini) My plan was set up then, my very own plan. When I revealed it to my friends, none seemed to share the same curiosity. So I carried out the project by myself. The initial stage of my project was to lay a ladder against the wall of this foreigner’s house in order to help me unpack the mysterious life behind the white thick high wall. I do not remember how many times I climbed up the wall and was caught peeping. It had become a ritual after school. I really was conquered by my curiosity. It would make me happy, just seeing the glimpses of this bule family bolak-balik bolak-balik, back and forth in their house. Once in a while, among the many frowns shown to me by the bule parents, I was awarded one or two smiles from their little children who upon yelling ‘Look Mommy!’, pointed their finger at me. I wanted them to call me to come to their house. My mission was to be friends with them. I wondered why they were not interested in me in the way that I was very much interested in them. But I was too innocent to think why this bule family did not seem to want to mingle with us their Indonesian neighbours while their life was actually surrounded by us. Stealing Oranges (Bella) I was too young to understand the implications of the bombing of La Moneda – the Presidential Palace – and the murder of Allende, mi presidente, as my father called him. I was also too young to realize the daily terror that people were experiencing as a result of the military’s repressive tactics of torture, fear, suspicion, inflation, and food shortages. However, although I was too young to know, I wasn’t too young to feel hunger and experience my mother’s shame when she caught me stealing an orange from a neighbour. Nor was I too young to sense my father’s long absences and my mother’s struggle to feed three children. These are some of the words that belong to the stories that my parents told about their old world: desaparecidos, momios, desesperación, miedo, milicos, aislada, soplones, interrogaciones, sufrimiento. To me, these words now represent my parents’ attempts to understand and make sense of what happened to them from their place in their new world.

What kind of inquiry is occurring through this writing? The way that both texts evoke specific times and places obviously contrasts with the kind of truth claims that researchers make when they conduct large scale surveys, when everything hinges on the response rate and the extent to which the respondents can be mapped on to the relevant demographic. We do not wish to deny that research of this kind can serve socially valuable purposes (in the same way that we have argued the need to cultivate a disposition that is open to the insights made available by other types of inquiry than storytelling). The relevant contrast, in any case, is not only with quantitative research of this kind, but with the assumption that there is a “truth to the matter” that it is the researcher’s job to “uncover” (Philips and Burbules 2000, p. 78). This

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kind of scientific approach is typically posed in contradistinction to hermeneutic or interpretive approaches to the phenomena with which educational researchers have to deal (Philips and Burbules 2000). Even advocates of social justice like Elizabeth Moje and Allan Luke express concern about identity-as-narrative studies, claiming that “how people recognize others or respond to the recognitions of others via the telling of their stories” (Moje and Luke 2009, p. 429) does not always take into account what is not visible to the storyteller, such as dimensions like race and gender that shape the identities of individuals. We shall not engage with these various methodological standpoints, except to say that in different ways they all presuppose a split between subjectivity and objectivity of the kind that we discussed earlier. This explains why the researchers that we have just mentioned are able to position themselves above the fray, as somehow capable of getting to the truth of the people and circumstances they are investigating. By contrast, the details in Desvalini and Bella’s stories highlight that any observation on the part of a researcher is simultaneously an interpretation of what he or she sees. The concrete detail presented here – the ladder that Desvalini used to peer over the thick white high wall that isolated the bule family from their neighbours, the orange that Bella stole and the humiliation she felt – is irreducible, eluding a classifying mentality that would seek to organise and contain social phenomena by treating it as a certain type according to a pre-existing set of categories. Such detail reminds us that the complexity of social life is always richer than any categories we might bring to an analysis of it, that social life cannot be grasped by simply applying pre-existing concepts to it (cf. Smith 2005, p. 50 and 54; Smith 1987, p. 105ff). A proper research approach involves, instead, a dialectical play between our standpoint as observers (involving the values and theoretical framework we bring to our observations) and the phenomena we are investigating, the rich particularity of which always exceeds our capacity to know. The way these texts resist explanation is also evident from their incorporation of words from languages other than English, a strategy that is common in postcolonial texts (see Ashcroft et al. 1989, pp. 64–65). Such words gesture towards worlds of experience beyond the experiences of Anglophone readers, thus requiring them to confront the alterity that is always inherent in language and cross-cultural dialogue. Their incorporation respectively of Bahasa Indonesia and Spanish into these texts reminds us that not everything happens in English, thus challenging the unspoken and unconscious assumptions of Anglophones that the world is as they see it, and sensitizing them to the complexities of their standpoint vis-à-vis cultures other than their own. These words also highlight how Desvalini and Bella have each lived in the contact zone (Pratt 1991) between two languages and cultures, thus confronting any presumption on the part of any group of people that they are somehow at the centre of the world and that the world is fully explicable in their terms. This condition of inbetween-ness, of life in the contact zone, is a starting point for questioning the whole edifice of the academy and the protocols that it imposes with respect to knowledge production, including the language and style that it privileges for academic work, giving rise, as Pratt argues, to hybrid texts that combine languages and resist generic classification (Pratt 1991). The standpoint of the I-narrator in Desvalini and Bella’s

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stories provides a focal point for fracturing the discourses for knowledge production in the Anglophone world, thus enabling them to grapple with social and political issues that are larger than any single individual (cf. Miller 1995, p. 24). The I in these texts is a divided I, one formed through the difference between the I that is doing the speaking and the I that is seeing (cf. Genette 1980/1990, p. 194). The older Desvalini and Bella look back on their younger selves, exploring how the worlds of their childhood mediated their upbringing, and engaging in an analysis that would have been impossible for them as children. This kind of construction of their childhood is far removed from any representation of “an overly coherent identity”, a problem that Moje and Luke (2009, p. 429) ascribe to attempts to understand one’s self through storytelling. The split I in Desvalini and Bella’s texts opens up a space where they can each begin to understand themselves as the products of the cultures and languages into which they were born. How is this relevant to the research in which language and literacy educators might engage in order to understand their work? As Marx observes in his Theses on Feuerbach, people who are serious about social reform need to look at the conditions of their own making (Marx 1969). Otherwise, they run the risk of placing themselves above everyone around them, of handing down prescriptions for social improvement from above, and thus reproducing a hierarchical society, even when they pretend to be seeking the overthrow of existing social divisions. Such a stance is identical with that of researchers who imagine that they can get to the truth of the people and situations they are investigating without reflexively engaging with the attitudes and values they are bringing to their inquiries. Marx emphasizes that any educator (and researcher) should seek to understand his or her own education – a point that Gramsci also makes when, in The Prison Notebooks, he posits the starting point for a critical engagement with existing social conditions as “the consciousness of what one really is”, as knowing oneself “as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory”, making it imperative to begin by compiling an inventory (Gramsci 1971, p. 324; cf. Said 1978, p. 25). Any project for social reform requires its proponents to reflect on the conditions of their own making in order for them to generate an educational program that might engage with the lives of others and the socialization that they have experienced. We argue that such reflexivity is also a condition for the work of language educators and the utopian impulse behind their work. Gramsci’s injunction to make an inventory has been taken to heart by both Desvalini and Bella in producing their writing (Gramsci 1971, p. 324; cf. Said 1978, p. 25), as they have attempted to explore the social and historical contexts that have shaped them, thus arriving at a sense of the values and beliefs that frame their research and their work as language educators, and enhancing their sensitivity towards the values and beliefs of others with whom they come into dialogue. They are grappling with what Jane Miller (1995) has called the autobiography of the question behind their research, showing how their work is closely bound up with their own education and upbringing. Miller gives an account of her work as a teacher educator, when she requires her students to produce autobiographical writing that has the potential ‘for rethinking

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teaching and schooling from a critical and feminist vantage point’ (Miller 1995, p.25). This makes them sensitive to what they bring to their exchanges with their students, and challenges them to re-envision the teaching and learning that occurs in classrooms in terms other than those mandated by systems, fully conscious of the autobiographies that everyone brings to such settings as a condition for culturally sensitive negotiations to occur.

(v) The split between the I who is seeing and the I who is telling in Desvalini and Bella’s autobiographical texts opens up a space where it becomes necessary to draw on other kinds of resources in order to understand the social and historical conditions represented. Bella’s narrative, a version of which was originally published in a collection of essays on the challenges faced by teachers of English vis-à-vis standardized literacy testing and other standards-based reforms (see Illesca 2003), lists Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Popkewitz’s (1998) Struggling for the Soul as providing relevant frameworks for understanding the characters and incidents in her story, which explores her pedagogy as an English teacher working with students from a socially disadvantaged community in a state school in Melbourne, Australia. The key reference point for Desvalini’s story, which is part of her PhD dissertation (Anwar 2016), is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson’s (1991) argument about how the prospect of national unification through language as it was enunciated by those who were struggling for independence in Indonesia and other colonies informs her account of her education and upbringing, and indeed the stories of their education and upbringing offered to her by the other teachers of literature in English that she has been interviewing. It is not, however, that such texts should be privileged as providing the truth, in relation to which the stories have only illustrative value. Their relationship to those stories is, rather, an intertextual one, whereby all these texts – the stories, alongside the historical, sociological and philosophical texts on which she draws– can be read as being in dialog with one another, with none of them representing the last word. The word intertextuality (Frow 2006, p. 148) is another way of naming the condition of in-between-ness, the relation between I and the other that is played out through language. Bella recounts in another part of her story a moment when her values and beliefs were brought into conflict with the actions of a Leading Teacher on Multicultural Day, when he astonishingly made an appearance dressed up as Captain Cook to once again lay claim to Australia on behalf of the British Empire. Her own story about growing up as the child of political refugees, combined with the stories that the students at this school told her about their own inability to identify with stereotypical images and storylines that celebrated an Australian collective identity, provide a counterpoint to jingoism of this kind without pretending that

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those images and storylines can simply be transcended. Desvalini locates her own story amongst other stories in a similar way, not simply in response to the imagined community of Indonesia as it shaped the struggles of those who fought for independence from Dutch rule, but in conflict with Suharto’s attempts to impose an official nationalism (cf. Anderson 1991, p. 83) on Indonesians at the expense of any recognition of regional languages and dialects. A crucial moment in her growing awareness of her identity as a committed educator was the publication of Laskar Pelangi, by Andrea Hirata, a novel that represents the struggles of a small group of children and their teachers to obtain an education, despite all the forces set against them, in the form of huge corporations that were exploiting their wealthy tin island, Belitong, and an Indonesian government indifferent to their fate. Although at that time the Indonesian text was only available (it has since been translated into many other languages), she immediately took it into her English language classrooms, in order for her students to read the book in Bahasa Indonesia and reflect on how it contributed to their sense of themselves as active participants in Indonesian society and culture. Thus her own sense of self involves both a consciousness of being addressed as the ideal reader of Laskar Pelangi as well as deferment, as a self that is continually being remade through her engagement with the stories that are being told now that Suharto’s rule has come to an end.

(vi) None of the play of languages and texts that we have just been considering can be distilled into the truth of the matter, whether we understand this phrase to denote the pretensions of positivist researchers to render an objective account of social phenomena that is not shaped by their own beliefs and values, or the claims of people who imagine that they are somehow at the centre of things, that they occupy a position from which they can judge other places to be on the periphery. For this is, after all, one of the great dangers to emerge out of the history of postcolonial societies, despite the claims that have been made about international dialogue through globalization and the spread of English. We are thinking about the recent resurgence of Australian nationalism, notably the jingoism of the Anzac legend that supposedly embodies an Australian national identity, as well as the official nationalism imposed by the Suharto regime on the diversity of communities and languages in the Indonesian archipelago. All nationalism, as Benedict Anderson (1991) shows, involves privileging us against them, a demarcation of those people who are supposedly united by language and history vis-à-vis those who are deemed to be on the outside, who are unlike us. The first person plural form in which such claims are typically couched is given content by myth making like the Anzac legend, and the propaganda surrounding Suharto’s anti-communist purge, affirming the emergence of a collective identity with which people who belong can identify. The research conversations out of which this essay has emerged resist essentialism of this kind by attempting to preserve a dialogical quality across languages

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and cultures without pretending to transcend the differences between us. Truth and identity exist in the spaces between us, in the relationships in which our conversations and storytelling are embedded. Language classrooms are typically places where these issues get played out, as teachers facilitate activities that enable their students to explore how language mediates their relationships with each other and their experience of the larger world. The reflexivity that is cultivated through storytelling on the part of educators generates a sensitivity towards language that enables them, in turn, to be responsive to the complex play between words and meaning that characterises the exchanges between students in classroom settings. Vis-à-vis the cultural and linguistic diversity of students in both Indonesia and Australia (not to mention other places in the world), this is more than a meta-linguistic knowledge or awareness, as is often touted by exponents of English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D), that might be applied by teachers in their efforts to enable students who speak languages other than English to attain the target language (see e.g. Cox 2015). Both in university and school settings, the cultural and linguistic diversity of students, and the wealth of experience they might bring to their exchanges within those settings, remain an unacknowledged resource when language teachers cling to notions of a linguistic standard, whether this be in the form of the standard version of English constructed by standardised literacy testing or the privileging of English as it is spoken by so-called ‘native speakers’ (Trimbur 2008). Our reflections, rather, have been concerned with the way we use language to name the world and engage in dialogue with others who share this world and this life with us. This involves recognising those who speak languages that we may not understand, whose thoughts and feelings are embodied in words that may be strange to us, and affirming the complexity of the meaning-making activities in which they engage when they draw on several languages in order to represent their experiences. There is obviously a pragmatic value in language educators cultivating a capacity to tell stories, as Harold Rosen observed some years ago: teachers who tell stories, and place storytelling at the centre of their pedagogy, are much more likely to elicit stories from their students, and thus to establish a foundation on which rich classroom communication can occur (Rosen 1985). Rosen quite properly wanted to restore storytelling to the centre of the curriculum, thus grounding the curriculum in the experiences that students bring with them to school. Such thinking is quite foreign in a world of standards-based reforms that are typically based on ‘evidence’ of a very limited kind, specifically the results that students achieve in standardised testing. A focus on storytelling and the interpretive play that storytelling involves generates an alternative way of describing what goes on in educational settings that is more congruent with the complexities of teaching and learning as teachers and their students experience them. To tell a story is to imagine a world that is shaped by our values and interests, that is always in some way a product of the multiple subjectivities that comprise any social setting. This is to re-envision the classroom, not as a place where the performances of everyone (teachers and students alike) can be labelled and measured, but as a social setting where identities are negotiated and the fundamental sociability of people can be affirmed. A prerequisite for language

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teachers to create such classrooms and to critically inquire into their practice is to engage with ‘a serious encounter with autobiography’ (Ayers 1993, p. 129), to confront the making of themselves as educators in the form of autobiographical writing of the kind we have been considering.

References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities (Rev ed.). London: Verso. Anwar, D. (2016). ‘Finding myself in someone else’s land’: Stories by teachers of literatures in English in Padang: A postcolonial framework. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Deakin University, Australia. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1989). The empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. London: Routledge. Ayers, W. (1993). To teach: The journey of a teacher. New York: Teachers College Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981/1987). The dialogical imagination. (M. Holquist, Ed., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoyevsky’s poetics. (C. Emerson, Ed. & Trans.). Minneaplois: University of Minnesota Press. Burawoy, M. (1998). The extended case method. Sociological Theory, 16(1), 4–33. Canagarajah, S. (1996). From critical research practice to critical research reporting. TESOL Quarterly, 30(2), 321–331. Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual practice: Global English and cosmopolitan relations. London/New York: Routledge. Carter, K. (1993). The place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education. Educational Researcher, 22(1), 5–12. Cavarero, A. (2000). Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood. (P. A. Kottman, Trans. & Introd.). London/New York: Routledge. Clandinin, J. (Ed.). (2007). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Clandinin, J., & Connelly, M. (1995). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. New York: Teachers’ College Press. Clandinin, J., & Connelly, M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San-Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Clyne, M., & Sharifian, F. (2008). English as an international language: Challenges and possibilities. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 31(3), 1–28. Connelly, M., & Clandinin, J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(1), 2–14. Cox, R. (2015). Contextualising multilingualism in Australia today. English in Australia, 50(1), 13–20. Doecke, B., & McClenaghan, D. (2011). Confronting practice: Classroom investigations into language and learning. Putney: Phoenix Education. Eagleton, T. (1981). Walter Benjamin or towards a revolutionary criticism. London: Verso. Fishman, J. (1968). The breadth and depth of English in the United States. In A. H. Marckwardt (Ed.), Language and language learning: Papers relating to the Anglo-American seminar on the Teaching of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, 1966. Champaign: National Council of Teachers of English. Freeman, M. (2007). Autobiographical understanding and narrative inquiry. In J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 120–145). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Frow, J. (2006). Genre. London/New York: Routledge.

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Genette, G. (1980/1990). Narrative discourse: An essay in method. (J. E. Lewin, Trans.). New York: Cornell University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from prison notebooks. (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Ed. & Trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Illesca, B. (2003). Speaking as ‘other’. In B. Doecke, D. Homer, & H. Nixon (Eds.), English teachers at work: Narratives, counter narratives and arguments (pp. 7–13). Kent Town: AATE/Wakefield Press. Jameson, F. (1981). The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Marx, K. (1969). Theses on Feuerbach. In K. Marx & F. Engels (Eds.), Selected works (Vol. 1, pp. 13–15). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1970/1973). The German ideology. (C. J. Arthur, Ed. & Introd.). New York: International Publishers. Miller, J. (1995). Trick or treat? The autobiography of the question. English Quarterly, 27(3), 22– 26. Moje, E. B., & Luke, A. (2009). Literacy and identity: Examining the metaphors in history and contemporary research. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(4), 415–437. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. (1998). Decolonising the mind. Diogenes, 46(4), 101–104. Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 163–188. Philips, D. C., & Burbules, N. C. (2000). Postpositivism and educational research. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Pinnegar, S., & Daynes, J. G. (2007). Locating narrative inquiry historically: Thematics in the turn to narrative. In J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 3–34). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Popkewitz, T. S. (1998). Struggling for the soul: The politics of schooling and the construction of the teacher. New York: Teachers College Press. Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. In P. Franklin (Ed.), Profession 91 (pp. 33–40). New York: Modern Language Association of America. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative (Vol. 1, K. McLaughlin & D. Pellaur, Trans.). London/Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosen, H. (1985). Stories and meanings. Sheffield: NATE. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, E. (1991 [1984]). The world, the text and the critic. London: Vintage. Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Trimbur, J. (2008). The Dartmouth conference and the geohistory of the native speaker. College English, 71(2), 142–169. Verhesschen, P. (2003). ‘The poem’s invitation’: Ricoeur’s concept of mimesis and its consequences for narrative educational research. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37(3), 449–465. Wertsch, J. V. (2002). Voices of collective remembering. New York: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 4

Stranger in a Strange Land: Conducting Qualitative Literacy Research Across Contexts Todd Ruecker

Over the past decade, qualitative research experiences have taken me to diverse places such as a major university in Chile, a high school located a few hundred feet from the US–Mexico border, and small town high schools throughout New Mexico. Researching in these diverse contexts has not always been smooth or easy, but it has been important. Despite the need for research in increasingly diverse contexts of language instruction, many researchers focus on their immediate context due to the challenges involved in moving beyond the familiar. Engaging in qualitative research beyond the confines of college campuses can be challenging for a variety of reasons. Research on college campuses is convenient because it does not involve additional layers of research approvals or additional commuting needs. It can also be more comfortable focusing on a context that one intimately knows, which saves the time it takes to learn about a new context. It is time consuming to build new relationships with teachers, administrators and students. It may also be difficult and uncomfortable negotiating the politics of a new context where a researcher may be viewed with suspicion due to the actions of researchers that came before – as in the case of more exploitative research relationships such as sojourner researchers who “were travelers through Native Americans’ land and recorded their findings for outsiders. Most left nothing behind.” (Whitbeck 2006, p. 183). Finally, as well documented in language education research, diversity among faculty and students on most college campuses does not reflect the diversity of the US as a whole, including K–12 school contexts where White students recently became a minority (Hussar and Bailey 2014). As a White faculty member researching with diverse student and teacher populations, I am constantly questioning my ability to research and publish in a way that is not biased against the population being researched. Beyond questioning myself, I find myself occasionally questioned by

T. Ruecker () University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_4

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other researchers about my ability to accurately depict the experiences of educators and students of color. Drawing on existing research and my own experiences, this chapter explores the epistemological and methodological challenges that qualitative researchers face when working in contexts and with participants they are not intimately familiar with, concluding by offering some suggestions for overcoming these challenges.

