Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research

Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research

What stories can we tell of ourselves and others and why should they be of interest to others? Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research responds to these questions with examples from diverse educational and social contexts. The book brings together a collection of writing by different authors who use a narrative/life history approach to explore the experiences of a wide range of people, including teachers, nurses, young people and adults, reflecting on learning and education at significant moments in their lives. In addition, each chapter provides an account by the author of the process of constructing research narratives, and the second chapter of the book focuses specifically on ethical issues in life history and narrative research. This book: • • •

provides vivid examples of a narrative/life history approach to research uses narrative/life history to explore identity, power and social justice offers an effective model for practice.

With contributions from a number of international experts, this book addresses key issues of social justice and power played out within different contexts, and also discusses the ethics of narrative research directly. The book makes a timely contribution to the growing interest in the use of narrative and life history research. With the increasing importance of continuing professional development for many working in education, health and social service contexts, the book will be of interest to both students and researchers, as it provides clear examples of how researching professionals can use narrative research to investigate a particular area of interest. Ann-Marie Bathmaker is Professor of Further Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Penelope Harnett is Reader in Education and Head of the Department of Primary, Early Childhood and Education Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.

Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research Edited by Ann-Marie Bathmaker and Penelope Harnett

First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2010 selection and editorial material, Ann-Marie Bathmaker and Penelope Harnett; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Exploring learning, identity and power through life history and narrative research / edited by Ann-Marie Bathmaker and Penelope Harnett. p. cm. 1. Education–Biographical methods. 2. Narrative inquiry (Research method) I. Bathmaker, Ann-Marie. II. Harnett, Penelope. LB1029.B55E87 2010 370.7⬘2—dc22 2009034075

ISBN 0-203-85837-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-49642-X (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-49644-6 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-85837-9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-49642-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-49644-5 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-85837-0 (ebk)

Contents

Contributors

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1 Introduction

1

ANN-MARIE BATHMAKER

2 The ethics of writing life histories and narratives in educational research

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PAT SIKES

3 A process of (un)becoming: life history and the professional development of teachers

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CHRISTINE HALSE

4 Becoming a gay male primary teacher: dealing with difference

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ELIZABETH NEWMAN

5 Changing identities through re-engagement with education: narrative accounts from two women learners

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RICHARD WALLER

6 Interrogating identity and belonging through life history: experiences of overseas nurses in post-colonial Britain

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SHEKAR BHEENUCK

7 Researching learning in and out of school: a narradigmatic approach

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JANE ANDREWS

8 Going to the pictures: learning to see the life histories of minorities within majority narratives

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DEAN SMART

9 In our own words: from actions to dialogue NICK CLOUGH

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10 ‘I lived down the road from you’: exploring power and identity, then and now

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JACKY BRINE

11 This do in remembrance of me: narrative uncertainty and the frothing of contentious identity

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JAMES HAYWOOD ROLLING, JR

12 Life history and narrative research revisited

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PENELOPE HARNETT

Recommended reading Index

171 181

Contributors

Jane Andrews is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her research and teaching interests lie in the learning in and out of school of minority ethnic children and bilingual language development. She has collaborated with colleagues on research projects including an investigation into children’s and parents’ experiences of transfer from primary to secondary school using drama techniques, an exploration of local authority staff experiences of implementing foreign language teaching in primary schools in England and a study of classroom interaction in two inner-city primary schools where children are developing English as an additional language. Ann-Marie Bathmaker is Professor of Further Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her research focuses on vocational and post-compulsory education, and new forms of higher education, teaching and learning cultures and the formation of student and teacher identities. She is interested in the relationship between policy and practice, especially in relation to the changing experience of learning, education and training amongst those who do not follow traditional smooth learning trajectories. Her empirical research and writing focus on the lived experience of education policy and the implications for social justice, equity and human agency in changing policy and socioeconomic contexts. Shekar Bheenuck is a Principal Lecturer, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has 29 years’ experience in nurse education with a special interest in diversity and equality, themes he explored further in his recent study of the lives and experiences of overseas nurses. Jacky Brine is Professor of European Union Education Policy at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She was for many years an adult educator working mainly with people who ‘had not done well’ at school. This, and her own biography, are the roots of her sustained interest in lifelong learning and

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particularly in the relationship between compulsory and postcompulsory/higher education. Her interests fall into three main areas: the global (underEducating Women: globalizing inequality, Open University Press, 1999); the European (The European Social Fund and the EU: flexibility, growth, stability, Continuum International Publishing, 2002); and the local, the ‘Bristol’ research, where she focuses on the life stories of people who were educated within the city’s tripartite system. Her analyses of policy at all three levels are informed by analyses of class, gender and race. Nick Clough is Director of Initial Teacher Education at the School of Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His longstanding interest in the relationship between learning identities and social justice outcomes has found expression both through his work in urban primary schools in England and through his published works about citizenship education. His doctoral thesis developed participatory approaches to documenting different levels of participation within a community-based/self-education initiative in Chiriseri, Zimbabwe. These approaches continue to be utilised to support innovation that arises from the community-based supplementary school movement in Bristol and are used in this book to explore the extent to which the idea of a sustainable future finds expression within our everyday actions and dialogues. Christine Halse is Professor and Director of the Centre for Educational Research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is a qualitative researcher specialising in narrative and biographical methods whose research focuses on vulnerable individuals and groups and the social and cultural construction of identity. Recent books using narrative methods include: A Terribly Wild Man: the life of the Rev. Ernest Gribble (Allen & Unwin, 2002) and Inside Anorexia: the experiences of girls and their families (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2008). Penelope Harnett is Reader in Education and Head of the Department of Primary, Early Childhood and Education Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She teaches history and humanities on professional courses and has published widely in this area. Her recent research conducted across Europe has included the contribution of history education to social cohesion and identity formation and the creation of responsible citizens. She is also interested in researching approaches to learning and teaching, including interactive methods and the role which language plays in the development of understanding. James Haywood Rolling, Jr is Chair of Art Education and a Dual Associate Professor in Art Education and Teaching and Leadership at Syracuse University. He earned his EdD in art education at Teachers College, Columbia University and completed his Master of Fine Arts in studio arts research at Syracuse University. His scholarly interests include: arts-based

