Hello everyone.
I found the article I mentioned in my previous post. It is in Word format
so I will cut and paste it to this email. It is not about disability perse
but about the "epistemologically marginalised" which may be a term used to
describe the exclusion of disabled voices from research.
Voiced Research: Bringing In the Epistemologically Marginalised?
John Smyth
Professor of Teacher Education
and
Director, Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching
Flinders University of South Australia
Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Australian Association for
Research in Education, Melbourne, 29 November, 1999
Voiced Research: Bringing In the Epistemologically Marginalised?
John Smyth
Professor of Teacher Education
and
Director, Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching
Flinders University of South Australia
Introduction
I want to start this paper with a proposition that has been gnawing at me
for years and that is becoming more compelling by the day. I want to then
elaborate on what this means for the kind of research we do in education.
We are living increasingly damaged and undemocratic lives, and what this
means has to be pursued vigorously in the context of educational research
Whether it is because I am reaching that time in life when we become more
contemplative and reflective about what is going on around us, or whether
it is simply the degenerative effects of old age, it seems to me that as
societies we are headed in completely the wrong direction.
By way of personal anecdote I have to say that there is an element of
emotion for me in doing this presentation here. I was born in Victoria,
went to primary and secondary school, attended university here, taught in
schools for 5 years, and was an academic here for 13 years. I left totally
disillusioned on the eve of what has been described as the Kennett
Revolution, predicting most of the dire consequences, disparities and
inequities that have subsequently been promulgated and eulogised by the
barbarians under the misnomer of the self-managing school. But that is the
topic for another paper I am presenting here at the conference.
We ought not to be mistaken about what is happening here in the broader
scheme of things. According to recent international comparative evidence,
Australia has the distinction of ranking second only to the USA (among 18
industrialised countries) in the level of child poverty - 14% compared to
the USA's 21.5% (and these figures were for the early 1990s - heavens knows
what the real effect will be when the real effects of the Kennett
Revolution are felt 2 -3 decades from now).
Across almost any set of indicators we want to take:
• child poverty
• youth unemployment
• levels of school completion
• literacy and numeracy
• socio-economic distribution of wealth
the educational policies of marketization, privatization and deregulation
which have been pursued relentlessly for the past two decades, are working
in the interests of only a tiny privileged sector of our society - those
who already have the cultural capital with which to succeed. A recent
report by the Catholic Church (ABC 7.30 Report, 20.10.99) claims that child
poverty is becoming so bad in Australia that we are creating "poverty
ghettoes" as bad as in any big US cities.
Schooling and how we organise it is clearly failing vast numbers of
students, despite the vocationalising and enterprise schooling
amelioratives. These initiatives pathologise the problem by alleging
individual deficiencies in students and their families, while further
sheeting blame home to schools for supposedly inadequate curriculum- while
failing to properly account for or explain the conditions of structural
adjustment in capitalism that produced the problem in the first place.
Something of Context
My point of all this in relation to educational research is that in these
times what we do as researchers is highly political:
• who we seek out to sponsor our research;
• what issues we choose to research (or not);
• who we involve (or exclude) in the formulation of our problems;
• how we incorporate some viewpoints while excluding others;
• whether we see ourselves as detached or involved in the lives of our
informants;
• who we see as our ultimate audience; and
• what we regard as our role in disseminating our research accounts.
Few would deny these days the political nature of research. Randall, Cooper
& Hite (1999) in their introductory chapter to the 1998 yearbook of the
Politics of Education Association aptly entitled "Accuracy or Advocacy",
argue that education is far from a value-free, unbiased, or objective
activity, and that the same can be said of educational research:
. . . the cloak of neutrality in both research and education is being
discarded as researchers begin to acknowledge the political nature of their
work. . . [R]esearch is inherently biased, education is intrinsically
political, and both have been and will be used for political purposes (pp.
1 -2).
Their argument is that we need to inject an element of realism and move
beyond the myth of neutrality: "Education never has been and never will be
an impartial activity, but is inherently value-laden, despite the
perpetuation of the neutrality myth" (p. 2). Randall, Cooper & Hite (1999)
note that the "new methodologies" (that employ "more eclectic, qualitative,
ethnographic" approaches) can also be "adversarial" and "at times . . .
even adopt the role of advocate" (p. 1). The issue of advocacy is becoming
increasingly important, and I will return to it shortly.
