Speaking outside the Circle

1
Speaking outside the Circle

• Research methods for an ethnographic case-study
• Susan Boyce
• School of Social and Cultural Studies in
  Education
• Faculty of Education
• Deakin University

2
Focus of the study
Substantive content

• The school library - profession, place and
  practice
• A critical analysis of the social, political and
  cultural significance of a major shift in
  communications technologies
• An explication of the ways that culture, text and
  language are permeated with issues associated
  with politics and power
• An intentional problematisation of institutional
  and professional orthodoxies

3
Focus of this paper
Methodology

• Investigating possibilities for telling the
  research story
• Selecting tools likely to optimise scope and
  purpose
• Setting structures that enable purpose, with
  potential to capture the fullness of the story -
  with appropriate economies

4
Speaking outside the circle A personal
stance

• Incitations from Bruce, Dressman, Gee, Smith
• the social happens ...
• Asking improper questions
• Ideology - an upside down version of reality
• ideologies construct not only human worlds,
  but humans
• Making the familiar strange
• Speaking the unspeakable

5
Territory and tools for my story

• Research position - participant/observer,
  insider/outsider, bi-discoursal
• Research problem - new understandings -
  socio-political-cultural perspective
• Research paradigm - work place-based,
  ethnographic case-study
• Diverse methods for data collection and analysis
  - rich representation and close-grained analysis

6
Theories shaping representation and analysis
7
All research tells a story ...

• The challenge lies in the telling
• Conveying the intensity, sharing the excitement
• Creating an intriguing text to transmit the rich
  complexity of your precious message

8

• Researchers cannot establish facts about the
  world they can only, in seeking knowledge,
  reasonably argue
• (Habermas 1987, in Scott and Usher 1999, p.97)