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educational research, the intersection of visual culture and identity politics, curriculum theory, semiotics and symbolic interaction, social justice and community-engaged scholarship, and narrative and poetic forms of inquiry in qualitative research. Elizabeth Newman is a Principal Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her research interests have focused on the culture of teaching in primary schools, the establishment of teacher identity and the interaction of structure and agency within those communities. She is especially interested in narratives of ‘otherness’ within this context, particularly the experience of men working in primary schools. A former primary school teacher, her doctoral thesis focused on the experience of newly qualified career changer primary school teachers during their first year of teaching. Pat Sikes is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. Over the past 30 years Pat’s research interests have focused on four interrelated concerns: educators’ lives and careers; life history research; qualitative methodologies; and social justice issues. Her most recent research (undertaken with Heather Piper of Manchester Metropolitan University) looks at the perceptions and experiences of male teachers, and those of members of their families, their friends and colleagues, who have been accused of sexual misconduct with female students which they say they did not commit and of which they have either eventually been cleared or the case has been dismissed due to insufficient evidence. This project has involved many ethical and methodological dilemmas and decisions, leading Pat to become even more interested in ethical issues than she already was. Dean Smart is a Senior Lecturer in History and Citizenship Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol, prior to which he taught in inner-city education where he developed an interest in multicultural education, inclusion and diversity. His doctoral thesis relates to representations of minorities in history textbooks. He has an interest in history education in Europe and has acted as a trainer with EUROCLIO, the European Association of History Educators. His published work includes a range of printed and web-based materials for teachers and schools. Richard Waller is Director of Lifelong Learning in the School of Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Originally trained as a sociologist, he has taught widely in further and higher education since 1994. His research interests focus broadly upon social justice issues, particularly the intersection of education, identity and social class. When not working or with his partner and two young sons Charlie and Eddie, Richard spends most of his time playing, watching or thinking about sport, especially football. He is a Spurs fan.

Chapter 1

Introduction Ann-Marie Bathmaker

What stories can we tell of ourselves and others at the beginning of the twentyfirst century and why should they be of interest to others? This collection of narrative and life history research responds to these questions by offering a range of examples from diverse educational and social contexts. What we offer here are narratives, which illuminate what ‘troubles’ us. Writing these narratives has enabled us, as educators and researchers who are concerned with learning, and with what it means to have opportunities to engage in learning, to explore how that is bound up with identity and power, and with the relation between individual agency and social structure. Narratives have helped us to do what C. Wright Mills (1959: 248) would refer to as linking ‘personal troubles’ to ‘public issues’. How the connections between personal and public concerns may be understood and interpreted are important questions for narrative and life history research. This is particularly so at a time when such research is shaped by ‘the ubiquity of personal narratives in contemporary Western culture and politics’ (Chase 2005: 669). Our news is filled with personal stories of success and despair, our television is saturated with the melodrama of the ‘real’ lives of ‘ordinary’ individuals staged on TV through contrived scenarios, produced for entertainment, focusing on the personal and the spectacular (Wood and Skeggs 2008), and our policymakers use individual narrative vignettes to promote their causes. As Chase cautions, we need to be wary of ‘the extraordinary self-conscious fascination with story telling that prevails at present’ (Chase 2005: 212). The creation of what Berlant (2008) calls ‘intimate publics’ through such story telling links to political processes that work at the level of sensation and emotion (Wood and Skeggs 2008). In educational contexts, Ecclestone (2004; 2007) has raised concerns about what she describes as a therapeutic turn, where students are encouraged to tell their personal stories and explore their emotions in the public space of schools. Though not intended for sensation and spectacle, Ecclestone argues that such practices diminish individuals and provide the state with new opportunities for surveillance and control.

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Ann-Marie Bathmaker

Narrative and life history research face the challenge that they too may open up personal lives and experience for scrutiny, but do no more than satisfy the curiosity of a wider audience, if this is not linked to what Lincoln and Denzin (2005: 1117) call ‘an engaged social science’. This is what Goodson and Sikes (2001) mean when they make the distinction between life story and life history. Life stories may be a starting point, the initial exploration of a life as lived, but life history grounds these stories of personal experience in their wider social and historical context, and pays attention to social relations of power. The distinction above hints at the multiple layering of narrative research. An important recognition in narrative inquiry is that narratives are collaborative constructions, and involve different participants in their construction. These include the subjects of the inquiry (who might be termed the ‘respondents’ in other forms of research), the researchers (who might also be the ‘subject’ of the research), others who become involved in the inquiry (such as the bilingual interpreter in Jane Andrews’ chapter in this volume), as well as the readers, who will form their own construction of the text that is presented. What work can our narratives do? We are still faced with questions of what work narratives can do, what insights a study of individual accounts can give us, and how we can learn from a study of the singular. An essential aspect of data relating to the singular and particular rather than to large samples and statistical generalisability is that ‘good narratives typically approach the complexities and contradictions of real life’ (Flyvbjerg 2006: 237). They reveal ambiguity rather than tidy it away. In Hodkinson and Hodkinson’s words (2001: 4), individual cases ‘retain more of the “noise” of real life than many other types of research’. Indeed, as they argue, other forms of research aim to exclude noise, yet ‘the excluded noise may be a highly significant part of the story’. This emphasis on context-dependent knowledge makes it possible to develop a nuanced view of reality, including the view that human behaviour is not simply about rule-governed acts (Flyvbjerg 2006). Individual cases and narratives can in this way help us to understand complex interrelationships (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2001). In writing the chapters in this book, it is the detail of everyday life that we have aimed to explore. The title of this volume, Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research, identifies the key threads that run through the chapters. All of the chapters are concerned with learning, sometimes, but not always, in formal educational contexts. Questions of identity and power weave in and out of the chapters, offering a diversity of insights into the constructions of identity, and the workings of power, and also showing the spaces and limitations for the taking of power through individual agency. While the authors of each chapter offer their own