But, there are also several other emerging issues I want to explore as well:
• the embeddedness of the author in the research;
• the ethical reflexivity of the research;
• the creation rather than the collection of data;
• the intersection of micro and macro aspects of power;
• breaking down formulaic forms of representation;
• pursuing accessibility while holding onto academic rigour; and,
• writing for multiple audiences.
In dealing with these (and I won't deal with them sequentially or even
exhaustively) I would like to reflect on a 3 year ARC-funded project
(Students Completing Schooling Project) myself and colleagues in FIST have
been working on. The project had its genesis in the stunningly obvious
realisation before we even started the investigation that there was a lot
of research around of a kind that constituted statistical descriptions of
the problem of young people not completing the post-compulsory years of
schooling in Australia, but the research was silent on: the way young
people framed the issue; the complexity of their lives in and out of
school; how they made the decisions to leave; or, even how they framed and
experienced the phenomenon of leaving school. We wanted to do some research
that was demonstrably more than tokenistic about these experiences.
As I look back now with the considerable benefit of hindsight what strikes
me most is that we were engaging in that project with what Jipson & Paley
(1997) appropriately term "daredevil research" - "a kind of tightwire
activity within the academy" (p. 6). As they say:
Choosing to take up the task of developing analytic practice that cross
irregular, unexplored terrain rather than to reproduce arguments within
existing geometries of recognizable intellectual space is not usually an
activity that accrues dividends in systems of mainstream academic exchange
(p. 6).
We were trying to recreate something of the analytic practice of what it
meant to leave school, but through structures and disclosures of knowledge
"that are responsive to, but unconstrained by the weight of traditional
research protocols" (p. 4). It certainly felt like we were moving in and
around areas of "political and epistemological eruption" (p. 5) as we tried
to open up spaces of freedom for young people to tell their accounts, even
if those accounts were non-linear, fragmentary, and possibly being told for
the first time to another human being. The data was being created rather
than collected, and the representations we were working with were
"epistemological eruptions" in the sense that they presented us with
"imaginative rearrangements"(p. 6) , or opportunities to hear and
reformulate repressed accounts of the trauma for young people as they made
sense of what (for most of the 209 we interviewed) was a distressing and
disturbing experience.
While there are still questions as to whether it was possible in the end
(even though we tried) to change the power relations between ourselves and
the young people (after all we were middle class academics and teachers!) -
we were nevertheless committed to trying to work in "non-imitative" ways
and to seek forms of "textual rearrangement" (p. 6) that were consistent
with this.
Jipson & Paley (1997) claim that what is involved in research of this kind
are shifts in thinking, a moving away from rigid categories and standards
through opening up "creative practices":
. . . one of the most obvious instances of these shifts is that of a
diminished orientation to the mechanics of traditional research grammar.
Concerns with the procedural rules of hypothesis, conceptualization, data
analysis, validation, replicability, generalizability . . . [are]
reinscribed in favour of a broad attention to indeterminate realities of
producing knowledge (p. 8).
We found ourselves fitting in well with these sentiments. In pursuing a
strategy for "naming silenced lives" (McLaughlin & Tierney, 1993) our
central problematic was expressed as: "Tell us what was happening in your
life at the time you decided to leave school". Posing the question in this
singular and seemingly straightforward way, enabled young people to
represent their accounts to us in whatever multiple ways they wanted. We
were able to explore with them "issues of multiplicity, elasticity,
ambiguity" Jipson & Paley, 1997, p. 9) within the tensions, contradictions
and subversive forces at work in their lives at the time.
Voiced Research
It may help if I reflect a little here on what we took this term "voiced
research" to mean, as we sought in this project to "capture the voices of
early school leavers" (in the words of one of the chapters of the account
we assembled).