Exploring Researcher Positionality Two important areas previously considered in the literature regarding researcher positionality have focused on community–university partnerships as well as race or ethnic differences between the researcher (and their epistemologies) and those researched. Within community literacy studies, a number of researchers have reflected on the often-fraught relationship between university researchers and community members. Relationships are at the center of qualitative research, which is highly situated and based primarily in human interaction. Grabill (2001) explained how the difficulty in building relationships in part connects to the distinct differences between communities and institutions in that the former is often a collectivelyorganized group of people while institutions tend to be much more tightly managed and authoritative. Of particular importance, he noted the impact that certain individuals have on creating reality: “Design is a process of creating a reality, and those interests more powerful – often because of their ability to construct more persuasive knowledge – get to create their reality” (p. 130). Because of the ivory-tower status attributed to many institutions, they may have a stronger role in constructing the image of community members than the community members themselves have. It is with this in mind that many community members may be wary of partnerships with university researchers, especially with a history of exposing faults in community organizations like schools, something explored by Goldblatt (2007), Flower (2008), and others in establishing partnerships with local schools. In my own experience, I recall attending a collaborative meeting between various university faculty members and teachers and administrators at a local high school. At the end of the meeting, the principal, with many years of high school teaching and administration, declared he was glad it was not another one of those let us tell you what you’re doing wrong types of meetings. This was reminiscent of a principal Goldblatt (2007) described as having “no confidence that my visits would do anything for the school but publicize its faults and gain me professional advantage” (p. 54). Of course, university researchers are not the only one at fault when engaging and reporting on qualitative work. For instance, Sternglass (1997) explained the harm done by a journalist who wrote a book about some of the students in her study, calling one a “miraculous survivor” (p. 265) as he dismissed her accomplishments. In a discussion between Goldblatt et al. (2008), Portillo explained that university members and community members will never be true partners until “resources

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concentrated in the university are actually accessible to communities” (p. 54). Unfortunately, Lyons felt that universities are interested primarily in their research agendas, especially since they have control over the funding. While there might be incentives provided to community members by researchers, these tend to be minimal in comparison to the knowledge that researchers ultimately take from communities. Within education, Jeffery and Polleck (2010) have explored the challenges of building better university-school collaborations by examining the success of a teacher education program situated within urban schools. While they found the initial project to be successful, they noted that “True reciprocity in school-university partnerships : : : requires extraordinary perseverance on the part of both institutions” (pp. 95–96). While these partnerships may be initiated with good intentions, they may not be sustained in a way that both sides truly benefit from the work. In addition to the imbalanced dynamics present in university-community partnerships, researchers have also explored concerns arising when the race or ethnicity of the researcher are not matched with that of the population being researched. As a White male who does extensive research with Latina and Latino multilingual students, I recall a question at the end of my first job talk asking me how I negotiated this disconnect. A common feeling among researchers is that the member of a particular ethnic or racial group has a particular insight into that group because they share certain lived experiences. This stems from the idea that “Epistemology is linked intimately to worldview” (Ladson-Billings 2000, p. 258), that is, it is shaped by the way one sees the world. Moreover, a history of mostly White researchers looking at minority peoples through a deficit lens has been well documented, even when using lenses like Bourdieu’s theory of practice that were originally designed to challenge inequalities in society (Yosso 2005). And, as many have written, a dominant experience of people of color is living in the world as a person of color, understanding first hand how a particular group of people is treated by broader communities. On one hand, some might suggest that only researchers of color can really represent the experiences of participants of color in education research; otherwise, the risk is too great that the researcher possesses an ideological and epistemological outlook that dismisses the experiences of certain populations, leading to a tradition of work that has continually looked at communities of color through a deficit perspective. More recent work on who can conduct research with populations of color has generally resisted a simplistic paradigm that only researchers belonging to a particular racial or ethnic group can effectively research that population. Acknowledging that a researcher does not need to come from a particular community, Milner (2007) noted that they can overcome disadvantages from lacking this connection by being “actively engaged, thoughtful, and forthright regarding tensions that can surface when conducting research where issues of race and culture are concerned” (p. 388). Elsewhere, it has been noted how membership in a particular group is not so neatly organized, as issues such as class, age, language, gender, and other factors shape the ability of a researcher to connect with members of a particular community (Ganga and Scott 2006; Ladson-Billings 2000). No magic formula exists for what makes the most effective research partnership. In working with a Mexican immigrant

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population in the Southwest, would a privileged Puerto Rican from the northeastern US or a middle-class White researcher who spent their whole life in the Southwest be able to more accurately and fairly document their experiences and worldview? There would be, of course, many more factors that go into answering this question. What research experiences do they have? Are they aware of and actively use frameworks that challenge the deficit mindset that many researchers hold? What kind of experiences have they had with Mexican immigrant populations? What kind of questions are driving their work? As researchers have noted, one’s worldview is constructed in a complex way that involves a variety of factors and experiences. Ladson-Billings (2000) described this as an active intellectual process, one that “requires active intellectual work on the part of the knower, because schools, society, and the structure and production of knowledge are designed to create individuals who internalize the dominant worldview and knowledge production and acquisition processes” (p. 258). Scholars of color, whether because they came from a privileged background or have become so inculcated into the dominant ideology shaping the workings of academia, may also have trouble entering into an unfamiliar group in a new context. Before exploring ways to move beyond these challenges, I would like to share two of my own experiences researching in diverse contexts as they can be used to illustrate the ways I have negotiated the discomfort of working in unfamiliar contexts where I was largely an outsider.

Urban High School–College Transitions on the US–Mexico Border Originally from Missouri, I entered a doctoral program at the University of Texas at El Paso on the US–Mexico border, a unique context in the midst of two interconnected cities on each side of the border. This was a very different context from where I grew up but one I felt relatively comfortable in after having spent a few years living abroad and gaining fluency in multiple languages. Around the university campus, as well as around town, Spanish was widely spoken, being the dominant language in approximately 70 % of the households in the area. From the University, one could look across the highway and fence straddling the border to see hillsides full of small, run-down homes crowded together. This was in sharp contrast to the adjacent neighborhood on the US side where some of the nicest homes in the city were perched up on a hill overlooking the border region and surrounded by large, manicured lawns, a wasteful luxury in the desert Southwest. These examples of gross societal inequality became a regular part of my daily life in El Paso and consequently influenced my vision of society and shaped the lenses through which I saw the world and consequently my work as a researcher. The uniqueness and richness of the El Paso context led me towards a variety of qualitative research projects, including one focused on the transitions of Latina

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and Latino students from high school to college. This project began at a large high school located very close to the border that was around 99 % Latina and Latino, very different from the overwhelmingly White Catholic high school I had attended a decade before. The school where I researched had a history of tensions with outside individuals, including a stronger border patrol presence in and around the school in the 1990s that culminated in a successful cease and desist lawsuit charging that students and teachers were being unduly harassed. In recent years, the school had come under increased pressure to bring up test scores on the state-mandated test, something I have written about in more detail elsewhere (Ruecker 2013, 2015). In general, the White-dominated outside world had not been kind to this school. Recognizing my foreignness in this environment and the time it would take to make connections with teachers and students, I began my project slowly, entering through an established bridge program, Gear Up El Paso. For a year, I attended English as a Second Language (ESL) and then English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms as a volunteer. During this time I worked individually with students while interacting with the teacher informally both during and after classes. The latter teacher I worked with, Mr. Robertson, was one of the few White teachers in the school but was appropriate for the purposes of my study since he was the primary senior English teacher. After a year’s time, I finalized plans to invite students to participate in this study. The Principal, a Latino who was familiar with the school context, helped me think through a few items that would make the project more successful, items I had not anticipated previously. First, he suggested that the consent forms be accompanied by a letter from him in order to make parents more comfortable with the contents, since he was a familiar name. Second, as I translated all relevant documents into Spanish, I was using the term investagador and investigator, which the principal suggested changing to researcher or something similar because investagador might arouse concerns surrounding immigration status, a concern of many students’ families. Soon after finalizing study documents, I introduced the project to all the senior English classes, inviting students generally and then offering selected individualized invitations based on my own experiences in the classroom and the advice of the teacher I worked with. As the students moved on to college, one young woman participant seemed uncomfortable with my presence, making sure one of her friends was present for the interview with me and soon after, no longer responding to my requests to meet. I had the sense that she had been in an abusive relationship, so the discomfort was exacerbated through this. Respecting the participant’s discomfort, I stopped trying to arrange future meetings. My relationships with the other participants continued, although I worked more closely with some than others. Interested in helping the participants benefit from the project as well, I was conscious of always offering to help them with writing assignments while answering their questions and concerns about college. Some never sought help while others came to me fairly frequently and I recognize I probably made some slight contribution to the grades one participant received. I provided guidance in other ways as well. When another was struggling to get Internet access at home, I gave her an extra DSL modem I had

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and talked her through the process of securing Internet that would enable her to do homework more easily. Through taking these precautions, both by spending time in the school and by working closely with stakeholders including teachers and administrators, I was able to build trust with teachers and students and find enough participants interested in the study to make it successful. Like many researchers in the social sciences, I did not have any funding for my study so was unable to offer participants reimbursements for their time; in lieu of this, I offered them the aforementioned writing and other support to facilitate their transitions to college. Ultimately, however, I am certain that I benefited more than most of my participants, especially since most of them ultimately dropped out of college despite my small efforts to help them succeed.

Rural and Small Town High Schools in New Mexico My most recent project has focused on linguistic minority student experiences in rural and small town high schools in New Mexico. Part of my rationale for this project has been the lack of research on rural literacy education in general, especially research focused on the increasing diversity of rural populations. In order to secure final research approvals, I needed approval from the districts where I planned to be conducting research. Unlike larger school districts, neither of these districts had any kind of dedicated research office because of their smaller size; therefore, the ultimate authority was the superintendent. I was a bit nervous about the districts’ interest in having an outside researcher visit; both, like many rural school districts, were fraught with politics and had seen many superintendents come through in recent years. My initial contacts with schools began via email. For the first site, I emailed the principal who directed me to the superintendent who soon directed me back to the principal, as she had just been named the replacement superintendent. The principal, who had so quickly expressed support for my study in our initial exchange, now looked at it with more scrutiny as the future superintendent. In order to solidify our connection and get support from the school’s English teacher, I drove three hours one way to meet with the new superintendent in a meeting that lasted approximately 15 min. Fortunately, the English teacher happened to be in the school that day so I had the chance to meet with her and seek support for the project. Confident that everything was going well, I left with the caveat that I needed approval from the incoming principal. From home, I emailed the incoming principal several times over a few months as well as the teacher, but never received any replies. With the project in limbo (despite having secured a research semester and a grant to support it), I grew increasingly nervous. Fortunately, I eventually got ahold of the principal and the project was approved. After overcoming these initial concerns about the project taking off, I began my initial visit to the school, a combined junior high/high school that was home

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to around 180 students in a town of approximately 1200 people. Knowing what others have noted about how teachers are watched in such small towns, I was very conscious of what I did as a researcher, maintaining a quiet personal life. Despite limited food and dining options (every place to eat closed by 6 pm, if not earlier), I chose to stay in town to become more immersed in the community, a decision that was generally greeted with pleasant surprise at the school. Overall, the teachers and students seemed comfortable with my presence in the school, giving me the opportunity to introduce myself to students. Being a faculty member at the flagship university where many aspired to go situated me in a certain way, both positively in the sense of my connections but perhaps negatively in terms of distance from their lived experiences. Throughout my three weeks at the school, I tried to be involved in different community events, attending a few sports games as well as the homecoming bonfire. Although the student population was primarily Hispanic (which is the preferred term among multi-generational families in northern New Mexico who trace their lineage back to Spain) and there were few White students, I did not feel too much of an outsider because most of the students had been inculcated into mainstream US culture and were mostly monolingual English speakers. Students were not as conscious of the lived experiences of being a minority in the wider world since they had relatively limited interaction outside their town. I continued this project the same semester in another school which was much larger and contended with a student body that was more challenging in that there were increased social divisions that included class and race/ethnic divides along with a pervasive drug and alcohol abuse problem in the community. The principal who had initially approved my project had left in shrouded political circumstances that no one talked directly about and there was a new principal on board, one who was cautiously optimistic of the project but had an overall goal to minimize any disruptions in the school, something I would potentially be. Towards the end of the first week, I began talking to individual students about interviewing them and my first few attempts were shrugged off with an ‘I’m too shy.’ Thinking I needed a better strategy, I turned to the teachers for help since they had a more established relationship with students. In meeting with the teachers, I explained the type of population I was interested in interviewing and collaborated with them to develop a list of suggested participants. In order to make the situation less pressured, I made sure I was not in the classroom when teachers invited students to participate. Some returned consent forms right away while others took time and multiple reminders from their teachers to respond. While I did end up interviewing one of the initially more resistant students, the interview was rather short and to the point and I got the sense that the student was more interested in getting the $15 gift card than sharing their experiences. As part of the study, I asked students to share some samples of their writing and this particular student said multiple times that he did not have his notebook with him, although in talking to his teacher it was evident he had it. This put me in one dilemma regarding whether to keep pressuring the student to provide writing samples in order to maintain study consistency or to respect the student’s implied wishes (I did the latter).

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Another challenging moment during this site visit concerned a student who had recently immigrated from China. Before going to the site, I translated consent forms into Spanish for students and/or parents who may not be fluent in English. However, I had no such documents in Chinese. I was torn here between a desire to learn more about this particular student’s story because it was so central to the study (growing immigrant student populations in rural high schools) but was concerned that the student would not fully be able to give informed consent if he did not understand what was being asked of him. With this in mind, I talked to him (and the rest of the ESL class) about the study, gave him a consent form for several days to look at and translate, and then we used the form as one of our tutoring activities and worked on talking through it and translating key words. Here, I asked him to summarize the main points so that it was clear he understood. Ultimately, all these situations would have been somewhat alleviated if I had more time to spend at the school, as the year I spent getting to know teachers and students during my dissertation study made me a presence everyone was more comfortable with rather than as a stranger showing up for a few short weeks.

Towards Better Qualitative Research The two experiences described in the previous section help reveal the messiness of qualitative research, especially when working with a variety of stakeholders in different contexts. I constantly had to think through the best way to build meaningful relationships with various stakeholders and adapt to different situations to make the projects successful. Having depended on the trust of students and teachers as I visited schools, I was conscious of the need to respect that trust when I sorted through the data and wrote about these projects. When engaging in qualitative research across contexts, researchers need to make certain epistemological and methodological decisions. Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the epistemological divides that might exist between researchers and minority communities; divides that may be connected not only to race and ethnicity but also class, age, immigration status, geographic location, etc. In working with these communities, it is important that the researcher takes time beforehand to reflect on their own background and experiences while learning about the community they would like to research with and avoid making assumptions that some point of connection (e.g. shared race or ethnicity or residence in a particular state) means they have similar life worlds. This can involve reading about the community in a variety of sources, understanding that they may, however, be biased. It can also involve spending time in the community as a visitor before starting a research project. If there is a commonly used language in the community, it is important for the researcher to learn it, or at least enough to show some respect and learn enough to connect with community members. It is particularly important for a White researcher working with communities of color to engage in this extra work, ensuring

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they engage in critical reflection on their positionality, something they do not always make explicit (Green 2003). Reading works like Roediger’s (1999) collection Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White can help them in this work of making their positionality explicit. Regardless, ultimately a researcher will always be situated in a community differently and will experience it in a different way. Picking one’s theoretical framework carefully is also important. Yosso’s (2005) work is a good starting point to understand how certain theoretical frameworks have traditionally been used to marginalize certain populations. She focused particularly on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, capital, and field, which Bourdieu developed to expose (and ultimately address) the inequalities in society (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). However, Yosso was concerned that it served largely to reinforce the deficits of minority communities (e.g., lacking in the necessary capital to succeed). This in part may stem from treating research as color and culture blind: “color-blind and culture-blind research epistemologies and approaches can potentially lead to the dangers of exploitation and misrepresentation of individuals and communities of color” (Milner 2007, p. 392). Color-blindness towards anything in an era marked by increasing social inequality is problematic. In response, researchers like Yosso (2005) and Tillman (2002) explained that culturally sensitive researchers should put ethnicity and culture at the center of the process, drawing upon theoretical frameworks that address disparities along these lines; work that has most notably been done in critical race theory (CRT). In drawing upon CRT, Yosso has advanced the notion of community cultural wealth, which has researchers look at communities with an eye to seeing what sources of capital they have instead of simply focusing on what they do not, such as familial, navigational, and resistant capital. As I have noted elsewhere, this work is important but a researcher should continue to pay attention to the way that these communities are harmed by the system, not in a way that blames them for lacking but in a way that challenges larger societal and institutional structures to change in order to support a particular community (Ruecker 2015). Along with thinking through an appropriately informed theoretical framework, participatory research offers a good possibility for engaging ethically and knowledgably with an unfamiliar population. Heath’s (1983) classic ethnography Ways with Words is one well-known example of this work. Heath (1983) wrote how she worked with teachers as a teacher aide, contributing to curriculum design: “We searched for solutions, wrote curricula, and tried new methods, materials, and motivations to help working-class black and white children learn more effectively than they had in the past” (p. 4). She took part in chores, cooking, cleaning, and chopping wood. Working as a consultant, Faber (2002) worked in several different communities over the years in order to study change. He felt that traditional research methods were inadequate, explaining that “I found that in order to fully understand change, I needed to play a self-conscious, direct role in change and fully experience the consequences, successes, and risks associated with change” (p. 13). This involvement in a community can help make them open up to one as a researcher and feel more comfortable working with them. For instance, in taking a traditional researcher stance, Scheper-Hughes (1992) found her participants angry with her:

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“When I emerged to see that the commotion was about, the women were ready to turn their anger against me. Why had I refused to work with them when they had been so willing to work with me?” (pp. 18–19). Schensul and Schensul (1992) have written about what they call collaborative research and argued that instead of forming a dichotomy between finding what is good for the individual or the community, researchers should look for a third area where the research benefits both researcher and individual or community being studied. Delgado-Gaitan (1993) termed her involvement as a researcher ethnography of empowerment, acknowledging that the researcher will always be an outsider but that she can gain a better understanding of the community being studied by encouraging and fostering “the relational process between researcher and researched” (p. 407). In composition studies, Bleich (1993) has described “socially generous research,” which aims to contribute “to the welfare of the community or society being studied” (p. 178). Socially generous research is is viewed as related to participatory research and “begins with the notion that most of the social, biological, and political problems affecting contemporary communities, nations, and the global community are complex and cannot be identified or solved without better sources of information and greater interpersonal and intersectoral collaboration” (Schensul and Schensul 1992, p. 196). In a similar vein, anthropologist George Marcus described the researcher and researched relationship as one of “epistemic partners” (Rabinow and Marcus 2008, p. 71). He explained that researchers have to form partnerships with the people they are researching and be sensitive to their needs; otherwise they are just collecting interviews (pp. 68–69). Those steeped in a more positivist research tradition may not be overly amenable to such work. For instance, Brueggermann (1996) reported how her dissertation committee complained about her going native while the already referenced Cook (1998) explained how her committee questioned her emotional involvement in her participants’ lives. However, those who engage in culturally-sensitive work tend to see the world through a more postmodern lens, which views reality as socially situated and constructed through the use of language. Ritchie and Rigano (2001) explained that this approach does not focus on finding the so-called true interpretation, but seeks to figure out relationally what makes sense. Similarly Dillard (2000) adopted a postmodern stance in discussing “endarkened feminist epistemology,” explaining that language and the work we do should aim to “do something towards transforming particular ways of knowing and producing knowledge” (p. 662). Returning to the experiences discussed earlier in this chapter, I found myself sometimes engaging in these practices and sometimes not. My El Paso experience was most aligned with the practices I have set forth here in part because I had more time and was engaging with a school situated in the city in which I lived, albeit in a different community from which I was used to. By spending extensive time on site before beginning research, I was able to think through the aspects of my study and have it be responsively designed in accordance with the site I was planning to work at. Beyond this, I was able to build working relationships with teachers and

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students before fully putting on the researcher lens (although it tends to be difficult to shed this perspective entirely once one is steeped in academic training). Finally, I took a true participatory researcher stance in this setting, regularly teaching lessons alongside the teachers I worked with, which enabled me to directly witness the challenges they faced in terms of advancing students’ academic literacies. It would have been easy for me to sit back and critique teachers for not having students write longer essays and engage in more source-based writing. However, when I tried organizing a multi-week lesson focused on reading Lord of the Flies and an accompanying essay, I directly experienced the challenges the teachers did, such as not having enough books for students to take home or the constant interruptions for things like pep rallies, testing, tutoring, etc. Ultimately, this work helped me recognize that the blame was not on the teachers at all for failing to effectively prepare students for college but on the school and larger structures surrounding it. In contrast, my project in rural schools has not adhered to the principles I set forth here as fully as it could have. This is in part due to the larger challenges concerning rural school research when one is situated in a more urban setting, hours away from the school sites. Weekly visits to the school site over a course of several months to a year beforehand would have been prohibitive in terms of time commitment and cost. The communities were even further in terms of cultural distance as well, given that I had spent most of my life in urban or suburban settings. There were also some ideological differences as I was an environmentalist vegetarian working in communities that were dependent in part on natural resource extraction and ranching. In order to overcome these challenges, I tried to structure the project where I would spend uninterrupted time in the communities as opposed to try and commute and/or stay in a different community. I was conscious of participating in community and school events like volleyball or soccer games or homecoming bonfires. I would frequent local eating establishments even though hours were short and the vegetarian options were limited. Instead of escaping on my own, I would try to have lunch with teachers and staff members at the school where I engaged in spontaneous conversations that gave me a unique view into the community and how it has developed over the years. As I stayed in the community, I kept a daily journal focused not only on my experiences in the school but also those living in the community itself. Ultimately, we as researchers change and are changed by the settings we visit. As Bruggermann noted, we “are always partially subject, partially researcher; partially participant, partially observer; partially self, partially other – never exclusively one or the other, never wholly one or the other” (1996, p. 33). When researching across contexts and with populations who are different from us, it is vital to spend extra time getting to know the contexts and the people with whom we are working. It is also essential to choose an appropriate framework that will accurately represent their experiences. Through taking these precautions, qualitative researchers can aim at escaping a research tradition that has misrepresented and contributed to the further marginalization of the communities researched.