Introduction

3

answers to the question of the purposes of their narratives, I want here to emphasise what is crucial to me, which is the possibility that narrative and life history research might ‘speak truth to power’ (Coffield 1999; Watts 2008). By this, I mean the ways in which narrative inquiry, through rich accounts of the complexities of real life and an emphasis on the particular, may call into question dominant narratives that do not match the experience of life as lived. A significant and important feature of narrative and life history research is that they provide a means of getting closer to the experience of those whose lives and histories go unheard, unseen, undocumented – ordinary, marginalised and silenced lives (Riessman 2008). Riessman emphasises how ‘Narratives invite us as listeners, readers, and viewers to enter the perspective of the narrator’ (2008: 9), that is, the person who is telling their own story to the researcher. This is very different to the way that reality TV encourages us to become voyeurs in the spectacle of the lives of others. Narrative research respects individuals as subjects, with both histories and intentions. Exploring identity/ies In focusing on the detail of individual lives, a major concern in narrative inquiry is the construction and enacting of identity/ies. Why does identity matter, and why does it matter now? McCarthey and Moje (2002) argue that identity matters, both because identities shape people’s practices and ‘because people can be understood by others in particular ways, and people act toward one another depending on such understandings and positionings’ (2002: 228–9). At the present time, the significance of identity is heightened by analyses that point to the breakdown of the set ‘trajectories’ for people’s lives. These trajectories may have formed a common experience according to class, gender and ethnic origin in the past (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991), but there is no longer a script that can be lived out in a relatively prescribed way. We are forced to cobble together a biography in Beck’s (1992) words, to construct our identities, rather than just live out a predetermined path through life. The implication is that it is no longer possible not to work on the self. Narrative research is therefore seen as providing opportunities and spaces for research participants as well as researchers. Riessman (2008) suggests that encouraging and allowing people to tell their narratives to us as researchers allows participants to negotiate their identities and to make meaning of their experience, and Lieblich et al. (1998: 7) comment similarly: ‘We know or discover ourselves, and reveal ourselves to others, by the stories we tell.’ In this respect, narrative and life history research are strongly associated with moves to restore individual agency, that is, to focus on the ways in which individuals may choose to shape their own lives, and a shift away from what Plummer (2001: 4) describes as ‘the big stories of the recent past’ such as

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Marxism and earlier forms of feminism, which tend to emphasise how social and economic structures determine individuals’ lives. At the same time, various life history and narrative researchers emphasise that it is important to understand individual lives and identities as constructed in the context of particular social structures and material conditions, which lock people into various forms of subjectivity (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000). Making sense of life as lived The role of the researcher in interpreting the stories that are told is therefore a significant one. Biesta et al. (2005) make this point very clearly when they argue that life history research is more than the collection of stories about individuals’ lives: Although the collection of such stories is a crucial first step in life-history research, and although such research is fundamentally interested in the ways in which people ‘story’ or narrate their own lives, life-history research aims to understand those stories against the background of wider socio-political and historical context and processes. (Biesta et al. 2005: 4) Goodson (2005) also argues that a preoccupation with the individual life history and its analysis is not enough. This tips into individualism, and a ‘fiction’ of an isolated, self-sufficient individual. What is central is the relationship between the individual and wider structures – in the words of C. Wright Mills (1970), how smaller milieux and larger structures interact. Narrative inquiry therefore goes beyond the telling of stories and involves trying to make sense of life as lived (Clandinin and Connelly 2000). In particular, narrative research can help to make visible taken-for-granted practices, and structural and cultural features of our everyday social worlds (Chase 2005). Chase argues that such work may reveal the stranglehold of oppressive metanarratives that establish rules of truth, legitimacy and identity. Engaging in ‘little science’ This returns to the question that challenges narrative and life history researchers, including the authors in this book. What is the purpose of our narratives? What work is it we hope they will do? It is here that I find the words of C. Wright Mills helpful, who says: Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues – and in terms of the problems of history-making. (Wright Mills 1959: 248)

Introduction

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This is what he calls the sociological imagination, explaining: ‘The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society’ (Wright Mills 1959: 12). However, whilst the connections he makes between biography, history and society are an important touchstone, which is shared by numerous narrative and life history researchers (for example Chase 2005; Goodson 2007; Plummer 2001, and Waller and Brine in this volume), a key aspect of narrative inquiry is also that it is concerned with what Denzin (2008) calls ‘little science’. It concerns itself with the small, the local, the fragmented, historically emergent, contradictory and accidental. While speaking truth to power may therefore include finding ways to make narrative inquiry heard by national and international policymakers, it may also involve what Casey (1995) describes as: a reconceptualization of what it means to be ‘political’. Central to this definition is the recognition that the personal is political and, further, that power is exercised in all relationships, not just those connected to the state. (Casey 1995: 223–224) In the chapters that follow, what stands out clearly is that possibilities for social change need, at least in part, to be understood and conceived of through the small everyday acts of individuals, and the histories that have brought them to their present place. It is the narratives such as those presented here that get behind the ‘now-ness’ of current policy-making, and offer not just a means of making some sense of our increasingly complex lives, but also glimpses of the possibilities that are realised in the everyday. The chapters in this book This volume starts with a chapter by Pat Sikes which addresses a major concern in narrative inquiry at the present time – the ethics of writing life histories and narratives. Sikes emphasises the responsibilities involved in narrating others’ lives – the ‘heavy ethical burden’ involved – and asks ‘what constitutes ethical research and writing practice?’ In particular she stresses the power that is invested in the researcher–writer who creates a particular version of reality, and how our own lives, beliefs and values are implicated in our practices, so that we have a duty to explain our positionality in the context of the research. This point is taken up by the authors of the subsequent chapters. Each of the chapters starts with a reflexive introduction, where the writers talk about their own life histories and identities and how they came to write their chapter, providing a personal contextualisation for the narrative/life history which follows. At the end of each chapter, the authors reflect on the professional and

