Fieldwork in Educational Settings

Methods, pitfalls and perspectives

Sara Delamont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317637356
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Fieldwork in Educational Settings is widely recognised as part of the essential reading for the researcher in education. It instructs those new to qualitative educational research how to find interesting research sites, collect great data, analyse them responsibly, and then find the right audience to hear, use, and build upon their findings successfully.

The revised and updated third edition includes the latest developments in authoethnography, data collection, analysis and dissemination, and is illustrated throughout with up-to-the minute examples of real world research. It embraces both sociological and anthropological approaches to qualitative educational research, using case studies from the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as the UK. 'Education' is treated broadly, including higher education and non-formal settings as well as schools. Threaded throughout the book is updated content on:

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• the internet and virtual worlds as sites for ethnography,

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• the ethical aspects of ethnographic research,

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• the strengths and weaknesses of autoethnography,

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• the debates about representing data,

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• the impact of technological innovations in all stages of qualitative research.

An indispensable introduction for students and novice researchers alike, the new edition continues to illustrate and sustain the increasing popularity of qualitative methods in educational research over the past thirty years, addressing the technological and digital changes that have occurred.

Chapter 1
For lust of knowing

Introduction to the scope and purpose of the book

We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter words our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known,
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand

(Flecker, 1947: 93)

James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) was a poet who died of TB after a very brief career as a diplomat in the Near East. He left two unpublished plays, Don Juan and Hassan, and the poem about the journey to Samarkand is from Hassan. It tells of a diverse caravan of men leaving Baghdad for ‘the cities of the Far North East, divine Bokhara and Happy Samarkand’ (p. 169). The travellers are pilgrims seeking a prophet, and poets, merchants, Jews, and they are facilitated by guides and camel drivers. Each group tells the listener why they are travelling, and their motives are essentially similar to those of academic researchers.

The pilgrims hope to find a prophet who ‘can understand why men were born’ (p. 92): their motive is ‘lust of knowing’, and they bravely claim that deserts and heat, hunger and thirst, fear and loneliness are no deterrent for them. All researchers should be motivated by ‘lust of knowing’ and expect to find their intellectual journey demanding and sometimes frightening. The poets ‘sing to find your hearts’, and the researcher has to write up the results in ways that find the hearts of their audience(s). The merchants are carrying trade goods, and an important goal of good research is to produce intellectual trade goods, papers, book chapters, policy recommendation and content for lectures and seminars. Many methods books focus on finding the data: this one emphasizes the writing up, and the ‘marketing’ of the resultant texts. The aim is to guide the reader to be pilgrim, poet and merchant.

This chapter introduces the book, explains what it does and does not do, and briefly sets out my qualifications for working it. Key terms are explained, and the different types of ethnographic research are sketched in. The previously unpublished ethnographic data used in this book are contextualized and explained, because savate (French kick boxing) is not well known in the anglophone world.

About the author

I have done qualitative research since 1968 when I began to observe classroom interaction in elite girls’ schools. At the time of writing (2015), fieldwork on two martial arts – savate (French kick boxing) and capoeira (the Brazilian dance and martial art) – is a vital part of my life. The savate fieldwork is used in this book to illustrate how fieldnotes are taken, analysed and turned into publishable texts. Documentary research is illustrated with scary stories about transfer to secondary education written by undergraduates. Drawing the illustrations from on-going research projects shows that choosing a project, getting data, reading, analysis, writing and reflecting are a continual process; a never-ending golden journey.

The tone, style and organization of the book

The tone of the book is mixed, with three types of writing. There are general statements (‘ethnographers generally regard their fieldnotes as private’), autobiographical recollections (‘when focusing on X I usually find myself…’) and some direct advice or injunctions (‘be very careful about…’). People desperate for practical advice may want to skip the discursive discussion, while experienced researchers may want to ignore the advice. The mixture of the three types is deliberate, and should be treated as an example of textual variety.