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References Bleich, D. (1993). Ethnography and the study of literacy: Prospects for socially generous research. In A. R. Gere (Ed.), Into the field: Sites of composition studies (pp. 176–192). New York: MLA. Bourdieu, P., & Passerton, J. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage. Brueggermann, B. J. (1996). Still-life: Representations and silences in the participant-observer role. In P. Mortensen & G. E. Kirsch (Eds.), Ethics and representation in qualitative studies of literacy (pp. 17–39). Urbana: NCTE. Cook, D. (1998). Secrets and ethics in ethnographic writing. In S. Fontaine & S. Hunter (Eds.), Foregrounding ethical awareness in composition and English studies (pp. 105–120). Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook. Delgado-Gaitan, C. (1993). Researching change and changing the researcher. Harvard Educational Review, 63(4), 389–411. Dillard, C. B. (2000). The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(6), 661–681. Faber, B. (2002). Community action and organizational change. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Flower, L. (2008). Community literacy and the rhetoric of public engagement. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Ganga, D., & Scott, S. (2006, May). Cultural “insiders” and the issue of positionality in qualitative migration research: Moving “across” and moving “along” researcher-participant divides. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 7(3), n.p. Goldblatt, E. (2007). Because we live here: Sponsoring literacy beyond the college curriculum. New York: Hampton Press. Goldblatt, E., Portillo, M., & Lyons, M. (2008). Story to action: A conversation about literacy and organizing. Community Literacy Journal, 2(2), 45–66. Grabill, J. T. (2001). Community literacy programs and the politics of change. Albany: SUNY Press. Green, A. E.. (2003). Difficult stories: Service-learning, race, class, and whiteness. College Composition and Communication, 55, 276–301. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hussar, W. J., & Bailey, T. M.. (2014). Predictions of education statistics to 2022. National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014051.pdf Jeffery, J. V., & Polleck, J. N. (2010). Reciprocity through co-instructed site-based courses: Perceived benefit and challenge overlap in an urban school-university partnership. Teacher Education Quarterly, 37, 81–99. Ladson-Billings, G. (2000). Racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 257–277). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Milner, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational Researcher, 36(7), 388–400. Rabinow, P., & Marcus, G. E. (2008). Designs for an anthropology of the contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press. Ritchie, S. M., & Rigano, D. L. (2001). Researcher–participant positioning in classroom research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(6), 741–756. Roediger, D. R. (1999). Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be white. New York: Knopf. Ruecker, T. (2013). High-stakes testing and Latina/o students: Creating a hierarchy of college readiness. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 12(3), 303–320. Ruecker, T. (2015). Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos writing in high school and college. Logan: Utah State University Press.

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Schensul, J. J., & Schensul, S. L. (1992). Collaborative research: Methods of inquiry for social change. In M. E. LeCompte, M. D. LeCompte, & W. L. Millroy (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 161–200). New York: Academic Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sternglass, M. S. (1997). Time to know them: A longitudinal study of writing and learning at the college level. Mahwah: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates. Tillman, L. C. (2002). Culturally sensitive research approaches: An African-American perspective. Educational Researcher, 31(9), 3–12. Whitbeck, L. B. (2006). Some guiding assumptions and a theoretical model for developing culturally specific preventions with Native American people. Journal of Community Psychology, 34(2), 183–192. Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 8(1), 69–91.

Chapter 5

Ethics in Qualitative Language Education Research Christopher Anderson

Ethics in social research concerns “how to make social research ‘work’ for all concerned” (Sieber 1992, p. 3). It is about creating harmony between the researchers, the researched and the community who will read it. It is important to recognize that research ethics concerns not only how researchers conduct themselves in the research process, particularly in terms of how the researched are treated and the integrity with which they carry out their research, but it also concerns the consequences of research and researchers’ responsibility towards society (Kimmel 1988). Ethics also has a role for academic disciplines beyond conduct during research as it can be used to address questions regarding the scope, nature, and purpose of research within the discipline; questions that engender epistemological, ontological, and political self-reflection (Magnan 2005). Ethics then is a key element not just in considering how research should be conducted, but in considering the nature and purpose of research. The rise in concern for ethics in academic research can be identified firstly as a response in the natural sciences to the revelations of forced human experimentation during the Second World War which lead to the Nuremberg and Helsinki declarations which made the principle of consent by a research subject a necessary prerequisite to any research project (McNamee 2002). Thus notions of the an individual’s right to autonomy; to not be harmed; to not be coerced or deceived, were to be codified in academic associations and professional bodies’ codes of ethics and practice. For the social sciences, it was the publication of research in the 1960s and 1970s that involved deception and potential psychological harm to the researched that raised the profile of ethics leading to restrictions in what researchers can do according to codes of ethics and practice (Punch 1994).

C. Anderson () School of Language Studies and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, CT1 1QU, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_5

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This chapter first discusses the concern over the institutionalization of ethics and goes on to consider how qualitative research has a particular relationship with ethics. The chapter then discusses the peripheral role ethics has had in language education research (with particular reference to second language education) and also provides a case study from my own research to illustrate not only the kind of ethics-related issues that occur in qualitative language education research but also to emphasize the central role it in fact has.

Institutionalized Ethics in the Social Sciences For many researchers the starting point for ethics is what is prescribed and proscribed in their discipline’s and/or profession’s codes of practice. These are the embodiment of ethical theories and principles which are not just prescriptions for researcher behavior but a means to admonish those researchers who do not behave in the ethical manner that their code prescribes. The oft-cited exemplar par excellence of codes of practice is the one published by the American Psychological Association (2015), which has perhaps gained its credence because it was one the earliest social research codes dating back to the late 1940s (Dufon 1993; Howe and Moses 1999; Kimmel 2007). This document is more than a guide to psychology researchers being a professional code that includes research ethics within a wider set of prescriptions on professional practice. The code sets out five principles: beneficence and nonmaleficence; fidelity and responsibility; integrity; justice; and respect for people’s rights and dignity. These principles propose that psychologists’ work should benefit those with whom they work (beneficence); should not do them harm (nonmaleficence); should create a relationship of trust with whom they work (fidelity); should be responsible to society and they communities they work with (responsibility); should be conducted honestly and truthfully (integrity); should treat people equally (justice); and should respect dignity, privacy, confidentiality, and individual autonomy (respect). It is stated in the Preamble to the document that the scientific and professional knowledge on human behavior and understanding produced by psychologists should be used to improve the condition of individuals, organizations, and society (American Psychological Association 2015). In addition to this, there is a commitment to respecting and protecting civil and human rights; to the maintenance of freedoms of inquiry and expression in their work; and to aid the public in making informed judgements and choices on human behavior. What this Preamble illustrates is that only very general ethical aims for a profession can be described in a code of ethics. To specify the detail may not be easy as there may be considerable disagreement within a profession as to what the answer to these aims are. The more complex ethical, political, and epistemological aims need the space of academic forums such as journals and conferences to be fully discussed and worked through. Codes of ethics provide something more than just guidance to researchers and professionals; they help create a research identity and delineate a discipline’s

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boundary (Coady and Bloch 1996, cited in Thomas 2009, p. 499). Institutional review boards (IRBs), however, provide simply a set of ethical protocols that must be followed in order for a piece of research to be approved (Kimmel 2007). Broader aims and purposes are not dealt with; explicit ethical principles may be lacking. It is a simple case of adhering to what is typically, in my experience, a checklist that ensures appropriate steps have been taken to guarantee informed consent and privacy, and to avoid harm. At the same time adherence to IRBs is a means by which institutions can avoid negative media coverage or even legal action because of ethically suspect research.

Ethics in Qualitative Research and the Critical Turn Despite certain tensions between different theoretical orientations towards ethics, one may be given the impression of a relatively stable system of research ethics in social science with an agreed set of assumptions regarding how to carry out research ethically. However, the rise in popularity of qualitative research in the social sciences combined with the critical turn that later arose within qualitative research, have seen since the late 1960s certain epistemological shifts that question established assumptions in research ethics. As McDonough and McDonough (1997) note, qualitative research has had a stronger tradition of formulating how research ethics work. I would argue that this has something to do with the nature of qualitative research itself in practice and the epistemological developments within this research paradigm that have engendered a stronger concern with ethics. Furthermore, qualitative researchers are more likely to find themselves in conflict with how ethics are codified by IRBs, when they are actually in the field (Punch 1994). In terms of its practice, qualitative research methods, particularly those that use ethnographic approaches, involve a sustained period of engagement with the researched typically through observation and interviewing where the researcher investigates individuals’ lives in depth. This type of investigation means that researchers often form close personal relationships with the researched during the data collection period (Burgess 1989). This intimacy between the researcher and the researched can be noticed in the qualitative terminology of calling the researched participants rather than the commonly used subjects of quantitative research (Howe and Moses 1999). Such relationships can be seen not just as a by-product of spending a long period with the researched but as a means to help the data gathering process and extract data (Crick 1992). The fact that qualitative research tends to be cyclical and open-ended in design (Howe and Moses 1999) means that in the field the researcher may change their research questions from those that were in their original proposal that had gone through an IRB. Furthermore, new participants may arise in the field who have not gone through the initial informed consent process. Intimate and open-ended research can also reveal findings that are ethically problematic such as illegal behavior, oppressive relationships, professional misconduct, and personal, private or professional problems which require external

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resolution. The researcher is then faced with an ethical dilemma of whether to break confidentiality. Furthermore, there is an issue of false consciousness, i.e. “What if the exercise of autonomy and self-determination by research subjects is at odds with the researcher’s perception of their interest?” (Murphy and Dingwall 2001, p. 340). Generally speaking, then, interpretative research is more ethically uncharted, and thus more ethically hazardous, than experimental or quasi-experimental research. Once begun, it requires more vigilant ethical reflection and monitoring for that reason (Howe and Moses 1999). What is clear is that ethical principles and practice as codified in associations and IRBs are more suited to the linear researcher design and researcher-researched distance that typifies quantitative research. Taking into consideration that these principles and practices originally derive from experimental medical research, this is no surprise. There are three areas in particular which demonstrate that quantitative-oriented research ethics is problematic when applied to qualitative research: informed consent, deception, and respondent validation.

Informed Consent In all social research, informed consent can be problematic (Homan 1991). Indeed, it is very difficult to have a clearly defined notion of informed consent that is applicable to all research settings (Kimmel 1988). The practice of completing an informed consent form prior to the commencement of the research does not sit well with the evolving nature of qualitative research in the field. As Sieber (1992) argues, informed consent needs to be an ongoing communication process with the researched. This traditional form of informed consent does not accommodate the researcher-researched relationships that develop in the field and it can be disruptive to the casual conversations in fieldwork. It fails to give the protection that is needed in qualitative research because of its open-ended and intimate nature (Howe and Moses 1999).

Deception The extent to which it is justifiable for a researcher to use deception is one of the greatest dilemmas in qualitative research. The level of deception can vary so much from one piece of research to another that it is difficult to create a clear-cut set of ethical procedure on this. Decisions on the appropriacy of deception have to be made by considering consequential cost-benefits where the knowledge gained outweighs the costs of some deception of the researched (Kimmel 1988; Punch 1994). Without deception it may be impossible to carry out important areas of research so that, for example, “a study of racial prejudice accurately labelled as such would certainly affect subjects’ behavior” (Kimmel 1988, p. 76). It can be argued, then, that research aims and agendas do not need to be clearly revealed to all participants when

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there is a consequentialist benefit of social justice, e.g. the research of teacher attitudes and behavior towards children such as racism and sexism. Dependent on the research focus then, deception can be ethical (Griffiths 1998). One also has to take into consideration the informed consent given, and the effects of deception on the participants’ autonomy, i.e. do the participants understand what they are consenting to? (Faden and Beauchamp 1986, cited in Kimmel 1988). Despite the lack of clear-cut norms for qualitative researchers, Punch (1994) does provide some useful guidelines: One need not always be brutally honest, direct, and explicit about one’s research purpose, but one should not normally engage in disguise. One should not steal documents. One should not directly lie to people. And, although one may disguise identity to a certain extent, one should not break promises made to people. Academics, in weighing up the balancing edge between overt-covert, and between openness-less than open, should take into account the consequences for the subjects, the profession and, not least, for themselves. (p. 91)

As Homan (1991, p. 73) makes clear even those researchers who claim to avoid deception through a clear and explicit informing in the informed consent process “make some selection of content and to that extent tell only part of the whole truth”, therefore the issue of deception is a more subtle consideration regarding how much information you provide the participants prior to and during the data collection process.

Respondent Validation Respondent validation is the process of the researcher revealing their findings to the researched so that they can comment on them (Seale 1999). On the one hand this process is concerned with the validity and credibility of findings (Lincoln and Guba 1985) being a form of triangulation where inferences from one source is checked with another (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). On the other hand, there is an ethical dimension to respondent validation in indicating to participants the character of the research (Sieber 1992). In carrying out this procedure, the researcher must also consider what it is the participants validate: i.e. the data or the interpretation of the data (Homan 1991). This can be problematic because a researcher’s interpretation of reality may differ from the participants’ version (Murphy and Dingwall 2001). I would also argue that data itself is an abstraction of reality and therefore open to disagreement, e.g. observation notes of a lesson. In terms of interpretation, the emergent nature, particularly of ethnographic research, may present findings to the participants on themes that they may not have originally consented to (Murphy and Dingwall 2001). Beyond the fact that concepts from academia may not be easy to explain to people unfamiliar with them (Seale 1999); quite simply participants may not have an interest for them (Silverman 1999). A final problem with respondent validation is that the revealing findings to participants within a power dynamic may be used by those with power over those they have control, e.g. a head teacher over teachers (Burgess 1989).

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The Critical Turn In contrast to these practical concerns, epistemological shifts in qualitative research have had an even stronger impact on the understanding of research ethics. These shifts in the 1980s and 1990s influenced primarily by critical theory, constructivism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, and feminist theory questioned many of the precepts of the knowledge-making process in social research in terms of the nature of truth, objectivity, power, and the researcher-researched dichotomy (Guba and Lincoln 1994; Vidich and Lyman 1994; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). Known variously as the critical turn or the interpretative turn, at its heart is a critique of both positivism and naturalism (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). A key element of this critique is a rejection of positivism’s notion of the separation of fact and value; and the separation between the objective researcher and the researched. This raises two points: research cannot be neutral and is value laden; and that the researcher is part of the research. Therefore, all researchers need to take an ethical perspective of what they are doing, and for whose benefit. The critical turn’s complex critique is neatly summarized by Holliday (2002) as producing approaches that emphasise that reality and science are socially constructed; researchers are part of their research settings; research must be reflexive using a self-critical dialogue; and the aim of research is to problematize and reveal hidden realities. The range of ideas in the critical turn does not form a coherent whole, but rather forms a range of epistemologies and approaches that raise their own ethical questions. For example, applications of critical theory argue that researchers “work toward positive social change” (Carspecken 1996, p. 3) thus giving the researcher the role of emancipator; while post-modernism problematizes the textual representation of truth (Vidich and Lyman 1994) and the independence of form and content (Tyler 1987, cited in Hastrup 1992). The critical turn also questions the privileged neutral role of the objective scientist studying at a psychological distance from their research subjects. In the critical turn, the researcher is conceptualised as part of their research setting and the researched as participants helping to create the research with the researcher. Thus what is created is a cooperatively developed dialogical text providing a possible truth where both the researcher and researched are brought into the text (Tyler 1986). Such an ongoing dialogue can also include a dynamic informed consent (Smith 1990 cited in Howe and Moses 1999). There is then a whole re-evaluation of the nature of the text produced (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986 – a key text in the development of this position). With both the researcher and the participants playing different roles, new ethical approaches arise. The development of collaborative and emancipatory approaches (Johnston 2000; Murphy and Dingwall 2001) can offer a means to deal with the aforementioned issues of informed consent, deception and respondent validation in being more democratic whereby the researched can collaborate at all stages of the research process (design, data collection, interpretation, and writing). Ethics play a role that reflexive researcher must be always sensitive to. Furthermore, the critical turn sees a shift beyond just a concern for the protection of the researched and the prevention of

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research misconduct to an approach which is concerned with a broad moral-political framework (what I would call discipline ethics) where there is not a clear distinction between broader ethics and operating principles (Howe and Moses 1999). What questions are worth asking and how researchers are to conduct themselves in the process of answering them cannot be divorced from the overreaching aims that research seeks to achieve (Howe and Moses 1999). Within this framework of moralpolitical commitment, researchers may work from the cultural norms of the studied in developing a research ethics (communitarianism) in ensuring that research is for the researched and the researchers demonstrate care towards the researched (e.g. trust and mutual respect) (care theory); a constant reflexive examination of the workings of subtle power-knowledge in the research process (post-modernism); avoiding technical control (critical theory); ensuring the status and voice of the research participants (contemporary liberal theory).

Ethics in Second Language Education Research From my personal engagement in second language education as both practitioner and researcher, I have gained a strong impression that ethics has had a rather peripheral role compared to its more central role in other disciplines. The content of professional and research websites; of text books; and of journals all support this impression; an impression which has also been confirmed by a range of scholars. In this section, I shall provide some evidence of this before considering the reasons why this role is peripheral. In a range of professional and research associations, there is a lack of consistency in how ethics is dealt with. In some associations, it is not dealt with at all (e.g. the UK IATEFL 2015); in others, it only covers ethics in terms of professional standards (e.g. the international ILTA 2015); whilst in others in addition to these standards, a disciplinary remit, positions, and research agendas are given but there are still no research codes of conduct (e.g. the American TESOL 2015; the UK NALDIC 2015). Looking at applied linguistics as the wider discipline which second language education is part of, some associations provide no codes whatsoever (e.g. the international AILA 2015; the US AAAL 2015; the European EuroSLA 2015) and some do (e.g. the UK BAAL 2015 – whose guide to good practice covers research ethics, professional standards and the remit of the discipline). It is interesting to compare this pattern to other associations which all have thorough codes of practice: for example, in addition to the aforementioned American Psychological Association; the British Sociological Association, the British Psychological Society, and the British Educational Research Association (McNamee and Bridges 2002). Scholars have noted the relative lack of ethics in applied linguistics research methods texts in the areas of second language education and learning/acquisition (Dufon 1993; Kubanyiova 2008; Thomas 2009). On examining a range of research methods texts in these areas, I concur with this conclusion. Some texts ignore it completely (e.g. Brown 1988; Brown and Rodgers 2002; Chaudron 1988; Larsen

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Freeman and Long 1991; Nunan 1992) while others only deal with it briefly never extending to a full chapter but averaging to just over three pages per book (e.g. Burns 1999; Richards 2003; McDonough and McDonough 1997; Seliger and Shohamy 1989; Wallace 1998). This brief treatment can also be seen in general applied linguistics research methods texts (e.g. Dörnyei 2007; Paltridge and Phakiti 2010) and handbooks (e.g. Davies and Elder 2004; Kaplan 2002). In terms of the range of journals covering various aspects of applied linguistics, I could locate only three which have devoted a whole or part of one special issue to the subject. It should be noted that language testing is one particular field that has contributed a great deal to ethics but this is more in terms of the practice of testing rather than research per se. Ethics has obviously far more coverage in the literature of other disciplines (Kubanyiova 2008; Ortega 2005a, b; Rajagopalan 2004; Thomas 2009). If one examines education, a discipline evidently close to language education, it is clear that there is a great deal published on ethics whether in terms of books (e.g. McNamee and Bridges 2002; Simons and Usher 2000; Tschudin 1994; Burgess 1989) or journals (e.g. Ethics and Education; Ethics and Education Research; Education, Policy and Ethics) devoted to the subject. As noted by Thomas (2009), there is lack of consistency in how ethics is dealt with in the literature. SLA and quantitatively-oriented literature deal less with ethics than work that is more qualitatively-oriented work particularly in the areas of TESOL, language testing, and critical (applied) linguistics. The fact that qualitative work deals with ethics more follows the aforementioned discussion of the critical turn that is reflected in critical (applied) linguistics (Block 2003; Pennycook 2001; Rajagopalan 2004); a turn that has been particularly felt in TESOL (Anderson 2003b) while language testing, with its own ethical concerns in practice, has also had a critical turn (Shohamy 1998). The qualitative critical turn has seen ethics gradually play a more important role, which can be seen by the fact there is a tendency for the more recent research methods texts books to cover it and be can be seen by the fact of the publication of the first book devoted to applied linguistics and ethics (De Costa 2015). Nevertheless, despite these changes, compared to disciplines such as education its presence is still peripheral.