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research implications of the narratives they have presented. But this does not mean that the authors all approach life history and narrative research in the same way. The various chapters deliberately offer diversity rather than uniformity. The authors focus on different subjects and they ‘do’ narrative research in different ways. The chapters may be read as individual case studies, but they also share common threads in their concern with learning, identity and the workings of power, and how these may be explored through life history and narrative research. In Chapter 3, Chris Halse explores processes of ‘un/becoming’ in the negotiation of teacher identity. She focuses on the experiences of Sue, an elementary school teacher in Australia, and Sue’s involvement in introducing an anti-racist Studies of Asia curriculum in her school. The chapter follows Sue as she engages in the challenges of trying to work towards her vision and ideals for the curriculum, within a context where her enthusiasm is not automatically shared. As Halse explains, this account of the life and work of one particular teacher allows her to take up questions of identity and social justice that are central to the broader agenda of life history. She asks: How is ‘self’ mediated by others? What is the subjective experience of engaging with issues of racial and cultural difference? What historical and personal resources empower or shackle efforts to bring about educational change for social justice? What are the implications for selfformation and the political possibilities of challenging normative ways of seeing and doing? Elizabeth Newman’s chapter also explores the negotiation of professional identity, through the life history of Ed, a gay male primary teacher in England. This narrative of ‘otherness’ shows how institutional and organisational settings shape ‘the selves we live by’ (Chase 2005: 659), and how difficult it is to construct a viable identity if you fall outside the norm. Ed’s account acts as a mirror to normative assumptions that shape the construction of teachers’ lives. While Ed eventually finds a way to construct a viable identity, we, as readers, are made to recognise how taken-for-granted assumptions about who can be a ‘teacher’ can quickly serve to exclude those who do not conform to these assumptions. Richard Waller’s chapter uses his own life history alongside the accounts of two students taking Access to Higher Education courses in England to show how a biographical approach can reveal the ways in which individual experience is inflected differently by class, gender and historical moment. He explores how his research participants review and reconstruct their identities as they move through the Access course and on to higher education. Waller emphasises how a life history approach enabled him to uncover how these individual experiences cannot be understood if divorced from social context. Waller’s use of a life history approach therefore highlights the ways in which structure and agency may interact in the playing out of individual lives, and the possibilities and constraints that this entails.

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A different approach to the preceding chapters is adopted by Shekar Bheenuck. He undertakes an analysis of ten narrative accounts, exploring the similarities and differences in the experience of nurses who, like himself, came to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s to train and work in the National Health Service. On the one hand, theirs are stories of migration and the construction of new or revised identities when they came to Britain. On the other, the analysis of their accounts reveals the shared experience of discriminatory practices by the white indigenous population, experienced both in their professional and private lives. Bheenuck’s chapter provides an alternative and unheard account of overseas nurses’ experience of coming to Britain to work. However, as he emphasises at the end of his chapter, these narratives have a wider purpose than to fill a gap in our historical knowledge; they are told with the view that the present and future can and must be different. Jane Andrews’ chapter shifts the focus on to the relationship between the researcher and research participants and the significance of such relationships in the construction of narrative research. Her work on a study of in and out of school learning amongst primary school children in England provides a rich resource for considering the ways in which narratives are shaped by the context of their telling. She discusses in depth the complexities of her positioning in the research process, as she went about gathering the narratives of Saqib, a 10-year-old boy from a Pakistani background, and his mother, Farah. She visited them in the family home, and as Farah did not speak English, Andrews first talked to Farah through her son Saqib, and then used an interpreter, adding a further layer or contributor to the narrative. Andrews questions her position as a white, English-speaking researcher, and the relations of power that this entails in relation to Farah and her son, describing herself as an ‘intercultural intruder’. At the same time, she emphasises the insights that she has been able to gain about the role of learning and school in this family’s life, which remain hidden from view in the more formal interactions between home and school. Dean Smart uses his own life narrative to explore how incidents in his past have shaped his values and practice now. His chapter centres around the question ‘Where are we in this story?’. This was the question asked of him by minority ethnic pupils in his history lessons in an inner-city school in Bristol. The chapter concerns narrative on two levels. First, it is an account of his own life history, and how that has shaped his positioning in an increasingly diverse and multi-ethnic society. Second, it is an exploration of the presence and absence of the narratives of peoples from ethnic minorities, and people of colour, from school history in England. His detailed analysis of the accounts that are told and those that remain untold are used to raise questions about the power of historical narratives to shape our understandings of both the past and the present. His auto/biographical narrative is used alongside this to raise questions about how things might be different, and how that requires the engagement of teachers to enact change.