The term "voiced research" is a relatively new way of characterising the
bringing into the picture of perspectives previously excluded, muted, or
silenced by dominant structures and discourses. Schools have been
relentlessly assaulted over the past several decades by policies, practices
and discourses of hierarchy, marketisation and managerialism-notions that
are not only foreign to schools, but that are anathema to the ethos of
collaboration, civility, community and democracy. Students are are also
being severely damaged as a consequence of these processes.
Voiced research starts out, then, from the position that interesting things
can be said and garnered from groups who do not necessarily occupy the high
moral, theoretical or epistemological ground- they actually may be quite
lowly and situated at some distance from the centres of power. As Grumet
(1990) put it, the promise of voiced research is anchored, local knowledge,
in the face of objective, normative, hegemonic forms of knowledge.
Shacklock & Smyth (1997) claim that "In the telling of stories of life,
previously unheard, or silenced, voices open up the possibility for new,
even radically different, narrations of life experience"(p. 4).
Voiced research is, therefore, political in that it has an explicit agenda
of reinserting in multiple ways, opportunities for expression that have
been expunged because dominant social visions are invariably allowed to
hold sway. There is always continual struggle over whose views get to be
represented and smaller voices, those which are less audible, get "drowned
out by others louder, more dominant, and putatively more epistemically
legitimate" (Shacklock & Smyth 1997, p. 4). In schools, who gets to speak
for and on behalf of schools and who get listened to, is an artefact of
power and who gets to exercise it. With the growing tendency of regarding
schools as annexes of industry in the quest for enhanced international
economic competitiveness, it is not hard to see how the guys from the big
end of town wind up with their ideologies, policies, language and practices
being promulgated as being unproblematically good for schools, teachers and
children. In these circumstances, students as well as teachers are treated
rather like exiles even in their own pedagogical worksites, frequently
disparaged as holding deviant viewpoints, and continually having to
challenge and supplant dominant beliefs.
What then characterises a voiced research approach ?
Because of its epistemological commitment to a more democratised research
agenda, voiced research has to be construed in such a way that it provides
a genuine space within which (ex)students as educational practitioners can
reveal what is real for them. This means that research questions can only
really emerge out of "purposeful conversations" (Burgess 1988), rather than
interviews (whether structured or unstructured). The operation of the power
dimension in an interview where the researcher has the question and he/she
is trying to extract data from the interviewee, has all of the wrong
hallmarks for a more participatory approach. The notion that what is
worthwhile investigating may reside with the research subject and may only
be revealed when a situation of trust and rapport is established, can rest
somewhat uneasily with some researchers. Not having tightly pre-formulated
questions, but being sufficiently confident of further research questions
that are sufficiently 'respectable' emerging out of the research context,
is a very different game even for many qualitative researchers. At issue is
who has the power to determine what is a worthwhile or robust research
question, and young people as subjects are in a vulnerable position in this
regard. When taken seriously, this represents a significant reversal of the
way power generally tends to operate in research projects; the researchers
know, and young people are expected to willingly comply in supplying and
surrendering information. Voiced research seeks to reverse those dynamics
of power.
Starting from situations of immediacy for the research subjects can
generate more than a few tensions for the resource-strapped researcher.
Having discussions stall, reverse, go down cul-de-sacs, and head off on
incomprehensible tangents, is a constant and real test of the authenticity
of the researcher and his/her democratic commitment to this apparently less
structured style of research. Exploring and explicating complexity does not
rest at all easily with the requirement of policy makers for rendering,
simplicity, reduction and utility in research-all aspects that run counter
to voiced research with its tendency towards cacophony, multiplicity and
idiosyncrasy.
Voiced research can be argued to have a high level of credibility, at least
from the vantage point of young people who are in, or have been in,
schools. This credibility derives from the embeddedness of this kind of
research in the lives, experiences and aspirations of those whose lives are
portrayed. This feature may be the cause of some loss of respectability
with large segments of the academy. It comes down to the audience
question-who is the research meant to inform or be useful to? Readers who
are able to resonate with the images, issues, messages, language, and the
fact that complexity, contradiction and struggle of the lives of the young
spill out in lively and recognisable ways into the account, rather than
being laundered or leached out. This is what makes voiced research valid-it
is believable !