The aim of the book is to make reflexive, non-sexist, high-quality ethnographic research a pleasure. If research is not enjoyable, it should not be conducted. Of course research is often frightening, usually difficult, and can be boring in patches, but overall it should be wonderful, and addictive. My intention is to convey the sheer exhilaration of doing research: the joy of reading, the luxury of writing, the excitement of a new field setting, the pleasure of good field relations, and the thrill of analysis. To communicate these delights I have illustrated the key ideas with my favourite things: reading as a pleasure is displayed by my favourite books, writing as a delight by passages that make me happy and so on.

The book is organized in an unusual way. It starts with reading – widely, critically, with a purpose – the most important task for an ethnographer. Reading is the way we learn to recognize good ethnography, and, perhaps more importantly, bad ethnography. Chapter 3 sets out the main problems that have afflicted past educational ethnographic projects and offers strategies to avoid them.

There are many books available on qualitative research in general, and some of these are specifically about doing qualitative research in education (usually in schools). Delamont (2012a) is a handbook focused on qualitative methods for educational researchers, which treats education as a topic that goes beyond schools, as this book does. There is also a four-volume set of reprinted papers on ethnography in educational settings (Delamont, 2012d) that contains many of the articles cited in this book. There are many more texts on qualitative methods, especially interviewing, than there are on ethnography both generically and in the area of education. In previous editions other books were discussed, but there are now so many, I have not tried to describe even a fraction of them. Rather I have concentrated on what this book does, and how it is ‘different’:

1. This book focuses on ethnography, rather than qualitative research more widely.
2. It draws on both the anthropology and the sociology of education.
3. Education is defined widely: here it covers all formal education settings from nursery to the PhD, and teaching and learning in non-formal and informal settings.
4. It gives priority to reading and writing as central parts of the ethnographic process.
5. The tone is optimistic and cheerful, but the scary, tedious, boring and unpleasant bits of the ethnographic process are not ignored (it is OK to be scared, bored and miserable).
6. It is non-sexist.
7. It is reflexive.
8. It makes the familiar strange.

These eight principles are explained below.

1. Most of the existing books are about qualitative research in general, and focus predominantly on interviews. This is a book on ethnography, with other qualitative methods in an explicitly subservient role. Most qualitative research uses interview data, and there are many books about how interviews should be done, from large handbooks (Gubrium and Holstein, 2005, 2012) to slim advice manuals (Spradley, 1979) and more reflexive works (Skinner, 2012; Okely, 2012). Interviewing is relatively neglected in this book.
2. There is a gulf between the anthropology of education and the sociology of education, and one aspect of that, alongside a failure to read and to cite across it, is that the methods texts are equally self-segregating. This one is not.
3. Many existing methods books focus exclusively on research in schools. Teaching and learning occur in many other settings, both formal and non-formal. Here a study of how people learn a martial art is central, because ‘education’ is defined as widely as possible.
4. Many books ignore reading and treat writing as an afterthought or a chore. Here they are presented as central and very enjoyable.
5. For people who like ethnography it is a wonderful method, and this book reflects that. If you do not enjoy it, then it is sensible to plan other sorts of research in future. However, there are many occasions when the ethnographer is scared, bored, too hot, too cold, footsore, or completely baffled by events. These are explored in the book.
6. Too many general methods books ignore the feminist critiques of social science research that have existed since the 1970s (see Delamont, 2003: chapter 4). Here issues of gender are central, many women authors are used, and readers are regularly alerted to the dangers of sexist assumptions.
7. Reflexivity lies at the heart of, and is fundamental to, good qualitative research. The core principles are the employment of a tough-minded version of self-consciousness throughout every stage of the research, and recognizing that research on humans always involves interactions in which both ‘sides’ are interpreting everything. So reflexivity ‘replaces’ the supposedly ‘scientific’ concepts of validity and reliability in a statistical sense with a robust concentration on understanding investigator effects. Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) includes a larger and more theorized discussion of this topic, and should be consulted. In this book the researcher is constantly reminded that she is her own best data-collection instrument but only if she is continuously self-conscious about her role(s), her action(s), her interaction(s), her theoretical concepts, the empirical material as it accumulates, and her reading(s) and her writing(s). These issues are explored in Coffey (1999).
8. Making the familiar strange is a duty of ethnographers, and enhances other qualitative research too. It is fully explained in Chapter 3 (pp. 24–37).