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Nick Clough’s chapter also explores the intertwining of personal experience with professional commitments. In examining his own biography, and interweaving this with discussion of his professional practice as an educator, he aims to identify power relations and identify crises that lie at the roots of his own lifelong learning. He describes events and experiences that have shaped his understandings and values around work on sustainability, and explains how he uses a series of photographs of ‘Myself with the Wider World’ to develop a similar approach with others. He shows how the interaction of different people’s lives can shift and change power relations. Through his own life history he suggests that identities are always in process, and therefore always open to development and change. The lasting memories of attending secondary school in 1960s England form the basis of Jacky Brine’s chapter. Her chapter is a moving auto/biographical account of her own and her contemporaries’ recollections of attending ‘bilateral’ (grammar/secondary modern) schools in Bristol, interwoven with Brine’s commentary on the impact of education policy on individual lives and identities. The tension between individual biography and a shared history of time, place and class is at the core of her chapter. Despite the strength of feeling engendered by the memories of the bilateral school, which Brine describes as ‘a powerful, pernicious class practice that remains deep inside’, she stresses now, looking back, that such experiences are not completely determining. To varying extents and in different ways she and her contemporaries also engaged in the construction of their selves. At the end of her chapter, Brine also suggests that living an unsettled identity can be positive, a constant challenge to the protective screen that may surround the academic researcher. The penultimate chapter in this collection positions narrative inquiry firmly as an arts-based research practice, both in what it says, and its form of telling. James Haywood Rolling, Jr describes the writing of his chapter as ‘a rite of passage into the uncertainty of now’. At one level, the chapter is an exploration and rewriting of his own biography, particularly his relationship to his father, through a multilayered narrative. At another level, the chapter performs narrative inquiry in a lyrical and discursive manner that invites us to rethink the boundaries within which we research and write. The poem which he includes in the chapter, to convey the ‘felt part of the story best’, provides an example of the power of different forms of re-presenting ideas. Narrative inquiry, he says, should seek to proliferate new tellings, not redeem facts, and as an arts-based practice, should aim to rearrange the known order from time to time as a test of what is possible and as a catalyst for change. The volume concludes with a revisiting of the purposes and value of life history and narrative research by Penelope Harnett. She draws on her background as an historian to connect the narratives presented in this book to ideas and work that span a broader historical context and time frame. Her exploration of the understandings that she developed through reading

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different chapters in this volume indicates the relevance of the unfamiliar as well as the familiar in moving our thinking and our practices forward. As this final chapter shows, the richness of narrative inquiry can encourage a revisiting of deeply held beliefs and ideas and a challenging of taken-for-granted assumptions. We hope that the narratives presented here will provide insights that connect what troubles us with wider concerns about the shaping and construction of what Riessman (2008: 10) calls the ‘deep structures’ concerning the nature of life in a particular culture. For novice researchers, we hope that through this book you will gain an insight into why we chose to create the narratives that appear here, and what work we see our narratives doing. If you are embarking on your own research you may find this helpful in thinking about the possibilities of constructing narratives of your own. As editor alongside Penelope Harnett, what strikes me forcefully is that the chapters in this book demonstrate that narrative inquiry is not simply one amongst a range of means of doing and reporting research. Engaging in narrative and life history research involves an investment of the self, a commitment to the issues being addressed, and a desire to create re-presentations that reflect our own commitments. I end this introduction with a fleeting glimpse of that commitment, from an email sent with one of the chapters in this book. It could stand for all of us: One last edit! Sorry to keep tinkering but this one is special to me. No more wordsmithing for now. (James Haywood Rolling, Jr, email, 17 April 2009) References Alvesson, M. and Sköldberg, K. (2000) Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research, London: Sage. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Berlant, L. (2008) The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Biesta, G., Hodkinson, P. and Goodson, I. (2005) Combining life history and life-course approaches in researching lifelong learning: some methodological observations from the ‘Learning Lives’ project. Paper presented at the TLRP Research Capacity Building Network Methods and Methodologies in Teaching and Learning Research in Cardiff, 22 February 2005. http://www.tlrp.org/dpace/retrieve/1369/EX_GB_PH_IG_TLRP+ conference+Cardiff_Feb_2005+paper.doc (accessed 15/03/2007). Casey, K. (1995) The New Narrative Research in Education, Review of Research in Education, 21, 1: 211–253. Chase, S.E. (2005) Narrative Inquiry: Multiple Lenses, Approaches, Voices, in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.), London: Sage, 651–680. Clandinin, D.J. and Connelly, F.M. (2000) Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research, San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Coffield, F. (ed.) (1999) Speaking Truth to Power: Research and Policy on Lifelong Learning, Bristol: Policy Press.

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Denzin, N.K. (2008) The elephant in the living room: or extending the conversation about the politics of evidence, in J. Satherthwaite, M. Watts and H. Piper (eds) Talking Truth, Confronting Power, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 1–16. Ecclestone, K. (2004) From Freire to fear: the rise of therapeutic pedagogy in post-16 education, in J. Satterthwaite, E. Atkinson and W. Martin (eds) The Disciplining of Education, New Languages of Power and Resistance, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 117–136. Ecclestone, K. (2007) Resisting images of the ‘diminished self’: the implications of emotional well-being and emotional engagement in education policy, Journal of Education Policy, 22, 4: 455–470. Flyvbjerg, B. (2006) Five misunderstandings about case-study research, Qualitative Inquiry, 12, 2: 219–245. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Identity in the Late Modern Age, Oxford: Polity. Goodson, I. (2005) Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics, London: Routledge. Goodson, I. (2007) All the lonely people: the struggle for private meaning and public purpose in education, Critical Studies in Education, 48, 1: 131–148. Goodson, I. and Sikes, P. (2001) Life History Research in Educational Settings: Learning from Lives, Buckingham: Open University Press. Hodkinson, P. and Hodkinson, H. (2001) The strengths and limitations of case study research. Paper presented at the Learning and Skills Development Agency Conference at Cambridge, 5–7 December 2001. Lieblich, A., Tuval-Maschiach, R. and Tamar, Z. (1998) Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis and Interpretation, Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage. Lincoln, Y.S. and Denzin, N.K. (2005) Epilogue: the eighth and ninth moments – qualitative research in/and the fracture future, in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage: 1115–1126. McCarthey, S.J. and Moje, E.B. (2002) Identity matters, Reading Research Quarterly, 37, 2: 228–238. Plummer, K. (2001) Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism, London: Sage. Riessman, C.K. (2008) Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences, Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Watts, M. (2008) Narrative research, narrative capital, narrative capability, in J. Satterthwaite, M. Watts and H. Piper (eds) Talking Truth, Confronting Power, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 99–112. Wood, H. and Skeggs, B. (2008) Spectacular Morality: ‘Reality’ television, individualisation and the re-making of the working class, in D. Hesmonhalgh and J. Toynbee (eds) Media and Social Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 177–194. Wright Mills, C. (1970 [1959]) The Sociological Imagination, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Chapter 2

The ethics of writing life histories and narratives in educational research Pat Sikes