There is an important pedagogical issue in voiced research-it provides a
prominent opportunity for context-embedded theorising. Theorising is
something in other forms of research that is the sole prerogative of
qualified outsiders, once compliant subjects have been conveniently milked.
Where voiced research differs is in the manner in which it is predicated on
a degree of sense-making in situ by virtue of the willing participation of
the research subject. The give-and-take of the research opportunity offered
the subject invites a certain degree of identity formation previously out
of reach.
Clearly, there are complex ethical issues at the very heart of this
research method.
There is also a staged sequence to this kind of research, which in our
case, went like this:
(Sorry folks, figure 1 would not copy and paste - it is described below)
Figure 1: Interview Strategy
Commenting briefly in the first of these - the reconnaissance phase we -
adopted the broad concept of the interviews as "purposeful conversations".
We sought to make the interviews as unstructured and non-confronting as
possible through a relaxed conversational style of interaction. We
recognised that we had our 'purpose', finding out why/how young people make
decisions about leaving or staying at school, but also that an open and
non-invasive process was more likely to produce richly storied accounts of
leaving and staying. Our opening question: "tell us about when you left
school and what was happening at that time?" usually worked well at
providing a whole set of issues for follow-up questions and conversation.
Importantly, what followed was grounded in the young person's experience of
school and not in any assumed expertise, or overbearing 'need to know' on
our part. While it did not always work as well as it sounds here, in an
overwhelming sense, despite occasional difficulties, our approach was
successful in 'finding the voices' and in capturing the complexity of
leaving and staying.
Something About Representational Issues
A major issue in this kind of research is the quite different set of canons
or criteria against which it is judged. In this regard it is worth dwelling
briefly on Polkinghorne's (1997) invitation to shift from "logician or
debater" to that of "storyteller". As he says: "By changing their voice to
storyteller, researchers will also change the way the voices of their
'subjects' or participants can be heard. As logicians and debaters,
researchers codify, objectify, and fragment what their 'subjects' have to
say into factors and themes. As storytellers, 'subjects' appear as actors
in a research narrative" (p. 3).
The genre of narrative research made a good deal of intuitive sense to us
at the time of conceiving this project. We reasoned at the time that
narrative approaches were the best way of 'honouring the voices' of the
young people who were our informants. This was a way of maintaining the
essence of the complex stories they were telling us and not violating the
integrity of them. The grim harshness and the emotion of many of the
accounts, along with the stories of institutional insensitivity, made an
even more compelling case for narrative renderings. To perpetrate more
violence on the stories of young people who has been 'done in' and 'done
over' by the institution of schooling, seemed totally unconscionable. There
were other reasons too why narrative approaches had appeal, but I'll not go
into those.
Looking back on it, and with some considerable distance between the
decision to go this way, it is clear that we were disturbed at the prospect
of presenting what we had heard, to use Polkinghorne's (1997) term, as a
"synchronic" (same-time) research report - one "without temporal depth" and
that conveys "information as if it were presented at the same time" (p. 8).
"Diachronic" reporting, on the other hand, is much more "through time",
acknowledging that like other human practices, research is a "movement
through time" (p. 9). In other words:
The research process needs to be reported as a temporal whole in which the
knowledge claim is a conclusion whose meaning is dependent on the
developing actions and events of the research process (p. 9).
In this genre of research, the storied account is probably unique in that
it moves towards a "solution", "clarification" or even an "unravelling" of
events or a series or actions to give a coherent whole.
We committed ourselves to some guiding principles (Smyth, 1998) akin to
those of a ghost writer in literary circles; someone who does the work for
someone else who takes the credit. We believed it important that the
informants received as much credit as possible for their stories (even
though in any subsequent publication, for reasons of confidentiality, it is
clearly not possible to use their names). This seemed consistent with our
task of being attentive listeners, or "hyper-listners" as Rogers (1998)
calls them, and of finding ways of enabling access to a wider readership.
In this sense, as well as being careful and sympathetic readers of the text
of the lives of these young people, we had a responsibility to weave the
story together and leave it as pristine as possible.