The specific research, unpublished until now, that is used in the rest of the book as illustrative of my own beliefs and practices is introduced next. This research has replaced all the examples from earlier projects used in the previous editions (Delamont, 1992, 2002), and needs a little explanation. For obvious reasons, as set out in Chapter 3, there is no need to justify a study of savate classes as an educational research project. The fieldwork used throughout the book to illustrate the methods of ethnography is on how people teach and learn a new, unfamiliar bodily skill. I have been doing research on savate (French kickboxing) since February 2009, and I began the study because capoeira, the Brazilian dance/fight-game I had been studying since 2003, was becoming too familiar. There is no savate taught in Cardiff, and so I have to travel to cities in England to observe it being taught and learnt. I have, at the time of writing, been to 26 classes and five all-day events. However, being an absolute beginner is useful for this book. The capoeira research, for which I have been to over 900 classes, is not a good basis for illustrating the golden journey of a new project.

I have been lucky with both projects: in capoeira I have been able to watch a Brazilian I call Achilles (nicknames are normal in Brazil and especially in capoeira), and in savate a man I call Randall Cotgrave. Both are gifted and dedicated teachers who love what they do, are enthusiastic about teaching it, and talk willingly and fluently to me about it.

‘Savate: what’s that?’

The variety of savate I have been observing is called assault, in which the aim is to score points by touching the opponent’s body and head with either a ‘punch’ or a ‘kick’, but forceful blows that could injure the opponent are banned. There are also more violent forms of savate, including a variety of fencing with canes rather than swords, but I have not studied those at all. Like in many other martial arts, people can be graded, and there are levels of proficiency. In savate these are labelled as glove colours, from blue to silver, but in practice people do not actually change their gloves unless they are worn out, so it is not possible to go to a savate event and rely on glove colour as an indication of ability or experience. Men and women train together in savate assault, and spar together, but competitions are based on sex segregation and weight categories. So in a European competition Randall would fight men in the same weight category from other countries such as Belgium, Bulgaria and France. In international competitions, each country has only one contestant of each sex in each weight category. As savate is very big in France, it is much harder to get into the French team than into the Irish, Finnish or UK teams. In the savate fieldwork extracts all the places have pseudonyms from John Buchan novels, such as Burminster and Heston, and the people have pseudonyms taken from Nicholl’s (2007) book about Shakespeare’s London. Many of the people in that book were of French Huguenot origin, so that seems appropriate for savate. The main informant is called Randall Cotgrave.

Savate was a demonstration sport at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, and if Paris had staged the 2012 Olympics it would have been one again. When I decided that I was far too comfortable – too familiar – with capoeira in the UK (of course capoeira in Brazil, which I have not studied at all, would be different), I chose savate, to be contrastive. It is rare in the UK, does not often feature in TV commercials or computer games or martial arts movies or TV series, and as it is French it is not exotic or attractive to those looking for an authentic non-European experience. Capoeira being African-Brazilian, done to music, and having connections to carnival, parties, Rio and samba, is featured in commercials and games, in the futuristic TV series Stargate and in films. It has spread all over the UK since the 1970s, and it is ‘easy’ to find classes to observe in any university city. The two martial arts are similar in that capoeira is taught to mixed classes, and men and women ‘play’ together rather than ‘fight’, but unalike, in that capoeira does not have a structure of competitions, or teams representing countries. Both are taught in a mixture of English and a foreign language that students may or may not speak, so the ethnographer needs to learn some French (for savate) or some Portuguese (for capoeira). I did a year’s course in the latter to improve my grasp of the teaching of capoeira, and had to recall my school French for the savate fieldwork.

The capoeira research has been more collaborative and less solitary than the savate project: I have done the capoeira research with Neil Stephens (Stephens and Delamont, 2006) and been supported by two Brazilian doctoral students, while the savate research has been done alone. In both cases the teacher is a man young enough to be my son, although there are teachers of my age in both areas, and I have not learnt the martial art myself. My fieldwork procedures are essentially similar, and will be explained throughout the book.