Introduction How would you feel if, one day, when reading a book, a journal or a newspaper, you came across writing you knew to be about you that revealed secrets, was unflattering, untrue, or had, in its interpretation, simply got the wrong end of the stick? Not best pleased, I imagine. Whilst such an experience is part of the everyday life of ‘celebrities’, it isn’t something that folk who agree to take part in academic research projects expect to have to go through as a consequence of their involvement. Nevertheless, sometimes they do, and on occasion, that experience has in itself become the focus of further academic writing, and, therefore, the cause of even more exposure. Well known and documented cases of this happening include Wilfred Foote Whyte’s (1943) Street Corner Society study (see Boelen 1992; Whyte, 1992) and Carolyn Ellis’ (1986) Fisher Folk research (see Ellis 1995 and 2007; Tolich 2004). In the accounts of how research participants have felt after seeing the ways in which they were depicted, hurt and betrayal feature large, as does concern about how other people, reading the descriptions, might now regard and behave towards them. These ‘betrayal’ stories make it clear that writing is never neutral or innocent because it is a social and a political activity with consequences and that, as such, writing about, and thereby re-presenting, lives carries a heavy ethical burden. As Laurel Richardson notes: narrativising, like all intentional behaviour … is a site of moral responsibility (1990: 131). In this chapter I am going to begin to explore some of the issues around the ethics of writing life histories and narratives in educational research. This is a massive topic and anything I write can only be partial, both in the sense of coverage and in terms of it being my own personal view. I should also make it clear here, right from the start, that I see all of the writing that we do in connection with any particular research endeavour as an

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integral component of that research. Thus the preliminary jottings we make when first beginning to develop ideas about what we’re going to look at, proposals, notes and references we take from the literature, field notes, transcripts, research diary entries, and so on, as much as any formal accounts – papers for journals, dissertations, chapters, books, whatever – are, in my opinion, as much a part of the investigation as any data we may collect. I totally share Laurel Richardson’s (1994) belief that writing is a method of inquiry and this view permeates everything I will write. Thus, when I talk about ‘research’ or ‘writing’ the likelihood is that I will be using the terms to mean the same overall practice. I also need to warn readers that I’m not going to be going in to great detail around the nature and definition of narrative and narrative enquiry. These are areas which have provoked considerable discussion and debate which can be pursued elsewhere (see for example, Barthes, 1966 and 1977; Bruner 1986; Chase 2005; Polkinghorne 1988; Porter Abbott 2002 and 2005; Riessman 1993 and 2008; Rudrum 2005; Van Maanen 1988). So, having given these caveats, throughout the chapter I’m going to be drawing on examples of my own and other people’s work and focusing on: my understanding and conceptualisation of what constitutes ethical research and writing practice; ethical issues vis-à-vis the people whose lives are the focus and substance of life histories and narratives; and ethical considerations around re-presenting narrative accounts of lives as research. I will address too, some of the repercussions that can follow on for researchers when they write about lives, whether their own (in the case of autoethnographic work) or of others (particularly those who are objects of social censure). I’m using these headings as an heuristic device, as a framework, to help me organise what I have to say rather than because I see what I’m putting in each section as separate and discrete. Indeed, my own experience is that the relational nature of narrative and life history research inevitably blurs all of boundaries – which can be a complication when we are trying to communicate our thinking to other people! My understanding and conceptualisation of what constitutes ethical research and writing practice I believe that writing lives is always an auto/biographical process and acknowledging this is, in my view, the first task that ethical researchers must address. In using the construction ‘auto/biographical’ I am following Liz Stanley (1992, 1993) who explains how, in analysing, making sense of and writing other people’s lives, our own lives, our beliefs and values, our positionality, inevitably are implicated. Talking specifically of sociologists but, I’d say, with equal relevance to anyone from any disciplinary background who is concerned to investigate aspects of the social world, Stanley writes: The notion of auto/biography is linked to that of the ‘auto/biographical I’. The auto/biographical I is an inquiring analytical sociological … agent

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who is concerned in constructing, rather than ‘discovering’, social reality and sociological knowledge. The use of ‘I’ explicitly recognises that such knowledge is contextual, situational, and specific, and that it will differ systematically according to the social location (as a gendered, raced, classed, sexualitied, person) of the particular knowledge-producer. Thus the ‘autobiography’ … of the sociologist becomes epistemologically crucial no matter what particular research activity we are engaged in. (Stanley 1993: 49–50) It seems to me to be unethical to offer a version of someone’s life (or indeed of any social phenomenon) without making clear the nature of the gaze that is being brought to bear upon it. Therefore, and for instance, if someone is a radical feminist or a Marxist they need to say they are before they start offering an analysis. Similarly, if you are investigating a life experience that you yourself have had, then this has to be declared as well in the way that, for example, I (Sikes 1997) and Barbara Cole (2004) did when researching and writing about experiences connected to motherhood. As I will discuss later, there can be consequences attached to doing this, but, nevertheless, reflexivity and honesty about one’s positionality and its role in sense-making are integral components of ethical practice. Camilla Stiver emphasises this when she refers to Zygmunt Bauman’s observation that ‘refusal to acknowledge the interpretive moment in every knowledge process reveals the urge to control’ (Stiver 1993:422). Acknowledging the auto/biographical epistemological relationship is also important when it comes to research which privileges the experiences and perceptions of the researcher/writer. Autoethnography (see Ellis and Bochner 2000; Ellis 2004, 2009) does this, and so too can personal life history work of various kinds (see, as examples, Richardson 1997, 2007 and Steedman 1986). Writing about ourselves usually implicates other people because there is very little that we do in total isolation. Thus, talking about childhood often involves reference to parents and carers; discussion of one’s education generally brings in teachers and classmates; and focusing on professional experiences usually means attention to colleagues and/or clients. Critics of autoethnographic approaches (e.g. Delamont 2007) often mention the inescapable point that, whatever pseudonyms or fictional alterations and disguising strategies that may be employed, if autoethnographic accounts really are about the author, then everyone who appears in the narrative is identifiable, if not explicitly identified. This, of course, raises a host of ethical concerns, some of which I will address later. For now though, I will simply reiterate the importance of recognising and acknowledging the need to, as Michelle Fine has put it, examine ‘the hyphen at which Self-Other join in the politics of everyday life, that is, the hyphen that both separates and merges personal identities with our inventions of Others’ (1994: 70). Further to this emphasis on the auto/biographical, my understandings and conceptualisation of what constitutes ethical research and writing practice have