Peripheral Role of Ethics In understanding why ethics has had this peripheral role in second language education research, one needs to examine its historical link to applied linguistics. If second language education is part of (in a disciplinary sense) applied linguistics; intellectually, applied linguistics derives from and is heavily influenced by linguistics (Pennycook 1994; Rajagopalan 2004). Within the development of European linguistics, language is seen as a homogenous unity that is objectively describable as an isolated structural entity (Pennycook 1994). Therefore, with structuralism

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as the dominant epistemology, language can be dealt with entirely in terms of its internal structure and thus without reference to its cultural, social, historical, and political contexts (Pennycook 1994). In a sense, the human is removed from the science as can be seen in theoretical linguistics where humans are reduced to an abstracted ideal (Chomsky 1965). The linguistics tradition of researching language data rather than human behavior also abstracts language from their producers and users. It is little surprise then that the consideration of ethics has not been a tradition in linguistics (Rajagopalan 2004). If structuralism dominates the understanding of language that has carried over into applied linguistics, then positivism as an epistemology has dominated how research is carried out in both disciplines (Holliday 1996; Pennycook 1994). The tradition in applied linguistics of quantitative research deals with language and psycholinguistic determinates of language production and acquisition. In focussing on language rather than the producers of language, research considers natural language data (e.g. discourse analysis, corpus linguistics) or various measures of language performance and competence (e.g. second language acquisition). In this paradigm, language is somehow separated from the individual producers, their identities, cultures and societies. Thus, in second language education research, humans are reduced to an abstracted learner. Having an emphasis on an abstracted individual language learner, on the psycholinguistic and psychological, on quantitative methods that try to eliminate interfering social, cultural and political variables, it is evident that the role and position of the researched is something that needs less consideration. If you consider second language education and applied linguistics as social science, logically at its core are the human beings who produce, acquire, learn, and teach languages. In studying these aspects of human social behavior, it would seem evident that ethics needs a central and not a peripheral role which is, as already stated, is recognized in the critical turn. With the critical turn in applied linguistics beginning in the 1990s, the shift of interest in ethics has arisen with less reliance on linguistics providing the theoretical basis for practical applications in applied linguistics (e.g. second language education) drawing on for example sociology, anthropology, education, communication, cultural studies, and politics. With these disciplines having already seen their critical turn, ethics plays a far more important role which has duly influenced applied linguistics. With the epistemological shifts, one sees the central interest is not just language but the humans that produce, communicate with, learn and teach languages, as well as the complex nebulas of identity, cultural, societal, and political factors that play a part in language production, communication, learning, and teaching. The interest in ethics within the critical turn has two dimensions. Firstly, as applied linguistics concerns the applying issues of language use and learning to the real world, as for example in language education, there is consideration of what happens in these real world contexts are ethical, i.e. what practitioners do in their work. Secondly, what researchers do is ethical when they research human beings in terms of their language use and learning.

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Ethics in a Case of Qualitative Language Education Research In this final section, I use a case study from my own doctoral research to illustrate the kind of ethical issues that occur in qualitative second language education research and to demonstrate why ethics should take a more central role. This was an ethnographic study on the professional lives of a group of ESOL teachers working at an institution of higher education in the UK (Anderson 2003a). The study concerned professionalism in TESOL investigating the teachers’ professional practices and their understandings of these practices, and how this relates to the wider professional discourses and cultures of TESOL. The research instruments were classroom observation, participant observation, group and individual teacher and management interviews, and document analysis. This research fitted into the critical turn being influenced by both critical and postmodern ethnography in the research design, and postmodern and poststructuralist theory in its analysis. On re-reading my thesis, there is an ethics visible in the discussion of my approach where I argue, following Holliday (2002), that I use an epistemology which emphasizes that reality and science are socially constructed; researchers are part of their research settings; research must be reflexive using a self-critical dialogue; and the aim of research is to problematize and reveal hidden realities. I add to this argument the desire for the voice of the researched to take centre stage to make the researched active participants in the research. Moving from theory to practice as I collected data in the field, I was faced with a set of ethical issues that were difficult to manage; a difficulty I believe was caused by the lack of resources I had in ethics due to my discipline. I reflected on the issues I faced in my research methods chapter – as befits a reflexive critical work (Anderson 2003a). Subsequently, I used my thesis as a case study on a qualitative research methods course for doctoral students and staff at my university. In these sessions, students and staff from other disciplines were often quite critical at how I dealt with ethics arguing that their own disciplines are far more rigorous and exacting about the application of principles and procedures. In fact, it was this reaction that motivated me to explore ethics further in terms of theory and practice and in terms of its peripheral role in second language education.

Applying Ethics In the study, I attempted to apply ethical principles drawing on a range of literature from outside of second language education because of the lack of work within it. There were two ways in which ethics was applied. Firstly, in the negotiation with the participants for carrying out the research including gaining informed consent with the teachers and managers (but not with the students). Informed consent was an oral agreement with a vague explanation of the research aims and remit, and a guarantee of anonymity. During the participant observation there was a high turnover of teachers making it difficult to get all their full informed consent. In

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hindsight, not gaining the consent of the students; not having all the teachers full consent; and not having consent in writing were all examples of inadequate application of ethical principles. What is interesting about this was that this research was carried out in an institution of higher education in a department devoted to second language education and my supervisors were in second language education, yet at no time were these inadequacies pointed out as problematic. During the negotiation process, there was a continual conscious reflection by myself on how I dealt with my participants based on the notion of having respect for the people in the research location. In practice, this meant that in the process of them giving (or not giving) consent they had control over when and where I would carry out data collection, e.g. when and where I could observe classes and teacher behavior; when and where I could carry out interviews with the teachers and managers (Anderson 2003a). This negotiation was done very much on the participants’ terms, but as already mentioned, the students were not part of this process. The second way in which ethics was applied was in the way I behaved with the participants in the field. This was a continuation of the approach taken in the negotiations of respecting the participants, but it also involved the negotiation of roles and the development and maintenance of relationships. On one level, this is an approach for maximizing the possibility of getting good data, since if the participants understand and agree with your role as a researcher and have a good relationship with you, they are more likely to provide the data you seek. On another level, this is about respect in terms of their needs and wants; in terms of their right to autonomy and privacy; in respecting their practices and beliefs; and in terms of treating all participants equally. It was necessary to establish my role so that the participants understood who I was and why I was there, whilst also recognising that my role was a positive one, that I was on their side, and being part of their profession, I was one of them even if I was then more of a researcher than a practitioner. I emphasized this role in a range of ways, (e.g. helping teachers find resources during lesson observations, engaging in small talk, and attending social events) to ensure I was not just a distant uninvolved observer. At all stages of the data collection process, the decision-making process was negotiated; for example, where I sat in the classroom to observe, the location of interviews, and what I could note in the participant observation. My thesis strongly indicates that I created good relationships with the participants. Yet, having interpersonal relationships with participants is an ethical conundrum in the sense that developing friendships in the field is a strategy, a way to extract information (Crick 1992), so it could be considered as manipulative (Murphy and Dingwall 2001).

Ethical Issues This problem of relationships with participants can be illustrated in terms of how I dealt with communicating the themes of the research to them. In line with ethos of the critical turn, I had planned to use respondent validation, but I finally decided not

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to do so. This decision was based on the fact that at that stage of the thesis, my initial data and findings were the beginnings of a critique of the profession’s discourse and culture. Avoiding the emergent themes was something I also did when giving the aims of my research to the participants at the beginning of each piece of fieldwork. Whilst I made it clear to them what my general aims were, as the focus shifted, I did not specify that it was emerging into a critique of the professional discourse. I was also evasive when I was asked about the themes of my research in the field by participants. There were two notable instances when this happened. There was a social gathering during the participant observation in a pub after work with a group of the teachers to which I was invited. One of the participants asked me what my research was about. When confronted, I gave a rather unconvincing bland response. Secondly, during the group interviews, a participant asked me if the research was about student-centeredness, and I replied that it was partly about that but giving no more information. There was, in my mind, a clear rationale for avoiding explicitly communicating the research themes. As this critique was still in its nascent stages, I was not particularly confident at the time of articulating the things I found wrong with the profession that were being revealed in the findings and my reading. For the teachers in respondent validation, such data and/or findings could have been interpreted as critical of their practices and beliefs. Beyond the fact that this could have led to a defensive reaction when giving their responses, I was extremely concerned that the participants’ negative reactions would make it more difficult to get further data from the research setting because it would harm the relationships we had developed. My critique was of the wider profession and its discourse rather than a critique of the teachers in the study who I considered to be highly-competent doing their jobs with complete integrity. I believed such subtle distinctions would be hard to communicate to the teachers whilst it would require concepts from the literature which would not have been easy to explain to people unfamiliar with them (Seale 1999). The nature of the research setting made this more complex because I was an insider, not only a fellow ESOL teacher, but an ongoing part-time member of staff. Revealing my findings could have not only affected my chances of collecting further data, but also my professional relationships (and potentially chances of future employment) as well as my personal relationships, as I counted some of the participants as not just colleagues but as friends. Behaving honestly in the field is a supportable aim, but in practice the context makes for ambiguity and difficulty; thus “some deception, passive or active, enables you to get at data not obtainable by other means” (Punch 1994, p. 91). What can be seen in this brief case study is how ethics permeates throughout a qualitative second language education research project. The initial gaining of informed consent is only a starting point. An important consideration is that I often felt ill-equipped to deal with the ethical dilemmas I faced; an inadequacy that I believe was partly due to coming from a discipline where ethics had a peripheral role. Indeed, in the comfort of hindsight, I believe that I made several poor ethical judgements which I may have avoided if I had been in a discipline where ethics was more centrally placed.

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Conclusion This chapter has considered the role and importance of ethics in social research as well as considering the particular role and importance it has to qualitative research. Ethics is more than a bureaucratic exercise that must be completed in order to begin collecting data. It is something which is essential to every element of the research process from conception to publication. Furthermore, ethics plays an essential role in how a discipline considers what is its field of knowledge; what are legitimate areas to research within this field; what are the ways in which research should be done; and how its practitioners and researchers should behave. Bearing in mind the importance of ethics, it is a concern how ethics has taken such a peripheral role in second language education research. This peripheral role has been counterbalanced by a rising interest from qualitative researchers in second language education and critical applied linguistics. Thus there has been a slow historical shift over the last 25 years of bringing ethics from the periphery to the centre. Yet, compared to other disciplines within the social sciences this role is still relatively peripheral. It is essential that second language researchers should engage more with ethics particularly in qualitative research where ethics has such a great importance. This engagement needs to be at every level as described in the aforementioned model. The brief case study provides examples of the sort of ethical issues and dilemmas a qualitative researcher can face during the research process. A discipline that has ethics at its centre can guide and support researchers this hazardous process helping to negotiate the tensions between what Kubanyiova (2008) describes as the macroethical principles (i.e. the prescriptions of academic associations and institutional review boards) and the microethical principles (i.e. the ethical decisionmaking made by researcher during the research).

References AAAL. (2015). American Association of Applied Linguistics homepage. Accessed 2 Sept 2015, at http://www.aaal.org AILA. (2015). International Association of Applied Linguistics homepage. Accessed 2 Sept 2015, at http://www.aila.info/en American Psychological Association. (2015). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. Retrieved September 2, 2015, from http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx Anderson, C. (2003a). Deconstructing teaching English to speakers of other languages: Problematising a professional discourse. Unpublished PhD thesis. Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Anderson, C. (2003b). Phillipson’s children. The Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication, 3(1), 81–95. BAAL. (2015). Recommendations on good practice in applied linguistics. Retrieved September 2, 2015 from http://www.baal.org.uk/dox/goodpractice_full.pdf Block, D. (2003). The social turn in second language acquisition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Part II

Methodological Approaches

Chapter 6

Classroom Ethnography on Critical Language and Literacy Teaching and Learning Sunny Man Chu Lau

The social and the poststructuralist turns in the fields of Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have advanced an understanding of language and literacy as social practices (Gee 2003), particularly with the help of ethnographic language research. Using findings from language classrooms, this chapter aims to illustrate how ethnographic studies with poststructuralist and feminist orientations have informed and are informed by sociocultural literacy developments. It particularly seeks to argue the pertinence of adopting an ethnographic perspective (Bloome 2012; Green and Bloome 1997, 2005) to critical language and literacy education (CLLE). CLL teaching – the cultivation of students’ ability to analyze and evaluate texts for transformed actions and critical social choices – is often bound up with contradictions and controversies regarding institutionalized power structures and the plural, partial nature of knowledge. Ethnographic studies informed by poststructuralist and feminist theories have helped illuminate not only the inherent paradoxes in critical education and its ironic oppressive potential, but also the complex shifting interstices between power, identities, and agency within the classroom and wider social environment. This chapter describes some of the major changes in critical education as informed by such ethnographic perspectives, which include the problematization of the grandiose emancipation claims, the centering of emotions and relationality in critical praxis, and the attention to the embodied – lived and performed – CLLE practices.

S.M.C. Lau () School of Education, Bishop’s University, 2600 College, Sherbrooke, J1M 1Z7, Québec, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_6

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Socio-political Perspectives of Language and Literacy Second/foreign language learning has been viewed as primarily mental processes such as noticing, information parsing, and restructuring of existing knowledge (Gass 1988; McLaughlin 1990). The social element in later SLA theories, such as Pica’s negotiation of meaning (1994) reflects communication as largely information exchange and social identities in native-nonnative binary terms. Such a view has led to an imbalance weighted toward the cognitive-oriented theories and methodologies that give preference to experimental rather than natural settings and the universal rather than the local, leading to the marginalization of the sociocultural dimension of language (Firth and Wagner 1997). Rampton (1997) urges researchers to engage with postmodern debates that help refurbish language theories to reflect a more heterogeneous and fluid society and to revitalize an interest in the “contextsensitive, value-relevant, interpretive methodologies that fit more comfortably with late modern assumptions” (p. 330). Situating learning as social practice and participation (Lave and Wenger 1991, 2005), poststructuralist theories further elucidate the politics of participation by emphasizing the plural, situated nature of discursive power relations and identity constructions central to language learning. To learn a language is to participate in the discourse communities that require specific sets of social languages for activities or practices to enact certain socially situated identities recognised and endorsed by the communities (Gee 2000, 2001). For example, children who are encouraged and supported by their families with scaffolds to deliver linear, concise expository summaries of their day at the dinner table are enculturated into a way of being that corresponds with literacy practices found in the school community (Gee 2003), which helps cement their school-based literate identity. The proximity of a student’s linguistic habitus to that which is consecrated in the field of education will influence the degree of legitimacy and the value the student’s linguistic resources can claim, and ultimately the position s/he can occupy within the community (Bourdieu 1977/1997). In other words, classroom relations are systems of power hierarchized between the in- and out-groups (Grenfell 2012) contingent on the linguistic and cultural capital ascribed to them. Learning to read and write, in this sense, is about “adopting a cultural ideology including how one defines who one is and who others are” (Bloome and Brown 2012, p. 139) rather than just about attaining a set of atomized autonomous skills. Departing from the inflexible determinism of classical structuralism, Bourdieu, however, viewed agents as creative and inventive players who strategize, within the limits of the structures, ways to pursue the prizes it offers and principles to cope with the ever-changing situations (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 19). Bourdieu’s dialectical relationality between the field and habitus underlines the dynamic tension and interaction between the structures and the agent. In a similar vein, Weedon (1987), a poststructuralist feminist scholar, uses the term subjectivity to refer to an individual’s sense of self which is caught between being a subject OF a set of social relationships and being subjected TO a set of relationships (Norton

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and Toohey 2011). There is no a priori self, outside of language but rather the self is produced and reproduced by varying, sometimes competing or conflicting, discursive practices (economic, social, and political). The meaning of woman, for example, varies from “ideal to victim to objet of sexual desire” (Weedon 1987, p. 25) as the context changes. Similarly, the term ideal language learner is open to challenge and redefinition with shifts in its discursive context: “What it means at any particular moment depends on the discursive relations within which it is located, and it is open to constant rereading and reinterpretation” (Weedon 1987, p. 25). Poststructuralist and feminist understandings of subjectivities, power relations and agency have increasingly inspired research that focuses on the multiple intersections between language and gendered, raced, and classed discursive practices (e.g., Amin 1997; Cameron 2005; Cummins and Early 2011; Heller 1987; Ibrahim 2006; Katz and DaSilva Iddings 2009; Kubota and Lin 2009; Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004; Pennycook 2001), all pointing to the urgency for language research and education to take into account the sociocultural/political dimensions of language teaching and learning.

Classroom Ethnography in Language and Literacy Education The sociocultural/political views of language learning as power-imbued social processes have great ontological and epistemological implications on language research. First, as our understanding of language can never be context-less (Blommaert and Jie 2010), it must be studied in situ. Second, language as social practice reflects and refracts its micro and macro sociopolitical and historical conditions and relations of power (Bloome 2012). The focus on the local actions and interactions should thus be viewed in tandem with the broader sociopolitical structures in which these localized activities are embedded and held in dynamic tension. Lastly, the situatedness of literacy practices means the field researcher is inevitably an integral part of the knowledge gathering and production processes; hence reflexivity is of vital importance. These ontological and epistemological positions are similar to those of the ethnographic traditions in research and, in fact, the sociocultural/political perspectives of language and literacy learning are largely shaped by and are shaping ethnographic language studies (Creese 2008; Street 1995). Street (1984, 1995) while critiquing the autonomous model of literacy argues for the importance of ethnography in illuminating the embeddedness of literacy practices within wider social and political structures (Rampton et al. 2004). Drawing on theories and inquiry practices derived from anthropology and sociology, ethnography in general seeks to illuminate a holistic cultural knowledge of a group through thick emic description (i.e., the insider accounts) of activities and patterns of social interactions in relation to a particular cultural context (Hitchcock and Hughes 1989). Ethnography that focuses specifically on language use can be traced back to Hymes’s (1974) ethnography of communication and Gumperez’s

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interactional sociolinguistics (1999). Language ethnographies that are associated with the general poststructuralist movements tend to incorporate media studies, feminist poststructuralism, and sociology to examine how situated language use shapes and is shaped by power relations and discursive formations (Foucault 1980), identities (Hall 1996), and social positionings (Davies and Harré 1990). Despite the rich array of classroom ethnography research, this chapter, within its limited space, focuses mainly on that relates to language and literacy education that holds a critical orientation and aims to illustrate how poststructuralist- and feminist- informed ethnographic perspectives help reconfigure such critical language education. Bloome (2012) gives a detailed definition and delineation of what classroom ethnography is within this poststructuralist strand. He states that classroom ethnography is not a comprehensive ethnography per se, but it adopts an ethnographic perspective (Green and Bloome 2005) that seeks to understand how social boundaries are defined and drawn; and how systems of meanings are constructed relating to learning, achievement, development and social identities. The ethnographer’s sustained and prolonged engagement as well as triangulation of data are two main features for ethnography (Mahboob et al. 2016). Data can be collected through a range of tools including participant observation, field notes, open-ended interviews, audio- or video-taped classroom interactions, and artefacts (De Costa 2014). However, what makes a research ethnographic is not necessarily those tools, but rather its effort in seeking an emic perspective to understand how interactions within the classroom both reflect and refract the broader social and historical practices and values (Bloome 2012). Because of the interest in power relations and ideological positions, data analyses are often done by using Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995) or Discourse Analysis (see Gee 2014, p. 10 arguing that all discourse analysis is critical becasue language is political) to foreground how (para)linguistic choices and interaction patterns define and shape relationships and understanding. With the advances of the technology, (critical) discourse analysis has been extended to images and multimodal texts (Gee 2011). Text or discourse can only be rendered meaningful in relation to the social context that constitutes it in the first place (Locke 2004). Contextualization cues are hence important tools for microethnographic analysis of classroom language and literacy events – bounded series of actions and reactions people make within a social scene that reflect or refract the literacy practices in broader social and cultural contexts (Bloome et al. 2010). Contextualization cues include manipulation of artefacts as well as verbal (syntax, register, etc.), nonverbal (gestures, facial expressions, posture, etc.) and prosodic (tone, volume, stress, pausing, etc.) signals that are shared and expected by the speakers and listeners within the context, from which a material basis is generated for description and interpretation (Bloome et al. 2010, p. 9–10). Turn-taking or participation structures (e.g., a teacher-fronted lecture or a teacher initiation-student response-teacher evaluation sequence) and intertextuality (how one text references or incorporates other texts such as allusion to and/or direct quotes from a conversation, a poem or a media text) are two other important tools in (critical) discourse analysis to shed light on how participation patterns and intertextual connections construct knowledge and social positions for individuals.

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Through these detailed textual and multimodal analyses of data derived from an extended period of time, a classroom ethnographer strives to identify how language is learned, processed, negotiated, and positioned, and how individuals are positioned within the immediate context that indexes racial and gender relations as well as economic and classed boundaries in the broader sociocultural/political contexts (Bloome 2012, p. 14). Classroom ethnography can be viewed as a matter of “foregrounding the classroom and back-grounding the broader contexts” (Bloome 2012, p. 11) without obviating their inherent relationships. Because of the interest in locating social identities and power relations, an ethnographer should be reflexive of the ways in which the observer has on the observed and the events as captured within specific social and historical contexts. Blommaert and Jie (2010) argue that in order to be “objective”, an ethnographer has to be aware of and make explicit one’s subjectivity – how the reality is seen, experienced and understood by the researcher. Not only should the researcher reflect and monitor closely and continually his/her own roles and reactions with participants, s/he should also be acutely aware of the ways in which the research is framed and the data selected and analysed (Cohen et al. 2000). De Costa (2014) highlights particularly the importance of an ethnographer’s sensitivity to participants’ emotions and the need to exercise ethical care to respect the relational nature of ethnographic research and maintain its rigour and coherence in every step of the research process. Since language in classroom ethnography is not only the focus of but also the tool for the research and representational process, Bloome et al. (2010) use the metaphor of a “semitransparent mirror” to represent the kind of reflexivity that a classroom ethnographer employs in order to provide “a view of the event while also provid[e] a view of the researcher and the field, each view clouding and bringing into focus of the other” (p. xix). While taking account of the limitations and constraints, classroom ethnography allows for the examination of complex human activities and relationships in full and in connections to spaces, institutions, and broader social practices, which helps contribute to the reconceptualization of curricular and instructional directions that help challenge established inequities.