In savate all engagements, especially paired practice and fights, begin with a small ritual. The person in charge (teacher, referee) says ‘Salut! En garde! Allez!’ and the players make specific arm gestures to signal they are ready to go and accept the authority of the speaker. At the beginning and end of the contest the fighters turn to each judge (there is one on each side of the fighting space) and signal their respect.

Changing fieldwork

The biggest change in ethnography since the first (1992) and second (2002) editions of this book has been the spread of online spaces for education, for work and for socializing, and consequently the growth of ethnographic research done in virtual spaces and places. Pascoe (2012) did an ethnography on a Californian high school in 2003. Then,

very few of the youth with whom I spoke had email accounts. YouTube had not been invented. MySpace was in its infant stages. Facebook was still being imagined by a few Harvard undergraduates. At that point only 25 percent of teens owned mobile phones.

(p. viii)

By the time the second edition of the monograph was being prepared, in 2011, ‘three quarters of teens now have mobile phones and 73 per cent use social network sites’ (p. viii). When Shelley Correll (1995) did an ethnography of an online lesbian bar, both the bar and the investigation were unusual. Boellstorff’s (2008) participant observation in Second Life in its early years was radical at the time. In 2014, only the most old-fashioned researcher would query virtual ethnography in virtual worlds, and Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce and Taylor (2012) is a text on how such studies should be conducted. When Boellstorff began his research in Second Life there were about 200 people inworld at any given time, out of about 5,000 account holders. By 2010 there were about 50,000 people inworld at any moment, and 1.5 million active account holders (Boellstorff et al., 2012: 10).

The book does not attempt to give detailed advice about CAQDAS packages. The first edition predated the widespread use of software to analyse qualitative data (more commonly interview transcripts than fieldnotes), when the researcher who did use Kwalitan or Nudist (Tesch, 1990) was unusual. By the time I wrote the second edition, the use of software packages, especially NVIVO and AtlasTi, was normal. However, the specifics of packages change so fast that any book text about them is very quickly obsolete. The basic issues about the strengths and weaknesses of using a software package were explored in Coffey and Atkinson (1996) and have not changed, although the capacities of the hardware and software keep growing and their prices keep falling. The chapter on analysis (11) does explore the key tasks that are involved in making sense of data.

This book, like the two previous editions, excludes detailed attention to the ethnographic study of language, from a sociologistic perspective, or those of conversation analysis, discourse analysis or ethnomethodology. There is a chapter (7) in Atkinson, Delamont and Housley (2008) that makes a good starting point for anyone who wishes to explore those approaches to ethnography. Of course classic ethnographies of education that focus on language and dialect in use in real life settings, such as Heath (1983, 2012) and Guthrie (1985), do appear.

The organization of the book

The book follows, roughly, the trajectory of a research project, whether that is for a higher degree or a funded project. Chapter 2 demonstrates why reading widely, reflexively, critically and with a purpose is the mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the third edition: the golden journey
• Caveat: do you really want to do qualitative research?
• Acknowledgements
• 1 For lust of knowing: introduction to the scope and purpose of the book
• 2 Tales, marvellous tales: recognizing good fieldwork and reading wisely
• 3 Beyond that last blue mountain: impediments to good fieldwork and how to overcome them
• 4 Manuscripts in peacock styles: writing diaries, data and text
• 5 Gnawing the nail of hurry: choosing the topic, setting and problem
• 6 Sweet to ride forth: gaining access and recording the process
• 7 Beauty and bright faith: early days in the field and how to record them
• 8 Spikenard, mastic and terebinth: varieties of data collected and recorded
• 9 Seek not excess: maintaining relationships in the field
• 10 Leaving the dim-moon city of delight: terminating your fieldwork
• 11 Beauty lives though lilies die: analysing and theorizing
• 12 For glory or for gain: producing the thesis or book
• 13 Always a little further: the conclusions
• Appendix 1: evaluating the literature
• Appendix 2: demystifying peer review
• Bibliography
• Index