The principles we followed, broadly speaking, were:
1. as much as possible keeping the narrative voices of the informants intact;
2. using their actual words as much as possible in a seamless text, but on
occasions, re-arranging parts of the story so it flows;
3. for the moment, not inserting ourselves into the account, even though we
might have been present at the interviews;
4. trying to ensure that any linking text written is as consistent as
possible with the genre of the informant's voice;
5. being conscious as much as possible of not 'writing over' the informants
accounts, but allowing them to 'breathe' on their own with a little
artificial assistance from us;
6. at some later point to consider how our voices might be inserted.
The process we came up with, and only articulated some time after we got
into the process of rendering the stories, was the notion of "portraiture"
(Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983). As Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis (1997) put it,
portraiture is a method of qualitative research "that blurs the boundaries
of aesthetics and empiricism in an effort to capture the complexity,
dynamics and subtlety of human experience" (p. xv). The attempt is to
document, record and interpret the perspectives, experiences, voices and
visions of the people being studied.
We came across the practicality of this idea in the report of the Stolen
Generation by the Human Rights Commission. That report was written in the
voice of the Commission, but continually interjecting and speaking for
themselves were complete intact portraits of children of the Stolen
Generation. They were powerful and moving stories recollected in the words
of the by now adult members who had been forcibly removed from their
parents as children.
References
Burgess, R. (1988). Conversations with a purpose: the ethnographic
interview in educational research. Studies in Qualitative Methodology, 1,
137-155.
Grumet, M. (1990). Retrospective: autobiography and the analysis of
educational experience. Cambridge Journal of Education, 20(3), 321-326.
Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission. (1997). Bringing Them Home:
National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and torres Strait
Islander Children from their Families . Sydney: Human Rights Commission.
Jipson, J., & Paley, N. (Eds.). (1997). Daredevil Research: Re-creating
Analytic Practice. New York: Peter Lang.
Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (1983). The Good High School. New York: Basic Books.
Lawrence-Lightfoot, S., & Davis. (1997). The Art and Science of
Portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
McLaughlin, D., & Tierney, W. (Eds.). (1993). Naming Silenced Lives.
London: Routledge.
Polkinghorne, D. (1997). Reporting qualitative research as practice. In W.
Tierney & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the Text: Re-Framing the
Narrative Voice (pp. 3021). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Randall, V., Cooper, B., & Hite, S. (1999). Understanding the politics of
research in education. In B. Cooper & V. Randall (Eds.), Accuracy or
Advocacy: the Politics of Research in Education (pp. 1-16). Thousand Oaks,
CA: Corwin Press.
Rogers, L. (1998). Wish I Were: Felt Pathways of the Self. Madison, WI:
Atwood Publishing.
Shacklock, G., & Smyth, J. (1997). Conceptualising and capturing voices in
dropout research . Working Paper: Students Completing Schooling Project,
Adelaide: Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching.
Smyth, J. (1998). 'Ghost Writing' the case records in the Students
Completing Schooling Project: Some Guides Methodological Principles
(Unpublished Working Paper, Students Completing Schooling Project ).
--------------
Note:
The Students Completing Schooling Project was a 3 year collaborative study
funded by the Australian Research Council. The partners were the Flinders
Institute for the Study of Teaching (FIST), the Senior Secondary Assessment
Board of South Australia (SSABSA), and the Department of Education,
Training and Employment (DETE).
The research team comprised: Professor John Smyth (Chief Investigator, and
Director of FIST), Mr. Robert Hattam (Research Co-ordinator, FIST), Jan
Edwards (Research Officer, DETE), Jenny Cannon (Research Officer, SSABSA),
Shirley Wurst (Research Officer, FIST), Noel Wilson (Research Officer, FIST
1998-99), Geoff Shacklock (Research Officer, FIST 1987-89).
Best Regards
Laurence Bathurst
University of Sydney
School of Occupation and Leisure Sciences
PO Box 170
Lidcombe NSW 1825
Australia
Ph: 61 2 9351 9509
Fax: 61 2 9351 9197
Mobile: 0407 069 441
Email: [log in to unmask]
Work for a living - Leisure for a life
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