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been influenced by personal experience and observation and wide-ranging reading: a sort of bricolage approach to ethics (see Cannella and Lincoln 2007: 325). Hence, and primarily, I draw on: • • • • •

(Kantian) deontological concerns with the duties and responsibilities of researchers (such as respecting persons and not doing any harm) and the rights of research participants (for instance, to withdraw from a project) consequentialist concerns about the likely immediate and long-term effects of being involved or in any way touched by a particular research project (Aristotelian) virtue ethics where the concern is with advancing the general good a situational and contextual awareness that different situations and cultural settings generate their own research-related ethical questions and issues that demand unique and contextual answers and treatment and a (Buberian) relational ethics which acknowledges interpersonal relationships, connectedness, and a responsibility to care for each other.

Of course I also have to be mindful of the requirements of institutional and funding body ethical review committees (known as Institutional Review Boards [IRBs] in the USA). Quite simply, if I do not do what is necessary in order to get ethical clearance, I cannot proceed with my research. Like many others (eg, Allen et al. 2009; Cannella and Lincoln 2007; Halse and Honey 2007; Hammersley 2008; Johnson 2008a; Lincoln 2005; Lincoln and Cannella 2009) I am sceptical about, and critical of, the workings of such committees and believe that they can, actually, be antithetical to ethical research practice. However, there is not space here to explore these matters further. Interested readers can follow up the references given (and also see my own thoughts in Sikes and Piper 2009). Ethical issues vis-à-vis the people whose lives are the focus and substance of life histories and narratives My bottom-line, acid test for whether or not I consider my own or other people’s research to be ethical is: how would I feel if I, members of my family or my friends were to be involved and treated and written about in the way the research in question involves or treats or depicts its participants? Any qualms raise alarms and questions for me (see Sikes 2006a). It is undoubtedly the case that writers do have considerable power to create versions of reality and this is, perhaps, particularly pertinent when they are writing under the heading of ‘research’ with all the connotations that that word carries. Even when researchers make it clear that they are taking an interpretative, or even a postmodernist, position and spell out that they

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acknowledge that there is no single ‘truth’, they are usually, either explicitly or in effect, making a claim to present a legitimate and authentic account of whatever it is they are studying and writing about: in our case, people’s lives. And, I would suggest, readers often tend to bring their own understandings and expectations that there is some sort of correspondence implied in the account/writing too. This is, I think, a consequence of the positivist and postpositivist traditions which, as Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln note, ‘linger like long shadows over the qualitative research project’ (1994: 5) in which life history and narrative work is entirely located. The salient result is that how we describe people’s lives is how they appear to, and in, the world through our writing, however much any depiction is the result of our own auto/biographical interpretation, the product of our vocabulary and our skill with words, the outcome of our concern to use the life/lives to support a particular argument and/or our theorising, and so on. That a piece of writing has a temporal permanence is important here too because, although circumstances and contexts, attitudes, beliefs and practices may change, that particular writing stays the same. So, the life histories I, Linda Measor and Peter Woods constructed when we were studying teachers’ lives and careers back in the early 1980s and which were reported and discussed in our writings about that research (Sikes et al. 1985) could be seen to fix, freeze and stop the clock on those teachers’ lives and on our interpretations as well (see Sikes 2009: 157 for an acknowledgement of how we might approach the same work differently 20 years on). Tony Adams (2008) talks about the notion of narrative privilege and, in so doing, asks who has the ability to tell and who can listen to or, more pertinently here, read a story? He uses as an example his own autoethnographic writing about his difficult relationship with his father and he makes the point that, since his dad is not an academic he is unlikely to read, or to be able to respond in writing and in the same fora, to what his son writes about him. This gives Adams some licence to write about his parent in any way he likes. However, this re-presentational freedom brings responsibility if he is to act ethically: I must understand, as best I can, how I may (re)present him, tempering any demonising feelings I have while still allowing my story to unfold. My story will change knowing I have control over my father’s portrayal, but being aware of this control is necessary when we write about others unable to tell their stories. (Adams 2008: 181) It may be that in the majority of cases it is unlikely that the people whose lives we re-present would, in the normal course of events, come across our accounts (Medford 2006: 858), although serendipity can intervene in the most unexpected ways and stories can end up in places we would never have