Ethnography for Transformed CLLE Practices Ethnographic perspectives with poststructuralist and feminist bearing are especially pertinent to the study of CLLE education. CLLE, drawing on critical theory of the Frankfurt School and critical pedagogy (Giroux 1992; Luke and Freebody 1997a; McLaren and Kincheloe 2007), broadly aims to promote students’ critical abilities in analyzing how textual structures and forms represent or silence certain social values to maintain and (re)produce dominant ideologies and assumptions. Grounded in a generally rationalist tradition, early developments in CLLE tended to help students examine how technical characteristics like sentence structures, grammar, or genres advance meaning and beliefs that favor or disenfranchise certain social

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groups. Classroom pedagogies tended to focus on textual and media critique and deconstruction. As multiliteracies are gaining educational importance, CLLE has expanded to include examination of how different semiotic resources are deployed to construct positions and students are encouraged to partake in the reconstruction as well: to rewrite/redesign cultural texts in a more equitable way (Janks 2000, 2010; Luke and Freebody 1997b). Despite such a change to engage students in both critique and creative efforts for social change, the fundamental positivist belief that CLLE can help recover subjugated truths and distorted knowledge through objective analysis has been much criticized by poststructuralist and feminist scholars (e.g., Ellsworth 1989; Wooldridge 2001). Taking into consideration the poststructuralist and feminist concerns of fluid identities and discursive power relations, ethnographic studies help further illuminate the intrinsic paradoxes of critical education. Buckingham’s studies (1993, 2003), for example, demonstrate how critical media objective analysis can easily be turned into a language game and essentially identity work when middle-class students in particular quickly learned to feed their teachers politically correct answers to compete for higher social power positions within the classroom, inadvertently perpetuating the dominant power hierarchies that critical education seeks to disrupt. Keddie’s (2008) ethnographic analysis of teacher-student interaction in a prestigious boys’ Australian secondary school also brings to light the opportunities, constraints and contradictions that present in the focal CLLE classroom. The teacher’s progressive pedagogical intentions to encourage critical discussions around gender issues represented in literature and movies actually contradicted his use of authority and control as a way of establishing credibility and good male bonding with his students, reflecting a lack of reflectivity on his own gendered assumptions. When asked about the stark disparity between the boys’ classroom identities and the bravado and fighting they engaged in outside class, the teacher conceded that the boys were just “play[ing] the game” (p. 577) and behaving in accordance with the discursive demands in different settings. This purely emotionless, bodiless intellectual exercise of doing social justice in class ironically left the dichotomised positions unchallenged: teacher/students; knowledge/ignorance, order/chaos, and mind/body. Unless alternative discourses are supported by programs that address institutional power and agency, critical teaching may only offer abstractions (Ellsworth 1989, 1992). Ethnographic studies do not just expose latent discrepancies in CLLE education, they also help open up possibilities for change and transformed practices for reflexive educators and researchers. Reflexivity in ethnographic perspectives allows teacher-researchers to be vigilant to the micro-processes through which relations of dominance can be recognized and moments of possibilities rendered. One example is Rogers’ (2002) reflexive analysis of her interactions with adolescent AfricanAmerican students in a reading group that aimed to promote CLLE development. Using CDA to conduct an ethnographic micro-analysis of their interactions, she noticed she predominantly used close-ended yes-no questions, thereby limiting the opportunity for critical discussions. However, as she tried to rectify this power imbalance by asking more open-ended questions and allowing participants to lead

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the discussions, the conversation never moved beyond the dominant ideology of literacy as success and upward mobility, and it failed to be more critical of some complex issues relating to literacy (for example, literacy is often viewed as agentive, meaning it is up to the individual to achieve or fail). Through the study, Rogers learned to be mindful of her local interactions with students and to grapple with the moral tension between imposing her views versus allowing students space for personal inquiry, knowing that emancipatory goals of CLLE should be achieved not just through content but also through the very process itself. Similarly, Jones and Clark’s (2007) multi-year ethnographic research allowed them to see the importance of asking students to make not just connections but also disconnections in order to promote their critical engagement with the textual worlds. By attending to the situatedness of the classroom within broader social structures; in particular, how economic boundaries are defined and drawn within the classroom, Jones and Clark were able to trace how one of the low-income students who went so far as to fictionalize her own birthday party to match the dominant, middle-class version of a birthday party portrayed in the book they were studying, enabled her to negotiate the identity of a good reader among her peers. Making connections, as one of the seven most significant comprehension strategies (Harvey and Goudvis 2000), has potential to promote meaningful engagements with textual reading. However, connections often tend to be autobiographical and centre on superficial similarities between the reader’s and character’s experiences, which can inadvertently turn students into passive consumers of the texts and normalise the social world as portrayed in print and images without promoting critical dialogue. This ethnographic study poses questions about the social implications of textual connections and how making disconnections might better engage students in more genuine critical interrogation of the textual worlds as constructions.

Ethnography and Reconfiguring CLLE as Embodied Engagement Uncovering the inherent contradictions in CLLE, ethnographic studies also help shift the traditional singular focus on students’ intellectual engagement on critical analysis to one that foregrounds an embodied engagement that highlights the importance of emotions. To address the limitations of a rationalist deconstruction approach, critical scholars turn to feminist and poststructuralist insights in disrupting the Cartesian mind-body dualism. Misson (1996) points out that our subscription to certain beliefs reflects not merely a rational or social decision but rather our emotional investment in the beliefs as accommodating our desires. Arguing that students must be engaged both emotionally and intellectually, Mission and Morgan (2006) explain that CLLE has erroneously viewed emotions as a distractor, and yet they carry equal meaning and importance: “There needs to be an understanding of the kind of desire involving us with the emotions, the subject position being created

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through it, and why we experience that position as so attractive, before we can begin to weigh up what its advantages and dangers are.” (p. 224). To illustrate how helpless rationality is in face of emotional investment, Janks (2002) relates her horror as she watched the two hijacked airplanes crash into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon live on television on September 11, 2001, just 2 days after flying home from her son’s wedding in Boston. Glued to the television, she was awash in terror and disbelief, unable to engage intellectually with the situation. Hers was not an isolated experience; she noticed that nowhere in the media were anti-American voices given space, later understanding how “identification holds reason hostage” (p. 21). Relating affective investment and identification to CLLE, Janks notes that the problem with applying rational analysis to popular culture from which students derive pleasure and identification is asking them to police their own pleasures (Buckingham 2003; Comber 2001), which further distances them from genuine explorations of these issues in the classroom. Increasingly, research on critical language education shows how important it is that educators and researchers attend to emotions and desires circulating in the classroom, echoing De Costa’s (2014) call for ethical care in attending to the relational nature of ethnographic research. Emotions, as theorized by feminist scholars (Ahmed 2004; Benesch 2012; Lewis and Tierney 2011), are corporeal sensations yet constituted by ideology and socio-historical constructions. Lewis and Tierney (2011) state that emotions are shaped by and are shaping cultural texts: “the way social actors mobilize emotions can change the text as a site of meaningmaking in the classroom through repeated social performances that index the text as having particular function or meaning in mediated action” (p. 322). Their yearlong ethnographic study with a high school English class shows how students’ raw nerves were touched when they talked about the Disney movie Pocahontas. The focal teacher first read a scholarly article whose author was critical of the movie’s dominant racist views about black female sexuality. Two African American students reacted with strong emotions, voicing their indignation towards both the movie and the article. Despite its critique, the article’s verbalization of the hyper-sexualisation of minority women implanted painful cues to these two female students about the racial and sexist subjection of their bodies, which they might not have otherwise noticed independently. Despite the teacher’s repeated attempts to focus on a rational analysis of the movie and essay, the discussions were drawn to these students’ embodied experience as young women of color. Lewis and Tierney conclude that honouring students’ visceral emotions (e.g., anger), other than only those more tasteful feelings (e.g., empathy, or enthusiasm) endorsed within a personal growth approach to literature, allows a more fruitful examination of the ideological roots that produce them, and thus helps broaden CLLE to examining “how social actors mobilize emotion to transform texts and signs in ways that may otherwise remain veiled in English classrooms” (Lewis and Tierney, p. 328). Similarly, Benesch’s (2012) reflexive ethnographic analysis of her own critical lessons on military recruitment echoes the importance of creating a space for students to explore their feelings to the cultural texts under study as “the first point of departure” (Probyn 2004, p. 29) for greater self-understanding and social

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awareness. Faced with the increasing presence of military recruiters on campus, Benesch decided to have her English as Second Language reading class debate the question: “Should colleges be allowed to bar military recruiters?” (Benesch 2012, p. 80). The military offered enticing financial security and citizenship that many of the new immigrant students in her class desired. A rational debate, as Benesch reflected afterwards, might have forced the students to take sides, brushing aside their complex emotions about the issue and hence might have possibly precluded a valuable opportunity for them to meaningfully explore their conflicting raw feelings. Benesch postulates that she could have elicited “more nuanced, felt, and embodied responses” (p. 90) from her students toward the military recruitment campaign if she had invited them to express how they felt rather than what they thought about the issue. Following Benesch and other feminist scholars’ argument for attention to emotions in critical classrooms, Lau (2015) reflexively analyses her and her collaborating teacher’s critical media literacy lessons in which she illustrates their concern for correct readings led them to nudge their students to adopt a resistant view about dominant images of beauty and immigrants, hence disregarding students’ shifting desires as expressed in their plural responses regarding their fashion choices and ethnic identities. Lau argues for the relevance of emotionality in critical praxis especially as crucial guides for teachers’ moment-by-moment pedagogical decisions.

Ethnography and Reconfiguring CLLE as Lived Experience and Performance The importance of affective engagements in critical education challenges not only the enduring assumption that emotions threaten the “disembodied, detached, and neutral knower” (Zembylas 2005, p. 344), but also CLLE’s traditional logo- and verbo-centric theorization (Janks 2002; Johnson and Vasudevan 2012). CLLE tends to privilege spoken and written language over other communicative modes (e.g., laughter, gesture, silence, music, visuals, etc.) of critical curriculum and teaching. Ethnographic studies have shown how CLLE involves full embodied social practices and experiences which are negotiated, lived and performed by individuals. Hagood’s (2002) ethnographic study on one male teenage student’s literacy practices relating to popular culture texts (e.g., grunge rock, fashion magazine, etc.) illustrates how the teenager as a reader constructed multiple interpretations of those texts. As a result, he continuously created fluid, ever-evolving and mobile subjectivities for himself, actively pushing away a stabilized meaning of grunge rock or certain fashion as associated with what his teachers would perceive as unruly, violent student identities. Students’ exhibition of CLLE through subjectivity in action as Hagood argues, may not be readily recognized by teachers since the mainstream focus of CLLE instruction often lies solely in the verbal or written deconstruction of ideological messages embedded in authorial textual and graphic representations.

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Johnson and Vasudevan’s (2012) year-long ethnographic study following Grade 10 English students found how students used backstage spaces for playful, critical performances about race and racism. During a group discussion session, two focal students, beyond their teacher’s purview, joked freely and politically incorrectly about race as presented in a popular television comedy. Through their embodied responses (e.g., rambunctious physicality and laughter) and critical readings, they exposed unequal power relations that ran counter to the norms of the kind of race talk and democratic dialogue privileged in the classroom. The authors argue that students’ backstage talk illustrates how young people negotiate textual meanings for contingent media texts in ways that are often more creative, complicated, and unexpected by teachers. It is therefore imperative for critical educators to attend to the embodied dimensions of CLLE in order to increase the curricular relevance for students. There will be unplanned moments when students perform CLLE differently, challenging classroom norms and/or teacher comfort. Instead of dismissing or policing these postures and practices, Johnson and Vasudevan urge teachers to question these taken-for-granted norms and to create curricular conditions that center students’ visible and invisible critical performances in classroom inquiry and to seek ways to redefine what it means to be “critically literate” in school (p. 40).

Conclusion As shown in this chapter, ethnographic studies informed by poststructuralist and feminist understandings of discursive power relations and fluid identities constructions have helped and continue to help reveal cultural and social processes in language teaching and learning that the prevalent paradigm of quantitative processproduct approach does not address. Such ethnographic perspectives afford layered analyses that expose enduring inequities within the institutional structures, and bring to light alternative possibilities for emergent curricula and transformed practices, all indispensably pertinent to CLLE. In surfacing the inherent contradictions and contingencies in critical praxis, poststructuralist and feminist ethnographic language research has contributed to the paradigmatic shift from its traditional theorizations to one that gives primacy to affective engagement, reflecting an increasing importance in the inclusion of alternative, full-bodied multimodal ways of meaning-making for transformative purposes. Attending to students’ shifting desires and identifications as well as their backstage in-between spaces where they perform their CLLE practices and identities may help broaden our understanding what critical means and what counts as CLLE. These playful and provocative performances of identity and literacy practices may challenge classroom norms and cause discomfort, but if recognized and engaged rather than policed and subverted, they could open up possibilities for shifts in thinking and believing. While ongoing problematizing practice (Pennycook 2010) is key to critical education and research, the imperative is to adopt a higher degree of humility and situate critical praxis within the framework of care and

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self-determination (Andreotti 2011; Benesch 2012; Roche 2011). Critical education should not be coercive; rather than looking for certainties, it is possibilities of becoming and of emergent understanding (Morgan 2009; Roche 2011) that makes critical praxis relevant to students. Ethnographic perspectives that help advance our understanding of how identity and discursive powers work in classroom and community contexts provide a vital force that propels changes and refinement to CLLE, opening up greater possibilities for transformative changes.

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Chapter 7

So Many Data, So Much Time: Living with Grounded Theory in a Rhetorical Autoethnography Bob Broad

Whenever I teach my department’s graduate course in Research Methods in Composition Studies, the students’ main assignment for the semester is what I call the Teeny Tiny Tidy Pilot Project (abbreviated “T3P”; I have included the T3P assignment sheet as an appendix). For most of my graduate students, this assignment is their first experience with qualitative research. So I try to help them maintain confidence that valuable findings can be drawn from a tightly focused, strictly limited pool (a shallow wading pool, if you will) of qualitative data. This guidance – vigorously to focus and to limit one’s data set – is sage and valuable advice. Yvonna S. Lincoln, a particularly well known and successful qualitative researcher, once said that: “We should collect fewer data and do more with the data we collect.” In honor of Lincoln’s helpful pointer, my T3P assignment sheet specifically warns my students to “beware the temptation and risk of collecting too many data.” The only problem, really, is that as a “seasoned” researcher, I do not seem to be able to follow my own good advice while pursuing my research projects. Perhaps out of anxiety about how to make qualitative research engaging and compelling in a culture that tends to privilege quantitative data and analyses, I have historically collected what Lincoln (and any other sensible person) would likely deem too many data. For example, for the book What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing (Broad 2003) I recorded dozens of interviews and group conversations and transcribed those recordings into more than 800 pages of transcripts. Problematizing such a temptation to collect too many data, in this chapter I offer reflections and insights on specific research strategies, namely open coding and focused coding, carried out within the larger category of grounded

As soon as we go into the field or turn on an instrument, we find ourselves drowning in a sea of data. (Bruno Latour, 1999, Pandora’s Hope, Harvard University Press, p. 39) B. Broad () Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_7

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theory methods. Drawn from an autoethnographic study (in progress) of how family writing shaped the individual and collective identities and agencies of the author’s family, the commentary offered here aims to help fellow researchers navigate and survive the rigors of qualitative research in literacy learning. In this ongoing project, given the working title Writing Family: A Rhetorical Autoethnography, I have collected, digitized, and coded 685 documents totaling approximately 500,000 words of data plus a collection of about a dozen interviews. This means that my pool of data for the Writing Family project is more than double the already over-abundant quantity of words from the What We Really Value study. To look at it another way, the number of words in the Family Writing Project archive and interviews approximately matches the word count of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the Old Testament from the Christian Bible. If you imagine how things would appear if some lunatic with a pair of scissors snipped War and Peace into 700 pieces of many different genres and lengths, then you’ll have a pretty good idea of what my data look like. Luckily, the data for this study are my favorite materials imaginable: writings among members of my nuclear family. Especially since my life-partner, Julie, and I recently became empty-nesters as our younger child started at university, I find that reading notes, journal entries, contracts, poems, and stories written as the children were growing up is an enormously rewarding activity. So I am happy to immerse myself in these data, even if the quantity of the data – and the rigor of grounded theory research methods – require years of work. Nevertheless, there is a problem. For me, the most severe challenge of having lots of data is that open coding lasts so long. And when open coding (also called initial coding) lasts so long, researchers may struggle to maintain their faith that meaning and value will emerge from the lengthy analysis. Therefore this chapter attempts to provide companionship, offer hope, and bolster faith for qualitative researchers of literacy learning who find themselves in predicaments like mine: so many data, so much time. Specifically, I attempt to illustrate vividly and concretely the challenges and rewards of conducting grounded theory research as a data-rich, analysis-full, and time-intensive process that yields deep, engaging, and compelling knowledge about (in the case of my current study) how families create and shape themselves (identities, agencies, and relationships) through words written to one another. *** Several significant studies of literacy set the context for the Writing Family project. In Ways with Words, Heath (1983) studied the literacy practices of two working-class communities in the southeast United States. Though family literacy received some attention in Heath’s famous ethnography, she focused more strongly on community and school literacies. James Britton’s Language and Learning (1970) is a fascinating instance of a single-subject autoethnographic literacy study. Interspersed with Britton’s carefully researched academic chapters on literacy theory are exquisitely detailed observations of his young daughter’s acquisition of spoken language. Britton provides an important precursor to my study, but he studied only his daughter’s literacy development, whereas I am studying the literacy

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practices of the whole four-person family and how those literacy practices shape and impact the family as a micro-community. Bissex’s (1980) Gnys at Work: A Child Learns to Read and Write presents a memorably detailed and theoretically contextualized archival study of her son’s early literacy. Here again, however, the focus is on one child, not on the entire family unit. Stillman’s Families Writing (1998) presents strong arguments in favor of family writing and a remarkable array of suggested strategies. As such, it is more of a how to (and why to) book than it is a book of research on family writing. Possibly the study that most closely resembles mine is Taylor’s Family Literacy (1998). Taylor studied six families and how the families’ literacy activities contributed to the development of one or more young children in each family. My study differs from Taylor’s in being more archive-based and in being an autoethnography of a single family. Also, I am as interested in the effects on adults of the family’s writing as I am in its effects on children. As a relatively young qualitative methodology, autoethnography merits special discussion. The method’s name, autoethnography, makes clear that it builds on and grows out of the long traditions of ethnography, the discipline of writing about cultures. As also clearly indicated by its name, autoethnography is distinct from traditional ethnography (and from most other approaches to qualitative inquiry) in that the autoethnographer studies the community to which she belongs (or studies herself as a situated individual). Autoethnographic researchers study the practices of a community of which they are members, and they [the researchers] are visible in the research. (Canagarajah 2012). Works by Ellis and Bochner (2000, 2006) and Ellis (2007) laid the groundwork for the emergence of autoethnography in the fields of anthropology and sociology, and Muncey (2010) provided a useful overview and discussion of practical issues. In the field of writing studies, Canagarajah has provided both exemplars of (2009) and methodological reflections on (2012) autoethnographic methods of studying writing practices and literacy learning. More recently, autoethnographies have appeared in a wide range of research publications focused on literacy education and related fields (e.g. Campbell 2016; Gao 2014; Pennington and Brock 2012). When the autoethnographer is in a position of power in the community he is researching, urgent political and ethical issues arise. In considering my application for permission to proceed with my study, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at my university posed several pointed questions about whether I could research my children without coercion and invasion of privacy. Luckily, a colleague of mine directed me to Adler and Adler’s Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity (1998). In their chapter “The Parent as Researcher,” Adler and Adler detailed how they worked with their university’s Institutional Review Board to develop a series of guidelines and protocols to minimize risks of coercion and other risks for the researchers’ children, who were participants in their study. Following Adler and Adler’s lead, I took special steps to protect the privacy of my research participants (by omitting from the archive any writing that was intended to be private or the content of which was a private, personal, or sensitive) and to reduce risks of coercion (I recruited a colleague to request my participants’ informed consent outside of my presence and I provided multiple opportunities for my participants to remove items from the archive or to withdraw from the study).

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In the Writing Family project, I study the social function of writing in creating and maintaining identities and relationships in the nuclear family of four people in which I am a father and life-partner. For this study, I have compiled an archive of 685 documents written by the four members of my immediate family (mother, father, son, daughter) over the course of approximately 19 years. I am also conducting a series of interviews with the three other members of my family and a few additional people whose writing or reading is significant in the archive. For example, beyond family members, I have interviewed a professional colleague and a former childcare provider, and I also plan to interview The Tooth Fairy, whose archived correspondence with my two children is substantial (eleven notes, all composed in rhyming couplets, written by The Tooth Fairy to our two children, and ten notes to the Tooth Fairy from the children). Here is one of the first notes written by my son, Dylan, to the Tooth Fairy when he was 7 years and 10 months old. In response to Dylan’s impassioned plea for Star Wars toys instead of the more traditional (and more modest) monetary gift, the Tooth Fairy agreed “one time only” to put a magic spell on Dylan’s father (me) so that the next day I would immediately grant his request to buy him a Jar Jar Binks action figure. You can see that my children’s dealings with the Tooth Fairy were dynamic, complex, and intensively negotiated.

[Transcription:] Dear Tooth Fairy, I do not want money. I would preety preety preety preety preety preety preety preey preety preety please [like a] Jar Jar Binks and Qui-gon Jinn action figure

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The data for this study exceed Lincoln’s (and my own) wise guidelines, but so too do my analyses. Currently, my coding scheme includes 296 codes such as: • animals • connection/attachment/belonging • emotions/feelings: – grief/sorrow/disappointment – joy/delight/pleasure/excitement – love • • • • • • • • • • •

family food/drink/cooking gifts/giving/generosity labor/work/jobs laughter/humor/jokes/pranks/puns magic/fantasy play/games/recreation/vacation politics/citizenship/activism thanks/gratitude/appreciation time writing

Coding is the name qualitative researchers give to the comprehensive and systematic ways in which they label and categorize units of data so those units can later be studied along with all the other data units that were similarly labeled. To quote Charmaz (2014), “we study our early data and begin to separate, sort, and synthesize these data through qualitative coding. Coding means that we attach labels to segments of data that depict what each segment is about” (p. 4). Coding is universal among qualitative researchers, and it is also employed in some quantitative methods, especially those used to analyze discursive data (i.e. words). Coding is not specific to grounded theory methods, but is a key part of grounded theory methods as they make up part of the larger universe of interpretive research methods. I count myself as an adherent of grounded theory methods for two reasons: First, grounded theory methods foreground the importance of researchers’ creating theory from their data analyses rather than applying pre-existing theories to data. As a result, grounded theory methods help us fulfill our responsibility, inherited from ethnography, to represent the meanings people attach to their experiences using the terms and concepts that those people use. (This is often termed an emic approach vs. the etic approach of imposing the researcher’s meanings on those who are being studied.) Second, grounded theory methods comprise the most fully developed and the most systematic and comprehensive type of qualitative research that I have encountered. In the end, I believe grounded theory methods can equip qualitative researchers to claim greater validity due to the rigor and transparency that distinguish the grounded theory approach. Qualitative researchers’ most profound responsibility is to approach their data with radically open minds. “[O]ne of the basic principles of [grounded theory

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methods is to keep] an open-minded, framework-free orientation to the research domain at the outset” (Bryant and Charmaz 2007, p. 18). This openness is crucial to the spirit of grounded theory, because only when exercising the self-discipline of bracketing off one’s own (and others’) theories and interpretations does one open the possibility that one will discover the hidden truths the data hold. This is all good, and I firmly uphold (and teach) this principle and discipline of profoundly open coding. The problem is that, when open coding lasts for months or (in my current experience) years, the researcher begins to have worries and doubts. What if, she may anxiously wonder to herself once or two hundred times, all this work and all this time yield findings that are of no interest? What if my analyses only point to obvious or uninteresting themes? In the literature of grounded theory methods, findings that are interesting are said to have grab. A lengthy phase of initial coding may leave the researcher wondering whether and how her findings will develop grab. The difficulties of open coding very large amounts of data go beyond tests of patience. This is also an enormously lonely predicament for a researcher, since gurus of grounded theory (e.g., Charmaz 2014; Glaser and Strauss 1967) admonish us against collaboration and textual research during the early phase of coding, lest these outside influences inappropriately shape our emerging analyses. Commenting on a slightly different situation, Star refers to this solitary crisis simply as intellectual loneliness (Star 2007). To address such emotional and intellectual concerns (impatience, worry, doubt, loneliness) for qualitative researchers, this chapter brings readers with me as I make the transition, in real time, between the long, dark, cold winter of open or initial coding (where we generate codes and sort coded data, but have not yet grasped meaningful or surprising findings) to the lush, sunny garden of exploring coding reports (focused coding), which yields findings and material for articles and book chapters. Focused coding is where we finally harvest the insights (hopefully rich with grab) that make qualitative research rewarding both for researchers and for their readers. Note, for example, that several of the codes I listed above are, in and of themselves, anything but fascinating. It cannot be surprising or even interesting that the Family Writing Archive contains significant amounts of writing about family, food, or animals. Hopefully, however, the focused exploration of material gathered under each of these codes will reveal points of interest, insight, and discovery that are not evident just from the name (or definition) of a given code. For example, the fact that both the children in this family wrote verse eulogies to deceased pets may provide engaging insights regarding the interplay of animals, writing, and coping with the death of a beloved pet. This is my point about the long winter of open coding: you hope and believe that there is good material in there, but you really don’t know until you get to focused coding. You just have to keep going by exercising methodological faith. *** Before bringing you along for the focused analysis of one coding report (among a potential 296 such reports), I provide this brief overview of the project: Writing

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Family: A Rhetorical Autoethnography. This is an archive- and interview-based study of the writing done in one conjugal family (Habermas 1989) over a period of approximately 19 years (1989–2008). The study qualifies as an autoethnography because I (the researcher) am a member (life-partner and father) of the fourperson family being studied. The study was approved in 2010 by the Illinois State University Institutional Review Board. With the support of a sabbatical provided by the Department of English at Illinois State University, I started the project in earnest in the fall of 2011. I began composing a document called the “Family Writing Research Log.” Entries in this log appear in reverse chronological order (most recent first). In grounded theory terminology, the research log functions as a collection of analytical memos. Since readers of this chapter have already glimpsed an item from the Tooth Fairy correspondence, I offer this relevant snippet from one recent (Nov. 21, 2014) analytical memo from the Research Log: Writing is an especially important medium (and topic) of correspondence in the case of the Tooth Fairy and other magical creatures because (by definition and tradition) writing is our sole means of contact with them. This is an unexpected virtue of writing: that it allows for communication with beings who would otherwise remain entirely invisible and inaccessible to us.

At the same time that I started the Research Log, I began searching my family’s home (in Normal, Illinois, USA) for artifacts that belonged in the Family Writing archive. Almost right away I decided to exclude two potentially interesting and rewarding kinds of documents: those produced by Rachel and Dylan while in school and (with a few exceptions) letters and other correspondence. While I firmly believe both of these two kinds of writing (school writing and letters) are worthy of study, they did not fit my special purposes in conducting this inquiry. School writing could not help me to learn how people write in a family literacy context, where most of the writing is not assigned. Letters also seemed to me a historically well-studied genre of writing, and I wanted to focus on less studied, more everyday genres such as personal notes, stories, poems, signs, contracts, journal entries, etc. Over the subsequent (so far) 5 years, the archive grew to 685 documents, and my coding scheme, as mentioned above, grew to 296 codes. Though I have one important body of data that I still need to digitize (type in) so I can analyze it in the QSR NVivo software I use for my analyses, I have decided to go ahead and start the process of focused coding in the context of this chapter on grounded theory methods in studies of literacy. Recently, I printed out the list of the project’s 296 codes, paying special attention to two pieces of quantitative information: first, in how many different sources (out of the 685 documents in the archive) did I label material with this code?, and second, how many references are there to this code in the entire archive? (i.e., how many different times did I label a passage with this code?) I find this phase of attending to and being guided by quantitative information helpful and important from the standpoint of validating qualitative methodology. Following the numbers compels me to attend first and foremost to those codes that are quantitatively most significant in the data. Therefore I cannot simply plunge into analyzing whichever codes are my favorites. For example, given free rein, I would probably start my analysis with magic/fantasy partly because that would allow me

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to study my children’s correspondence with The Tooth Fairy (among other magical beings), and I am particularly fond of that correspondence because it captures much of the magical character of childhood. To find those codes that are most quantitatively substantive, I conducted two rudimentary counting activities. First, I highlighted any of the 296 codes that featured forty or more sources or references. It turned out there were forty-one such quantitatively significant codes out of the 296. Among the forty-one standout codes, I then looked for codes that had more than 100 either sources or references (some had more than 100 of both). I found twelve such super-codes, and I decided to begin my focused coding with these. The list of super codes that follows looks a lot like the list of sample codes I provided above, except that several codes I included in the earlier list to help illustrate the wide range of topics across the substantive codes are not among the super codes: • animals • emotions/feelings: – joy/delight/pleasure/excitement – love • • • • • • • • •

family food/drink/cooking gifts/giving/generosity labor/work/jobs laughter/humor/jokes/pranks/puns play/games/recreation/vacation thanks/gratitude/appreciation time writing

I decided to look closely at only one Super Code in this chapter. But how to choose which one? The sub-codes gathered under emotions/feelings (e.g., laughter, love, and joy) seemed too emotional for a chapter on research methods. Animals and family seemed forbiddingly generic. I decided that for this chapter I would zoom in on the super code of thanks/gratitude/appreciation. This code has enough emotional resonance to be interesting at a humanistic level, but also enough academic identity (since giving thanks is a powerful social act) to be compelling intellectually. Here are the notes I took on my first pass through the coding report for thanks/gratitude/appreciation: • There is quite a range of things for which we write that we express gratitude: gifts, work, food, donations, time spent, help, companionship, and writing. • Notice that “thanks” are usually given for things people have given us, but “appreciation” and “gratitude” can be for anything (or non-thing) in the world (e.g., sunshine, being alive). • In one angry note, Rachel denounces the lack of appreciation our family shows toward her hard work. Note, then, the juxtaposition of the emotion of anger/hatred with the failure of thanks/gratitude/appreciation.

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• Before this act of focused coding, I was aware of the many expressions of “we are thinking of you” that are on the CaringBridge blog. I was not aware of all the expressions of thanks people offered for providing our network of friends and family with the information and updates on Dylan’s medical progress. “Thank God for this web site : : : ” reads one typical blog message from a friend. And of course we reciprocated, thanking the readers and writers on the blog for participating. This shows me that a particular text (the CaringBridge blog) that I had associated with one code (well wishes/thinking of you) has another dimension (thanks/gratitude/appreciation) that had escaped my awareness during open coding. • Note that the “Make the World a Better Place” bookmark gives this advice: “Say ‘thank you.’” So expressing thanks can be seen as a political strategy for changing the world for the better and making armed conflict less likely (the implicit goal of the bookmark). • Valentines are, interestingly, descriptions of things people do that we appreciate, things that demonstrate what love is. So Valentines D love C thanks. The first finding I draw from my initial focused look at this coding report comes from the simple fact that thanks/gratitude/appreciation is a super code. From this we learn that members of this family spent a significant amount of their writing time expressing gratitude. In fact, it’s fair to say that they expressed thanks in their writing more than most other sentiments. (Only two other codes, joy/delight/pleasure/excitement and love show a larger number of combined sources and references.) It might be rewarding in a future interview to ask participants why they think this is one of the main sorts of writing the family did. Why, in other words, was it so important to express gratitude? Why thanks are important to this family is also presumably the reason Rachel was so angry about the lack of appreciation she perceived when she wrote her angry note. Also note that the How to Make the World a Better Place bookmark, co-authored by Dylan and Rachel with Julie’s help, lists “Say ‘Thank you!’” as one of the ways to improve the world. From all this, we can conclude that the family studied here believes explicitly and profoundly in the power of expressing thanks to improve human life: to heal, strengthen, encourage, and transform people and relationships. I also value the ways in which this coding report showed and reminded me that particular documents (e.g., the CaringBridge blog) or groups of documents (e.g., Valentine’s Day greetings) have features and functions of which I was not aware during open coding. I was aware that the main code I used in analyzing the CaringBridge blog was well wishes/thinking of you because so many of our friends and family expressed that sentiment when they posted to the blog. They wanted us to know that they were wishing us well and thinking of us during Dylan’s medical procedure. Seeing the prevalence of thanks in other blog postings helped remind me that the blog had multiple important features. Writers on the blog appreciated many things, not the least of which was the existence of the blog, since it allowed our family to let our network know how Dylan was progressing and since it allowed those in our network to express their attention and concern for our family in the midst of a health crisis.

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Of particular importance are the ways in which the family’s home-made, hand-written Valentine’s Day greetings transformed and subverted that genre. I’m interested in the ways in which their approach to Valentines reverses the usual formula of “expressing” or proclaiming love. Here, focusing on research methodology, I’ll simply observe that I had been unaware of how much of the content of the family’s Valentines was made up of expressions of thanks. This gets me thinking about the ways in which expressions of love and descriptions of what love “looks like” are also expressions of gratitude. One might usefully pose the question: What is the relationship in this archive between love and gratitude? I promised to share with my readers in real time my discoveries regarding the super code thanks /gratitude/appreciation, and I have done that. Now, here is another real-time discovery I wish to share. While working on this book chapter, it slowly dawned on me that this super code of thanks is closely related to another of the super codes: gifts/giving/generosity. Gratitude is obviously a close counter-part to generosity; giving gifts and giving thanks are intimately intertwined social, emotional, and rhetorical acts. Based on this discovery or realization (which I admit in retrospect seems as if it should have been obvious to me before now), I believe I can confidently state that this counterpart phenomenon of [gifts/giving/generosity] C [thanks/gratitude/appreciation] is quantitatively the single most significant dynamic I found in my study of the 500,000-word family writing archive. This does not necessarily mean that it is the most important thing happening in the Writing Family project, but as I explained earlier the guidance of quantitative analysis is helpful in establishing truths about the body of data that might be lost if the analyst simply followed her impulses regarding what to study first. *** The Writing Family autoethnography explores how writing functioned in the growth and development of a four-person nuclear family over a span of 19 years. As I continue focused coding, studying the various coding reports (starting with the super codes and moving on from there), I expect to generate significant questions that I will record in the form of analytical memos (in the Research Log) and then to answer those questions in the form of book chapters and journal articles. This chapter has only hinted at the findings that will eventually emerge from this study. Instead, the focus here has been on some of the challenges of grounded theory methods. Specifically, I have attempted to provide companionship, hope, and faith to other qualitative researchers who have made the mistake I chronically make: collecting too many data. I tried to demonstrate how the shift from open coding to focused coding, when it finally arrives (and it will arrive!), yields surprises, connections, questions, and answers that do indeed exhibit grab. I want to conclude with an acknowledgment that not every researcher can afford to take so much time to patiently code so many data. This is a point that Jennie Dautermann made years ago in her book Writing at Good Hope: A Study of Negotiated Composition in a Community of Nurses (Dautermann 1997). Some

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researchers (among whom I count myself) have the resources, power, and privilege to devote years to open coding of large amounts of data. As a tenured professor with an established research program and a strong publication record, I can afford to take the time I need to get it right. However, graduate students, junior professors, and others in whom higher education has not yet invested such resources (and this level of trust) should certainly pay close attention to the cautions and guidance Yvonna S. Lincoln and I (among many others) have offered: Collect fewer data and do more with the data you collect. Later, when you can afford it, you may decide to indulge yourself in a deeper dive into the pool of data. If that day comes, and you spend years in open coding, you may find comfort in returning to this chapter and reminding yourself that grab will surely emerge from focused coding, and all the more so when you have invested a large amount of time in careful, methodical, and thorough initial coding. In fact, the time and care spent in different coding phases usually translates directly into validity and persuasiveness, leading one’s readers to understand and accept the sometimes murky analytical moves a qualitative researcher might make along the way to rendering her data meaningful.

Appendix Research Methods in Composition Studies (Eng. 497) Professor Bob Broad

Assignment Sheet for the Eng. 497 Teeny Tiny Tidy Pilot Study (Abbreviation: T3P) Assignment The goal of this assignment (The “Teeny Tiny Tidy Pilot Study” or “T3P”) is the same as the goal of this course as a whole: to give you theoretical and practical knowledge of how to conduct empirical (vs. textual) research in English Studies. • In the first couple of weeks of the course, invest significant time and energy in sketching two or three versions of your T3P. Consider what you are curious about in the field of English Studies; what do you want to learn about? Research is a rhetorical (and political, and economic, etc.) act, so explore a range of possible rhetorical situations into which you want to enter as a researcher. That is, consider a variety of topics, purposes, audiences, forums, genres, media/technologies, and exigencies (kairos) for your research. • Once you have two or three well-developed sketches of research projects, write out at least one research question for each possible project. Your research question(s) should clearly and succinctly answer the question What are you trying to learn (about)?

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• Once you have developed a few possible projects this far, go ahead and choose the one that seems to you most promising within the confines of what is possible to accomplish in one semester-long graduate course. You should get input from the professor and some of your peers on this choice. • Draft an “IRB Protocol Submission Form” and appropriate accompanying IRB documents for your study. Though I (Bob Broad) and your classmates will likely co-author a “batch protocol” to cover most of the studies carried out for Eng. 497, your work drafting your own individual IRB materials will help you understand your own study – as well as the IRB framework and process – better than would relying on the batch protocol to do the work for you. • Once you receive IRB approval to begin gathering data for your study, you need to solicit informed consent from your prospective participants. Then you can begin collecting data from those who consent to participate. Collect enough data to allow you to make interesting and important discoveries to answer your research question(s), but beware the temptation and risk of collecting too many data. Yvonna S. Lincoln once said (and I have never forgotten, though I have emphatically ignored her good advice on more than one occasion): “We should collect fewer data and do more with the data we collect.” • Use the methods for qualitative data analysis that you are learning from Constructing Grounded Theory (Charmaz) to develop your findings. Code your data, compose analytical memos, make diagrams, and do whatever else will help you gain insight into (build grounded theories about) the “studied lives” you are trying to understand. • For Eng. 497, you will be asked to produce two drafts of your T3P. About 4 weeks before the end of the semester, you will share with others in the class a 1500word draft of your research report (findings). At the end of the semester (as part of your course portfolio), you should produce a 3000-word (or longer) report (3000C words of data and analysis; the word count does not include Works Cited, appendixes, or notes). If your research report presents significant information in visual and/or other non-alphabetic forms, then please talk with the professor to negotiate the appropriate quantity of composing for your T3P. • Reviews of the literature are very important sub-genres for nearly every research context. Reviews of the literature help you find out what people already know about your research topic and research questions, so you know what you can most productively contribute to the professional conversation on those topics. Reviews of the literature are also rhetorical and dramatic performances through which you create in your readers the feeling and belief that your research question (and the answers you have developed) are timely, important, and interesting. However, for the specialized context and purposes of Eng. 497, I will direct you to mainly shirk and skimp on the important scholarly duty of the review of the literature. There are two reasons I will promote this specialized kind of shirking and skimping: (1) Since most research in English Studies is textual research, I am confident that you have prior experience and expertise in composing reviews

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of the literature; and (2) I want you to focus your energies in the context of Eng. 497 on making meaning of empirical (as opposed to textual) data (discursive, numerical, visual, audio, or several/all of these). Therefore please limit your review of the literature to a paltry 300 words. This skimpy review of the literature will make room and time for you to delve more deeply into analyzing your data. Likewise with your discussion of research methods; please limit this to about 600 words. Therefore at least 70 % (2100 words) of your final draft research report should report on the meaning you made of your data (i.e., your findings). (Please note: These quantitative targets are offered as minimums. If you wish to write more in any of these sections, you may.) • In the foreground of your report of findings should be: (1) you, the researcher, (2) your data (especially quotations from your research participants), and (3) your insights into your data. Make sure your insights and ideas (not your raw data or your participants) provide the structure and primary content of your report of findings. However, within the conceptual structure derived from your insights and ideas about your data, you should also present bountiful quotations and other sorts of excerpts and views of your raw data as a way to illustrate the validity of (and render lively and vivid) your findings. The voices of your research participants should be strong as you report your findings, but not quite as strong as your voice as researcher and analyst.

References Adler, P., & Adler, P. (1998). Peer power: Preadolescent culture and identity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Bissex, G. L. (1980). Gnys at work: A child learns to write and read. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Britton, J. N. (1970). Language and learning. London: Allen Lane. Broad, B. (2003). What we really value: Beyond rubrics in teaching and assessing writing. Logan: Utah State UP. Bryant, A., & Charmaz, K. (2007). Introduction to grounded theory research: Methods and practices. In A. Bryant & K. Charmaz (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of grounded theory (pp. 1–28). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Campbell, B. (2016). Rethinking my poetry pedagogy: An autoethnographic self-study. South African Journal of Higher Education, 30(1), 42–56. Canagarajah, A. S. (2009). Multilingual strategies of negotiating English: From conversation to writing. Journal of Advanced Composition, 29, 711–743. Canagarajah, A. S. (2012). Autoethnography in the study of multilingual writers. In L. Nickoson & M. P. Sheridan-Rabideau (Eds.), Writing studies research in practice: Methods and methodologies (pp. 113–124). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Charmaz, K. (2014). Constructing grounded theory (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Dautermann, J. (1997). Writing at good hope: A study of negotiated composition in a community of nurses. Greenwich: Greenwood Publishing Group. Ellis, C. (2007). Telling secrets, revealing lives: Relational ethics in research with intimate others. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(3), 3–29.

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Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 733–768). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2006). Analyzing analytic autoethnography: An autopsy. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 429–449. Gao, Y. (2014). An autoethnography on language ideologies in English curriculum development. Sino-US English Teaching, 11(8), 553–566. Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. UP. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press. Muncey, T. (2010). Creating autoethnographies. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Pennington, J. L., & Brock, C. H. (2012). Constructing critical autoethnographic self-studies with white educators. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(3), 225–250. Star, S. L. (2007). Living grounded theory: Cognitive and emotional forms of pragmatism. In A. Bryant & K. Charmaz (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of grounded theory (pp. 75–93). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Stillman, P. R. (1998). Families writing (2nd ed.). Portland: Calendar Islands Publishers. Taylor, D. (1998). Family literacy: Young children learning to read and write. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Chapter 8

Action Research as Iterative Design: Implications for English Language Education Research Anne Burns and Pamela McPherson

One of the challenges for a novice researcher embarking on research is to locate the starting point for the design of their study. Many turn at some point to research methodology courses and texts to understand concepts, terminologies and procedures to guide research design processes. However, different perspectives and meanings of terms like research paradigms, research design, methods, and methodologies can be confusing, and can add to the complexity of the task. In action research this challenge can be particularly acute as the research process is highly iterative, exploratory, and cyclical. It means gathering insights from one dimension of the study and applying them progressively to other components. This iterative process often involves (re)examining research design decisions from theoretical, pragmatic, and empirical angles in a triangulated process throughout the whole study. In this way the researcher strives to achieve consistency among the research questions, the theoretical framework, the principles of the research paradigm, the research methodology, and the unfolding insights from the research data. This chapter discusses these processes and challenges and to illustrate them draws on a recent year-long classroom-based study, conducted by one of the authors (Pamela) in collaboration with the other (Anne). The study adopted a participatory action research approach to investigate the second language literacy development needs of adult refugee students enrolled in a community-based program in Australia, and to use the insights to develop personally relevant instruction for these participants. The model of research design used shows how the choice of a participatory action research paradigm for the study was necessarily influenced by social and cultural considerations, linked to the profile of the research participants and the research site conditions. The nature of the research questions, and notions of critical research found in the academic literature were also influential, as was the theorizing

A. Burns () • P. McPherson University of New South Wales, Anzac Parade, Kensington, NSW 2052, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_8

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of conceptualizations of adult literacy from recent research. In turn, the choice of a participatory inquiry paradigm with its orientation towards critical research practices pointed to the methodology and methods of data collection that could be adopted. This chapter aims to capture the iterative nature of qualitative action research and to illustrate this process in action.

Action Research Within the Qualitative Paradigm Paradigms represent different approaches to understanding the world and underpin the way the researcher conceives of the nature and design of their research. Denzin and Lincoln (1994) define a paradigm as a set of beliefs or a worldview that defines the nature of the world, the individual’s role in it, the relationships within that world, and the analytical units of its parts. A researcher’s worldview is embedded in notions of ontology, that is, the form and nature of reality and, therefore, what can be known about it; epistemology, that is, the nature of the relationship between the knower or would-be knower and what can be known; and methodology, that is, how the inquirer (would-be knower) can go about finding out whatever they believe can be known (Guba and Lincoln 1994). The methods for data collection used in action research are not necessarily only qualitative (Burns 2011). However, the philosophical underpinnings of action research locate it in a worldview that is aligned with interpretive-exploratoryparticipatory approaches. Ontologically, realities are perceived as multiple and subjective and embedded in research participants’ perceptions; the focus is on understanding (Wiersma and Jurs 2009) and the intervention and empowerment of participants in their own social contexts. Epistemologically, the relationships between the researcher and other participants is transactional and subjectivist. The investigator and others involved in the research are assumed to be interactively and intersubjectively linked, with the values of the investigator and situated others inevitably influencing the inquiry. Findings, reflections, insights, and changes in practice are therefore value-mediated (Guba and Lincoln 1994). Methodologically, the research takes place in naturally occurring situations in contrast with quantitative approaches in which empirical settings and activities are controlled and manipulated (Wiersma and Jurs 2009). The transactional nature of an action research approach assumes a dialog between the investigator and other participants in the inquiry. The methods used to collect action research data are thus oriented towards narrative, observation, and introspection. Action research has its recent roots in the theories of the philosopher, psychologist, and educationalist, John Dewey (e.g. 1933, 1938), and the psychologist and sociologist, Kurt Lewin (e.g. 1946). Dewey was critical of the separation of knowledge and human action that characterizes much experimental research and stressed the central role of experience in generating knowledge. He made a distinction between routine and reflective teaching and advocated the concept of teachers reflecting systematically on their work in order to strengthen and sustain

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long-term decision-making (Burton 2009). He identified three essential qualities for teaching: open-mindedness (listening to all points of view), responsibility (being alert to consequences of action), and wholeheartedness (demonstrating these qualities in being and action). The theories of pragmatism that Dewey espoused formed the basis for such educational approaches as problem-based learning. Lewin’s epistemological orientation was towards the integration of theory and practice, arguing for the application of practice to test theory; a position that counterdicted traditional empirical norms. He first used the term action research in Lewin (1946), describing it as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action” that uses “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action” (p. 35). However, what have come to be seen as the essential features of action research – a spiral of planning, action, observation, reflection, and further action  are more than simply a process for engaging in research. They represent a philosophy of social action mediated through research that seeks to lead to change and/or deep understanding. As Brydon-Miller et al. (2003, p. 15) argue that: ...action research goes beyond the notion that theory can inform practice, to a recognition that theory can and should be generated through practice, and...that theory is really only useful insofar as it is put in the service of a practice focused on achieving positive social change (p. 15).

The moral and ethical values of researchers and participants are also central in action research. The researcher’s educational beliefs, social identity and societal aspirations are embedded within the nature of the research processes undertaken in pursuit of goals for change and understanding. While historical accounts of action research locate its early use within the disciplines of education (Dewey 1933, 1938) and social sciences (Lewin 1946), Greenwood and Levin (2007) maintain that it is increasingly used across a spectrum of academic disciplines in universities, social service agencies, international development agencies, and non-government organisations. Burns and Burton (2008) observe that in English language teaching, serious consideration of the value of teacher research with ESOL learners began to advance from the mid-1980s. As the move towards the communicative classroom and learner centred curriculum placed the onus for course design and curriculum development on classroom teachers, teacher educators and researchers recognised the need for teachers to be repositioned as reflective, self-starting practitioners with an interest in classroom inquiry (Allright 1988; Bailey et al. 1998; Burton 1997; Freeman and Johnson 1998). In Australia and internationally, collaborations between researchers and teachers enabled pathways towards self-initiated classroom inquiry by teachers. Teachers’ published accounts demonstrate their use of action research to explore a myriad of language teaching issues in schools and adult learning contexts (Borg 2006, 2013; Brandon 2014; Burns 1999, 2014; Burns and Burton 2008; Burns and Hood/Burns and de Silva Joyce 1995–2005; Burns and de Silva Joyce 2000; Burns and Hood 1995, 1997; Edge 2001; McPherson 2008; Wigglesworth 2003). Such studies

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demonstrate that a range of qualitative data collection tools are typically incorporated, including observational (e.g. classroom observation, audio/video-recording, observational reflections, photographic and other images) and non-observational (e.g. journals, interviews, surveys) methods, but that sources readily available and related to pedagogical activity (e.g. student writing, oral production, teacher written feedback, records on Web 2.0 platforms) are also valuable data media (e.g. Burns 1999, 2010; McKernan 1991). The inherent flexibility and social situatedness of action research means that the researcher can adapt data tools to the environment, conditions and exigencies of the research site (Stern et al. 2014). In the research we describe, the researcher adopted a participatory and critical approach (Reason and Bradbury 2008) where she viewed her students as co-researchers engaged in a joint enterprise of teaching, learning and researching. This orientation draws on a notion of participation that transforms the life-world of the co-researchers through collective effort, so that changes that are made are critically meaningful to those involved. In outlining the study we first describe the participants and the site of the research, since the nature of each was fundamental to the unfolding of the action research design decisions that were made.

An Instance of Qualitative Action Research Australia’s Refugee/Humanitarian program offers resettlement to people who have experienced danger to life through war and persecution in their home countries. One experience found to be common among refugees in Australia is that they have severely-interrupted or no substantive schooling, and as a result are not literate in either a first or other language prior to arrival in Australia (Achren and Williams 2006; Brown et al. 2006; Finn 2010). For some refugees resettlement to Australia means entering a community that is not only geographically distant, but also remote in terms of cultural values and social practices. One such instance is the prevalence of written text for social communication and for recording knowledge and information. This aspect of Australian community life (as in other developed countries that receive immigrants and refugees) is a significant challenge to adults who come from highly oral cultures, or have not had opportunities for literacy in their spoken languages (Achren and Williams 2006). While recently-arrived adult refugees are eligible for government-funded English classes to develop skills in spoken and written English, some find the conditions for participation irrelevant to their lives, or exclusionary, and thus complete their allocation of mandated tuition hours with only rudimentary skills in English literacy. The participants in this study, four refugee women from Sudan, were such a group. The study aimed to explore the social and cultural factors influential on their opportunities for participation in English literacy development. It then drew on these insights to co-construct, through a participatory action research process, a flexible, accessible and personally relevant curriculum for literacy development within a nonformal literacy instruction program provided by a community organisation.

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The Sudanese Australian Integrated Literacy (SAIL) organisation was the educational location of the study. SAIL provided the site, facilities, and resources for literacy instruction, and formally supported the conduct of the study within their program. These resources and conditions influenced key aspects of the research design, most particularly decisions about the research methodology and data collection. As a volunteer, non-government funded organisation, SAIL did not mandate or advocate a particular curriculum approach, collect data on learner progress, or require reports on the study. However, it was understood that the research activities should not undermine or interfere with the tutoring program, and that learners should retain full access to 90 min of literacy instruction each week, as a priority over research activities. This meant that the researcher, who was also the teacher, was free to explore aspects of literacy with the participants at their direction and their own pace without institutionalized curriculum constraints or mandated external accountability and assessment requirements. The venue for the literacy tutoring program was a small community hall in the central business district (CBD) of an outer western suburb of Sydney. Although SAIL aimed to provide individual or paired tutoring for adults, a shortage of tutors often resulted in small group rather than individual instruction. Adult literacy tutoring was provided outdoors in the front yard of the hall and poor weather conditions occasionally disrupted the sessions. The hall’s location in the CBD, opposite the car park entry of a large shopping mall meant that tutoring sessions were conducted against the backdrop of persistent traffic noise. These site conditions posed challenges to data collection, for example bursts of extreme traffic noise from accelerating motorcycles and trucks made audio voice recordings inaudible, and the lack of a secluded quiet space at the site ruled out individual interviews. These features of the site were a significant practical consideration for data collection, as they meant alternatives to traditional means of gathering qualitative data sources needed to be conceived. In this respect the research aligned with Denzin and Lincoln’s (2005) advice to recognize and respond to the diverse sociocultural components of a study when making decisions about research design and methodology: “Qualitative researchers stress the socially constructed nature of reality, the intimate relationship between the researcher and what is studied, and the situational constraints that shape inquiry” (p.10). The participants were women participating in the SAIL literacy support program, all of whom had arrived in Australia as refugees up to 8 years before. They had already participated in several government-funded programs, but were still operating socially from a position of disadvantage in that they remained at very early stages of literacy development. Nevertheless, these women were keenly aware of the importance of literacy in their new environment and like other Australians they were dealing with school communications, financial transactions, government organisations, community groups, and texts associated with work and study on a regular basis. Although eight women volunteered initially to participate in this study, over time the research focus narrowed to four, and then to two in particular who attended more regularly, showed the greatest commitment to their literacy development, and engaged most extensively with the researcher.

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The Iterative Process of Decision-Making The research conditions described above were fundamental to the instigation of the research design. While the physical situational constraints of the research site needed to be considered in the development of data collection methods, it was the unique cultural, social, and learning experiences of the participant group that had the greatest influence on the study’s design. The research participants’ backgrounds as refugees called for culturally sensitive approaches to seeking information about their lives and experiences, and their limited experience of formal education meant that it could not be assumed that they understood the purposes and methods of research. In addition, all research activities needed to be incorporated into tutoring sessions to avoid limiting literacy instruction time. For these reasons it was important to devise an action research approach that allowed research and instructional activities to be conducted simultaneously and interactively. However, ethical research practice demanded that research participants understood that they were not only accessing literacy instruction, but also involved in a research study (De Costa 2015; Rallis and Rossman 2009; TESOL International Association 2014). In keeping, therefore, with a participatory paradigm of action research, from the outset the participants were integrated into decision-making about the research design as co-researchers. They contributed to shaping the research questions, illuminating research activities and data collection methods that were acceptable to them, and steering the emergent approaches that were taken to their literacy instruction. This more study-specific approach to ethical practice falls in line with what Kubanyiova (2008) terms “micro-ethics” or the “everyday ethical dilemmas that arise from the specific roles and responsibilities that researchers and research participants adopt in specific research contexts” (p. 504). Researchers working with refugee groups advise that research can be perceived by participants as intimidatory and exploitative (Mackenzie et al. 2007; Moore 2007); being interviewed, for example, can suggest interrogation, to which some refugees may be been subject, and lead to suspicion about how the information they provide will be used and by whom. Traditional qualitative research techniques that may be culturally inappropriate for some groups can lead to skewed conclusions (Guerin and Guerin 2007). This advice is particularly pertinent in the case of refugees with minimal experience of formal education and unfamiliar with the goals, conventions, and methods of Western modes of educational research. Accordingly, one of the first decisions made in this study was to reverse the roles of the participants, making the researcher’s actions and experiences the subject of the study, with participants contributing to and evaluating instructional content, materials, and pedagogical approach. With heed to Auerbach’s warning against conflating notions of learner-centeredness and critical, participatory approaches (Auerbach 1993), the reflective phases of this action research needed to include a critical examination of participant and researcher agency, and attend to the transformative aspects of the curriculum that would enhance participants’ lives: “Changes in teacher-student roles are not an end in themselves but a rehearsal for changing power relations outside of class.” (Auerbach 1993, p. 544).

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In addition to reformulating the participant roles in the research, alternative choices needed to be made away from the use of the direct questioning employed in formal interviews and surveys, as these would potentially be puzzling and intimidating for the participants. Instead, they contributed their perspectives and described their experiences informally and over time, with data being captured through participant-researcher interactions as they were contextualised within the literacy instruction activities used during instruction (Guerin and Guerin 2007). Analysis of these contributions revealed beliefs about the power and role of literacy in the co-researchers’ lives, the social forces that constrained their literacy development, and the highly developed strategies they used to overcome literacy barriers to participation in work, education, and engagement in community life.

Theoretical Influences Other sources of decision-making concerning research design related to concepts of critical theory relevant to the study and the empirical body of work on literacy studies and literacy teaching and learning. In relation to critical theory, the perspective of shared roles for researchers and participants offered a valuable design framework for a study with adult participants who had experienced social and educational disadvantage and disenfranchisement. Critical theorists (e.g. Horkheimer 1982; Held 1980) assert that the goals of critical theory orient towards critiquing and changing the constructs of society, rather than simply describing them. These perspectives break from the traditional separation of knowledge, action, and values from research and lead to the view that the aim of research is to trigger change and development, rather than simply to observe and report. Participants are partners in both the investigative processes and the learning and development that occur as a result of their participation. The boundaries of researcher and participant become blurred, and the object of study is developed collaboratively rather than being subject to an outsiders’ view of what is worth investigating. In adopting a critical action research stance, the study followed Kincheloe’s advice that: Everyone involved, not just the researcher, joins in the process of investigation, examination, criticism, and re-investigation - everyone learns to see more critically, to think at a higher level, to recognize the forces that subtly work to shape their lives. This method of critical research is also a pedagogical process. (Kincheloe 2012, p. 135)

While critical theory was a guiding principle for the research paradigm and research methodology, its influence was only indirectly related to adult literacy. However, the philosophical orientations of both theoretical bases were inter-related and aligned from the point of view of the socially-oriented perspectives adopted. The theoretical bases used to explore and analyze participants’ experience of using and learning literacy drew on New Literacy Studies (NLS), developed from the 1980s. This research movement had its origins in anthropological studies of literacy practices in small communities as diverse as West Africa (Scribner and Cole 1981),

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Iran (Street 1984), and the US (Heath 1983). This research orientation seeks to develop understandings of literacy as a varied range of practices around written text involving social relations among people, and embedded within the social contexts in which they occur. Other studies that have followed this line have explored the role, functions, and relations of power involved in literacy practices in a variety of social contexts. Studies in this tradition see literacy as embedded in the events and practices that are grounded in social interaction and manipulated through relations of power. This social and ideological view of literacy (Street 1984) is aligned with the goals of critical theory, in that it aims to explore and uncover the social relationships and manifestations of power inherent in literacy practices.

Bringing Together Research Questions and Data Collection Given the previous discussion of the social and theoretical contexts of the study, the primary research question was framed as an exploration of the social and cultural factors that influenced the English literacy development of the participants. It sought to illuminate from a critical perspective the daily realities of the participants’ lives, their experiential processes of adjusting to life in Australia, and the learning of English literacy as part of these processes. The question was framed broadly to accommodate as extensive a range as possible of emerging insights and understandings: What socio-cultural experiences influence English literacy development for the research participants? The secondary question signalled the researcher’s purpose to identify how the participants’ experiences, in their personal and educational lives before and after they arrived in Australia (and in particular how any identified barriers to literacy development) could provide the basis for development of an instructional program: How can these insights be used to inform an instructional approach that assists the participants to further their literacy development? As noted earlier, decisions around data collection were mediated by the pedagogical location, physical circumstances, nature, and needs of the co-researcher participants, and the opportunities furnished by researcher and participant observations and interactions. In addition, the empowerment of the learners’ literacy through the construction of a pedagogically appropriate curriculum underlay the purpose of the research. In line with Gore’s (1992, p. 68) argument that empowerment ‘must be pedagogical – a process of knowledge production’, the data collection methods used aimed to interact with the emergent conditions and affordances of the action research process.

Co-researcher Conversations The first research question called for information about the participants’ historical and current experiences of education and literacy. An early attempt at an unstructured focus group interview with an interpreter revealed that the co-researchers

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were highly sensitive to questioning, particularly by someone who was a member of their own small and close community to whom they were revealing personal details. It became very clear that alternative ways of learning about participants’ experiences that were less intrusive and threatening were required. Rather than formal interviewing, observing and interacting with participants during classroom interaction and naturally arising literacy events offered an alternative approach. The nature of the research site, the casual instructional set-up, and group seating arrangements led to an informal and friendly environment. In these conditions it was not unusual for participants to share humorous anecdotes and talk about past, recent, or upcoming events with tutors. In these informal interactions, the co-researchers were able to control the range of conversational topics and what information they were willing to share. They shared information through the flow of natural conversation, within the limits of their spoken English proficiency and supplemented by use of gesture and body language. By this means the researcher learned not only the facts of the learners’ previous educational and life experiences, but also their attitudes, feelings and beliefs about them. For example Hana, whose story is narrated in this chapter, revealed her resentment at being denied opportunities for early schooling, her efforts to teach herself to read in her own language, and her determination to access formal education in Australia. She also explained how she learned to speak and understand different varieties of a second language, prior to learning English. With this insight into Hana’s language learning experiences the researcher was able to adapt the pedagogical approach to a method that encouraged her skills in self-directed learning and drew on her established learning skills. Rather than the traditional teacher/learner roles and formal-analytic approaches to literacy instruction that Hana had struggled with previously, she was encouraged to identify aspects of a text that were unfamiliar or difficult for her, indicate the form of assistance she required from the researcher/tutor, and apply her own strategies to learn, use and recall the literacy concepts. The action research cycle provided opportunities for her to reflect on the effectiveness of her learning strategies, and modify or adapt them over the period of her involvement in the study.

Co-researcher Literacy Event Observations Later in the study as personal trust increased the researcher was invited to co-researchers’ homes and asked to participate in literacy events and tasks. These visits allowed for observation of some of the dominant literacy practices in the families and the ways family members engaged with texts that came into their household. These were important indicators of the role of literacy in the family member’s lives and the strategies they used to manage their use of these texts. These occasions also provided insights into the backgrounds and histories of the learners as they displayed images and relayed brief anecdotes about life before their journey to Australia. Observations and notes on these activities and the people

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involved were later written as field notes. These combined qualitative field notes served to create narrative accounts of the political, cultural, and social histories of the main participants. This approach to data collection responded to a longestablished tradition in qualitative research. For example, in earlier ethnographic literacy studies, such as Heath’s (1982, 1983) portable audio equipment was not available and written observation notes were widely used. Analysis and reflection on the data collected through observations of the coresearchers’ engagement in literacy events in their homes brought insights into the ways they managed situations that called for a literacy-mediated response. It also revealed a stark contrast between the literacy curriculum endemic in formal instructional institutions, and the literacy demands of social situations in their every-day lives. Observing the ways they used community resources and communal strategies to participate in literacy events, precipitated the trial of similar approaches in the evolving literacy curriculum for this study. Rather than formal, direct instruction, the co-researchers were encouraged to analyze the literacy demands of a real life task, identify the gaps in their knowledge, and share resources within their group (including the researcher) to complete the task.

‘Critical Informant’ Reflections Reason and Heron (1997) and Carr and Kemmis (1986) advise that in action research reflection is likely to be less productive as a solo activity. Carr and Kemmis (1986, p. 194) reiterate Habermas’s (1974, p. 29) point that “in the act of self-reflection, the subject can deceive itself”. While the co-researchers informed research directions to a large degree, the perspectives of a peer literacy teacher/researcher who could take on the role of a critical friend and informant offered the opportunity for deeper critical evaluation of the researcher’s own perspectives on the emerging data. The literacy teacher, with extensive experience in teaching learners with limited education and refugee backgrounds, consented to participate in unstructured interviews and conversations, during which the researcher shared her reflections on teaching events, experiences and practices and invited a professional response. Two meetings of approximately 2 h each occurred during the study, in which issues about the experiences and learning of this refugee group that the researcher had not been aware of, or had overlooked, were further illuminated. The meetings were partially audio-recorded and supplemented with notes taken at the meetings, and teaching resources and samples of student work that the literacy teacher provided. The researcher’s conversations with the critical informant revealed this teacher’s deep understanding of her own students’ patterns of learning and engagement. She had gained their confidence and trust to the extent that many confided difficult situations in their lives and she was able to take these into account in managing their learning program. Without betraying these confidences, this teacher was able to advise the researcher on strategies for flexible instructional practice that

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accommodated the needs of students with high stress and poor health. As the teacher operated from a theoretical framework that differed from the researcher’s, both needed to articulate their stance on literacy instruction clearly and find points of confluence that enabled the sharing of ideas and resources, resulting in expanded insights for the researcher.

Implementing and Recording the Instructional Approach The second question concerned the initiation and implementation of an instructional approach informed by the data sources described above and by the emerging interventionist nature of participatory action research. The original concept for recording the co-researchers’ responses to and evaluations of the pedagogical content, activities, and materials was to use checklists for them to complete following each 90-min session. However, checklists proved to be conceptually demanding and time-consuming and were discarded. Instead, the participants were observed as they worked and detailed notes were constructed about their verbal and physical responses to the literacy teaching interventions and interactions. As participants responded to a reading or writing text, it was marked up with notes about any areas of difficulty, strategies they used to manage the difficulties, the kinds of intervention the researcher used, and how the participants responded to them. As they were at beginner stages of literacy development, it was not difficult to maintain note-taking at pace with their rates of reading and writing. Moreover, in order to avoid discomforting the participants, a common instructional practice aimed to enable their learning and empower their learning choices was to provide materials and then make statements (You choose what is important to learn) rather than to pose questions (What kinds of reading texts do you want to learn?) which were likely to be too complex to answer. The personal histories and literacy events recorded in the field notes, combined with the observational notes of the participants’ selections of, engagement with, and reactions to the various instructional activities served to create an instructional response, which continued to evolve in line with emerging learning preferences. For example, while one participant showed a preference for highly structured grammar and sentence-based exercises, in line with her personal beliefs about what schooling was about, another was more comfortable with authentic texts and simple graded readers that gave her a sense of being a real reader. The data collection approaches described here connect with Guerin and Guerin’s (2007) recommendations on research with immigrant and refugee groups for a slow and gradual process of building up information over time. They liken this approach to “peeling the layers of an onion” (p. 151) and contend that more authentic data can be obtained in this way than through single conversational or interview encounters. The trustworthiness of the data is enhanced over time because with several bearings from different sources and perspectives, the researcher obtains a more informed portrayal of the multiple perspectives of different participants. As

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familiarity and rapport grew in the research relationship in the study, this approach allowed the participants to decide how much information they were prepared to reveal at any particular time; gradually they become more willing to elaborate on their experiences and understandings of literacy in their lives, which enabled the researcher, their teacher, to find relevant responses to instructional development. In the section below, we illustrate through the case of Hana, one of the two focal coresearchers, how the data were able to inform the instructional process.

Hana’s Language and Literacy Learning Hana was 30 years old, married with five children, and after the study began had two more children. She was raised in a small rural village in a mountain area of Sudan. She did not attend school as a child, although some of her siblings did, because she had to help on the family farm, tending the family’s herd of goats and selling produce at local markets. While growing up, Hana’s African language was the primary means of communication, although she occasionally used the national language, Sudanese Arabic. At home Hana used her siblings’ school books to teach herself alphabet, number, and elementary reading skills. Although not schooled, she was good at conducting transactions and could memorize details of her sales. After marriage in her mid-teens, and a sustained period of government military attacks on her village in which she lost her sister, she moved with her mother, husband, and young child to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. There, Hana worked as a cleaner 6 days per week and continued to learn spoken Sudanese Arabic, using interactions with others to acquire new vocabulary and grammar through every-day communications such as market shopping, and with her employer. After 2 years, Hana travelled to Egypt with her extended family. There, she again needed to learn the local Arabic dialect and used the same strategies of learning through everyday interactions. After approximately 2 years, Hana and her family were resettled in Australia. Within 6 months she had enrolled in a government funded English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program and the Adult Migrant English Program. This was Hana’s first experience of formal instruction and she spoke warmly of her teachers. She attended for 15 h weekly for 6 months of a preliminary course which introduced classroom learning routines and foundational concepts such as alphabet, number, and vocabulary, within themes such as personal identification and health practices. Hana did not complete her full course entitlement as she had another child and could not access childcare. She sought alternative English instruction through informal programs at the local library, a local church, and a community center. All were low intensity programs of 1–2 h per week, usually staffed by untrained volunteers with a focus on spoken English. At this time, Hana learned of the SAIL program and enrolled with her children. While at SAIL, she continued to attempt to enrol in various local state-funded Technical and Further Education literacy courses with mixed success over the next 2 years. She also continued to

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make use of community-based programs. Hana became increasingly confident and communicative and demonstrated deep commitment to her literacy development by continuing to seek opportunities for enrolment. A visit to Hanna’s home provided the opportunity to observe how she managed literacy texts and practices in her daily life. One incident involved a school permission note for her 5 year old daughter, which the child had neglected to show her in time. The note was discussed with other siblings in the family who confirmed the mother’s understanding and the child was reprimanded in English and the first language. Hana’s confidence in dealing with this text within her family belied the struggle she demonstrated with similar school-oriented texts in class. Such observations crystallized the need for instruction for Hana to move away from pedagogic texts and tasks that required analyzing structural and linguistic features or answering comprehension questions. Such approaches are widespread in formal language and literacy programs and also tended to be a feature of the informal learning program at SAIL. It was clear that Hana could successfully manage to respond to literacy texts and understand their social function through a process of literacy brokering (Perry 2009) with family members, tutors, and friends. Her language learning history and experiences also showed that she learned well through more naturalistic and authentic communicative interactions. Thus, the instructional approach adopted with Hana moved towards using unmodified authentic texts and a whole text approach to reading instruction supported by a high level of interactive scaffolding (de Silva et al. 2008) of skills and strategies, such as skimming and scanning the text to understand its purpose and search for relevant meaning; skills which Hana had not previously developed. Although high levels of scaffolding between Hana and the researcher were necessary in early sessions, over time Hana was increasingly able to locate information herself without assistance. Throughout the study her confidence in her reading skills and strategies improved and by the end she was able to access graded readers, or what Day and Bamford (1998, p. 63) refer to as “language learner literature”, with increasing independence.

Conclusion The task of designing the research processes in this participatory action research were, as Denzin and Lincoln (2003) describe, a continual iterative process of gathering insights from one aspect of the study and applying them to other components. Iteration enabled the researcher to examine research design decisions from theoretical, pragmatic, and empirical angles in a triangulated progression throughout the whole study. It helped to maintain consistency between the principles of the action research paradigm, the research questions, the theoretical frameworks, the research methodology, and the literacy goals of the research participants. The choice of a participatory research paradigm for the study was influenced by the social and cultural contextual elements, that is, the profile of the research participants and the

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research site conditions. However, the nature of the research question, and notions of critical research found in the academic literature were also influential, as was the theorising of adult literacy in recent research. In turn, the choice of a participatory paradigm and its orientation towards critical research practices pointed towards the adoption of a participatory action research methodology and methods of data collection. The iterative and dynamic nature of the approach and the way in which it served to steer the research underscores the need for researchers who adopt an action research design to avoid a simplistic reading of the traditional cyclical model of action research (plan, act, observe, reflect). It would be a mistake to envisage these framing concepts as rigid structural tenets that action researchers must doggedly follow (as seems to appear in some published research). Instead, the process-oriented characteristics of action research should be seen as offering dynamic emergent designs that allow for researchers to deal with complexity “by iteratively changing the learning environment over time-collecting evidence of the effect of these variations and feeding it recursively into future designs” (Barab and Roth 2006, p. 115, cited in Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008, p. 244). Action research deals with possibility rather than prediction within the study of social and institutional systems (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008), in this case the uncovering of the historical socio-cultural experiences of the learners and their current instructional needs. In the case of the refugee women who participated as co-researchers in this study a participatory, socially-oriented and gradually evolving process was vital to the unfolding of instructional innovations that would become in any way meaningful for their further literacy development. For researchers interested in adopting an action research orientation to their work, it is important that their methodologies be constructed on principles of participation, iteration, inventiveness, and emergence.

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Chapter 9

Conversation Analysis and Language/Literacy Teacher Identity Construction in Interviews Stephanie Anne Shelton and Peter Smagorinsky

In classroom settings, particularly in classrooms emphasizing language and literacy practices, talk is an integral part of standard instruction. Conversation Analysis (CA) offers important tools by which researchers might consider the significances of everyday talk in classrooms. CA emerged from the focus of ethnomethodology on order in the everyday and the assertion that society’s members, through their actions and talk, establish the everyday patterns that make up social order. Garfinkel’s (1967) research on the taken-for-granted aspects of day-to-day interactions became the basis of ethnomethodology and introduced a new branch of social inquiry (ten Have 2004). Previous sociological research had primarily focused on explaining social facts; ethnomethodology worked to examine how specific ideas and beliefs were constructed as facts. Additionally, it argued that individuals have agency in how they participate in and help to shape their environments (Maynard and Clayman 1991). ten Have (1986) highlights the continual engagement of people in establishing what can be assumed to exist and in doing so, they connect what they notice with their stock of knowledge. To Garfinkel (1967, 2002), social order was based on individuals’ membership and competency in specific societal contexts through which they help maintain orderly social exchanges by operating in appropriate ways in particular settings. Ethnomethodology considers how society works; CA “is about how conversation works” (Sacks 1984, p. 26). CA examines the creation and maintenance of various aspects of social order through the organization of talk (Sidnell 2010; ten Have

S. Anne Shelton () Department of Educational Studies in Psychology, Research Methods, and Counseling, The University of Alabama, Carmichael Hall 306, 870231, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487 USA e-mail: [email protected] P. Smagorinsky Department of Language and Literacy Education, The University of Georgia, Aderhold Hall 315, Athens, GA, 30602 USA © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S.-A. Mirhosseini (ed.), Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education, Educational Linguistics 29, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_9

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2004). CA seeks “to explicate the ways in which [conversations] are produced by members in orderly ways that exhibit their orderliness and have their orderliness appreciated and used, and have that appreciation displayed and treated as the basis for subsequent action” (Sacks and Schegloff 1973, p. 290). Conversation analysts examine how conversations follow consistent rules that participants generally use and may be aware of, and how one individual’s use of rules-in-talk reflects and influences others’ acknowledgements of the shared sets of rules. The conversation itself thus cannot be viewed as disembodied from speech conventions, but can only be understood as part of a continuum of speech events and social patterns in which it is embedded. The conversation analyst must assume that each individual conversation adheres to the conventions of the speech genres and social languages that serve as the intertextual body of communication from which it emerges. Invoking the wrong set of conventions is thus likely to lead the conversation analyst to infer inappropriate understandings of verbal exchanges. CA most commonly focuses on spontaneously occurring talk. Many conversation analysts argue that formalized talk (e.g., interviews) does not provide the same series of interactions and patterns, and therefore not the same information. However, other researchers have argued that formalized conversations also have modes of order and meaning that are amenable to analysis, leading conversation analysts to examine talk in institutional settings, such as classrooms, doctor’s offices, and courtrooms (Atkinson and Heritage 1984) and in research interviews (e.g. Baker 1997a; Rapley 2012; Roulston 2006), under the assumption that they fit within broader speech genres that enable the analyst to infer meaning based on inflections, pauses, turn-taking, and other recurring features of conversations that follow features of conversations within these settings.

Common Concerns About CA CA’s procedures have been met with skepticism from researchers who find its isolation of specific conversational excerpts from other speech events to rely on autonomous notions of speech. In this section we review three concerns about CA’s tenets and how CA researchers have addressed them. First, one of the most common concerns with CA is that many analysts provide transcription excerpts out of context (ten Have 1986). CA architect Sacks (1984) asserted that CA should focus only on the information that a transcription provided, insisting that it is not the source of the talk itself that matters as much as what might be learned from the talk. Analysts should approach “conversation in an unmotivated way” (Sacks 1984, p. 27) that does not rely on context, and in doing so, researchers might note language conventions consistent or in conflict with others’ analyses on similar topics or types of talk, even as intertextual factors such as the patterns of speech genres and social languages are central to inference-making. The belief that conversations’ contexts should not pre-formulate findings is not a wholesale rejection of context’s relevancy. Sacks et al. (1978) wrote that

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terminology in talk is often context-sensitive, and ten Have (1986) claimed that although many aspects of talk are “quite general,” talk is always a “fine-tuned adaptation to local circumstances” (n. p.). There are occasions when removing talk from a particular context changes its meaning and researchers’ understandings. There are also instances in which analysts require a specific context for their purpose. For example, Speer and Stokoe (2011) identify themselves as feminist conversation analysts, and therefore, select talk during which people discuss gendered issues. Stokoe (2010), for example, contextualized the setting (a police station) and speakers (police officers and men arrested for assaulting women) prior to CA, so that the speakers’ roles and purposes for speaking were clear. Thus, while CA researchers at times omit context because they intend to demonstrate talk conventions as consistent across interactions, even the founders of CA acknowledged that context is important, and at times essential to the point that many present day applications of CA, especially EM-based analyses, contextualize transcripts as a necessary part of analysis. Second, some argue that CA is ideologically neutral. CA “does not set out to prove this or that theory” (Sidnell 2010, p. 28), and this atheoretical premise has left many analysts approaching verbal interactions as if they have no societal or epistemological underpinnings. Researchers often limit themselves to decontextualized talk excerpts, without asserting a theoretical perspective as most social science researchers feel obligated to do. Presumably, CA’s avoidance of a priori interpretations prevents researchers from imposing external theoretical frameworks on an analysis. However, many contemporary CA researchers reject this axiom. Billig (1999) explicitly countered claims of neutrality, pointing out that ideology was unquestionably present when researchers selected passages and determined what CA concepts they would examine. Billig and others have carefully examined the ideologies shaping CA and have soundly rejected claims of neutrality (e.g. Sidnell 2010; Speer and Stokoe 2011; Roulston 2006). However, while a number of analysts reject ideological neutrality, it is important to note that even when adopting a specific theoretical perspective, CA must always limit itself to what is available in the talk. Present day applications of CA reject historic claims of ideological neutrality, even as they are consistent with CA’s historical project of focusing only on transcription analysis. Third, ten Have (1986) noted that CA researchers’ interpretation of participants’ utterances seemed to extend beyond what transcriptions provided. In a sense, conversation analysts seem to read their participants’ minds at times: to infer what participants meant or intended through their talk and interactions. Atkinson and Heritage (1984) noted that CA researchers’ “understandings, and negotiations about understanding : : : are not to be seen as an unproblematic window on co-participants’ minds” (p. 11). All responsible analysts agree that any examination should be grounded in the transcript and demonstrated conventions of language. However, the latter seems most problematic for CA’s critics. Both ten Have (1986) and Atkinson and Heritage (1984) pointed out that one of the reasons that readers may argue that CA is attempting to read speakers’ minds is that the conventions of talk that CA focuses on lack materiality and must be documented directly, thus leading to a

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reliance on inferences about how any instance of talk represents typicality such that conclusions are available regarding the meaning of pauses, emphases, and other features of talk. CA researchers often rely on previous CA research to understand the ways that talk typically works. If, for example, an analyst argued that a speaker’s long pause signaled a speaking turn’s end (Sidnell 2010), the researcher is not claiming to know that the speaker intended to end her turn. Rather, the researcher draws on previous CA research, which has demonstrated that in most cases of this type, a long pause in a conversation signals an end to a turn, with a new speaker taking up the talk following the pause. CA is not interested in the why, such as why a speaker paused, but in the how, such as how speakers navigate turntaking in a conversation. Knowing why requires mind-reading; knowing how can be documented analytically.

CA in Language and Literacy Education Research CA researchers have examined talk, such as interviews, within and related to educational settings (e.g. Baker 1997b; Emanuelsson and Sahlström 2008; Mehan 1991; Roulston 2001). Baker, for example, examined the ways that teacher-student interactions established the taken-for-granted social order and power differential in classrooms, based on ways that teachers and students shared speaking time and turn-taking. Roulston (2001) realized through her application of CA that she, as the interviewer and a former teacher, was influencing her teacher interviewees far more than she had initially appreciated. By sympathetically and readily responding to participants’ negative teaching experience descriptions, she had inadvertently encouraged them to provide more detailed descriptions of negative experiences than of positive ones. Despite CA’s contributions to education research, however, there are few studies focusing specifically on language and literacy education. There are a small number of studies focusing on English language learners (ELL) and their teachers (e.g. Crozet and Liddicoat 1997; Hellerman 2006; Waring 2012), which are important in examining how teachers’ and students’ contributions directly affect students’ language acquisition through classroom talk. Waring discussed the potentially negative impacts that ELL teachers’ yes–no questions had on students’ learning, peer interactions, and academic engagement in class. CA research on language learners potentially makes an important contribution to language and literacy education, but few studies specifically focused on talk in language arts classrooms and in teacher education (studies such as Anglin and Smagorinsky 2014; Cristoph and Nystrand 2001; Juzwik et al. 2008; Leander and Prior 2003; Marshall et al. 1995; Nystrand 1997; Smagorinsky et al. 2007; Smagorinsky and Fly 1993; Smagorinsky and O’Donnell-Allen 1998 examine teacher talk but without the use of CA). Of those that exist, even fewer use CA as an analytic method. Given that talk structures language and literacy classrooms, often in typical ways, CA could serve as an important method in this field of research.

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CA and Language Teacher Identity CA is occasionally employed to consider the ways that talk influences teacher preparation and teacher mentoring (e.g. Rivers 1989). We next demonstrate the ways that CA permits an examination of two pre-service English Education teachers’ identity constructions during a focus group interview. Sacks (1992) discussed the various ways that speakers formulate identities through their talk and interaction. Our analysis is based on an ongoing longitudinal study drawing from unstructured biweekly focus group interviews with 17 undergraduate secondary English Education teachers. Because of the detailed nature of CA transcripts, we have selected one interview excerpt to illustrate the mechanics of CA. CA relies on detailed transcription conventions developed by Jefferson (1984), provided in the chart below. Conversation analysis transcription key ? Interrogative tone (2.0) Pause timed in seconds (.) Small untimed pause We::ll Prolonged syllable or sound Why Emphasis or stressed word or syllable Yes

>I have to go< ı yesı hhh. .hhh " # D

Words spoken with noticeable emphasis (stronger than underlined words) Words spoken noticeably faster than surrounding talk Words spoken noticeably slower than surrounding talk Word(s) spoken noticeably softer than surrounding talk Out-breath Intake of breath Upward rise in intonation Downward fall in intonation Latching: There is no pause, or there is overlap, between speakers’ talk

We use these conventions in conjunction with Pomerantz and Fehr’s (1997) analytic procedures. Just as there is no one way to apply CA, there is no one application of Pomerantz and Fehr’s approach. Though we discuss these procedural steps as a linear process for the sake of clarity, the steps are often undertaken recursively. There are times when researchers will find that their transcripts necessitate skipping, combining, and/or repeating steps, for example.

Steps in Conversation Analysis We next review the sequence of processes involved in conducting a conversation analysis. These steps include selecting a sequence, characterizing the actions in

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the sequence, considering the speakers’ packaging of actions, coding for timing and turn-taking, and making inferences about the participants’ identities and relationships. The study from which we took the excerpt focuses on pre-service English/ Language Arts (ELA) teachers’ efforts to determine the best way to approach a literary unit on the American Dream, constructed in these discussions as the belief that diligence and dedication earn people monetary and social rewards. The excerpt’s speakers represented the majority of the cohort: self-identified middle class White women. The first author attended and often participated in the group discussions. As she had both taught the participants in their program and had discussed her subjectivities as a White researcher who had grown up in poverty with the participants during recruitment, she was aware that her presence affected interactions. For example, because they perceived her as an authority figure on both socioeconomic class and education issues, participants often oriented their talk to her or worked to incorporate her terminology in their speech. Our belief in the role of context in shaping social interaction framed our use of CA as replete with ideological dimensions. Carmen and Miranda participated in a pre-service teacher focus group discussion on the American Dream and socioeconomic status (All names are pseudonyms chosen by the participants). During the discussion, most participants struggled to reconcile their belief in the concept that hard work would be rewarded and the research that reflected the difficulty of escaping poverty, no matter how serious is one’s work ethic or effort. Step 1: Select a Sequence Pomerantz and Fehr’s (1997) first step is to select a sequence, or excerpt, from a transcript. Sacks (1984) argued that CA is “not [about] any particular conversation,” and that there “is not any particular conversation, as an object, that we are primarily interested in” (p. 26), maintaining that his data selection was not agenda-driven, instead being an “unmotivated examination of some piece of data” (p. 27). The excerpted sequence that we selected for this analysis captured the pre-service teachers’ discussions on the topic. Lillian’s contribution in the excerpt below reflected the conflict, while Miranda’s response echoed the group’s adopted stance on the subject. The following exchange serves as the basis for our illustration of procedures for conducting CA, with this selection chosen as representative of a fundamental tension experienced by the focus group participants in shifting to identities as teachers who mindfully approached the American Dream in relation to socioeconomic oppression: Carmen: 1 So::o, I have to do the whole (.) American Dream# unit thing" soon. 2 Part of high school English huh? And my mentor "loves this stuff# 3 hhh. Bu::t I look at my kids in my classroom? (1.0) 4 It’s a big freaking deal if they get a new jacket 5 and then I’m gonna tell them

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6 “Read these po"ems# and let’s talk about pulling" ourselves up" by the bootstraps# and junk?” (2.0) 7 I’d roll my eyes with them" (1.0) 8 >But (1.0) I mean, working hard does matter, right?