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expected (Ellis 2009: 311). Sometimes, perhaps even often these days, researchers employ some type of respondent validation (or ‘member check’), showing their interpretations and writings to those they concern and offering the opportunity for comment or even alteration. This practice raises the difficult issue of who ‘owns’ the lives we write about. On the one hand, we, as academic writers of scholarship, have a responsibility to make interpretations and an obligation to take responsibility for those interpretations as conveyed through our re-presentations, but on the other, we couldn’t write if the lives hadn’t been shared by those who lived them in the first place. Furthermore, as Laurel Richardson notes, ‘keeping the control of the text with its author … is especially important when one is writing personal narrative … It is the author’s story, after all’ (2007: 171). There are no easy answers, especially when one considers that the life as told is not, and never can be, the life as lived (Bruner 1993: 38–39). It also has to be said that many people who have attempted to use respondent validation, myself included, have found that ‘respondents’ don’t always want to read what we write anyway. The reasons for this can include: taking part in our research conversations and interviews and participating in the collaborative co-construction of a life history (see Goodson and Sikes 2001) can be sufficient involvement for some; people trust us to write ethically and responsibly about them; or, folk don’t have the time or the interest. And respondent validation is not always an option anyway, if, for instance, those we are writing about are dead or illiterate or, for whatever reason, are unable to comprehend (see Ellis 2007). It seems to me that the most important ethical concern is to do all that we can to ensure that we re-present lives respectfully and that we do not use our narrative privilege, or, put another way, our narrative power, to demean, belittle or to take revenge (and especially revenge which masquerades as sociological scholarship!). We need to always remember the significance of language, and weigh up carefully how the words and phrases, the discourses, we use can be understood and experienced. Sometimes we may need other people to act as critical friends who can give us their impressions of what we have written. This can be especially important when the lives we are writing about are located in contexts or cultures which we are not, ourselves, members of. We need to know what insiders will make of our accounts. I referred earlier to the controversies around Wilfred Foote Whyte’s (1943) Street Corner Society study and Carolyn Ellis’ (1986) Fisher Folk research. One of the key lessons to be learnt from these incidents is that when we write about communities or groups or even a couple of people who know each other, confidentiality and protection of identity need to be thought about very carefully indeed. Pseudonyms and other attempts to disguise can only really work in the wider world where readers don’t personally know, or know of, the people concerned. Anyone who is an insider, however, will be able to work out who is who. Martin Tolich (2004) usefully distinguishes between ‘external confidentiality’ and ‘internal confidentiality’ where the ‘internal’ refers to the network

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of relationships which allow insiders to know and identify who is being described and/or – and probably more pertinently – being quoted. Tolich points out that, traditionally, researchers have offered assurances of confidentiality which have been, and could only have been, partial and that, furthermore, ethics review procedures have usually failed to distinguish between the two arenas. Once again, I would argue that these issues should be the concern of all researchers, regardless of the methodologies or methods they use. They are, however and obviously, especially significant for those undertaking auto/biographical work where there is considerable potential for the fallout following from identification to have serious consequences for relationships far beyond and in addition to, those between researcher and informant(s). In talking about consequences for relationships, I think that it is fair to say that most ethics-related discussions about how informants are re-presented in writing either focus on, or tend to assume, that the implications are for those persons’ own well-being. However, there are occasions when the greater potential damage may be to others and when the charge of unethical behaviour lies at the door of the research participant. For instance, researchers may find out and reveal through their writing that someone thinks negatively about, or has deceived or betrayed, certain individuals. These other people may only learn about this as a result of publication. Then there are those cases where individuals may actively be using the opportunity to be involved in a research project in order to construct an alternative and fallacious identity. Heather Piper and I were acutely conscious of the dangers of this possibility when undertaking auto/biographical work with teachers who claimed that they had been falsely accused of sexually abusing pupils. As we noted, ‘apart from simply perpetrating a falsehood, such an identity could actually provide cover and, thereby, scope for further offences to be committed and we clearly did not want to be party to such a possibility’ (Sikes and Piper 2009). In his (1995) book, Telling Sexual Stories, Ken Plummer also talks about the risks inherent in giving voice to paedophiles who may well use involvement in research to construct a justification for their behaviours, thus raising the question of the ethics of doing such research in the first place (see also Sikes 2006a). The issue is not, however, confined to work with actual or potential sex offenders since all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons, may wish to lie. There are no simple solutions (and triangulation definitely is not the panacea) but acknowledging the possibilities and the dangers of this happening through one’s research and writing is, I would suggest, essential for ethical practice (Sikes 2000). Ethical considerations around re-presenting narrative accounts of lives as research As I have already noted, I share Jerome Bruner’s (1993) view that the narrated life is not, and cannot be, the life as lived. When people tell us their stories

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they are making choices about what to put in and what to leave out and also about what emphases to make and words to use in order to create a particular impression. When we tell those stories as writer/researchers, we too, are making the same sort of decisions, decisions which can implicate us in what Kristina Medford describes as ‘mindful slippage … between Truth (or our experience of reality) and truthfulness … between what we know (or what we cannot remember) and what we write’ (2006: 853). Sabi Redwood (2008) and John Bergin and Robert Westwood (2003), however, go even further and talk about ‘violent’ textual practices which shape and tame unruly data in order to present and privilege a version that serves the writer/researcher’s purpose. Following a similar brutal line, I tend to think of these sorts of activities as the Cinderella’s slipper syndrome – where researchers cut and slice data (standing for Cinderella’s sisters’ feet) to fit the story (shoe) (Sikes 2006b: 46). When the focus of the writing is someone’s life the potential for nastiness gets even greater and I am especially reminded of Patti Lather’s (1986) metaphor of ‘rape research’ used to refer to those cases when the researcher/writer takes and writes about what they want without any concern for, or acknowledgement of, the informant. Clearly, writing presented as research that involves slippage or violence is not ethical. It’s unethical with regard to the people it involves and it is unethical in that it damages the integrity of the overall purpose of the research endeavour, which seeks to further understanding and make sense of the social world. This last point is, I believe, particularly significant in the context of auto/biographical and narrative research which already faces enough criticism from opponents who claim it is not ‘proper’ or legitimate ‘science’ in the first place. Ethical research practice demands authorial honesty and nowhere more so than when it comes to using fictional devices and approaches in writing up and re-presenting social research. Sometimes the decision to use fiction is based on the desire to protect research participants. Heather Piper and I, for instance, wanted to do everything that we could to disguise the identities of the people who spoke to us in the course of our research into accusations of sexual abuse. These folk had already experienced considerable negative public attention and, in some cases, the full force of media hostility. Giving any clues as to who they were could have led to further exposure and even potential violence against them (Sikes and Piper 2009: Chapter 4). We therefore, and like Andrew Sparkes (1995) in his work with gay and lesbian PE teachers, constructed, and explained in detail how we had constructed, composite stories, in which everything described had happened but where characters and contexts were made up. In cases like these, fictional strategies tend to have ethical origins but even so it is always important to bear in mind that we have an ethical responsibility to readers too and that, as Laurel Richardson points out: claiming to write ‘fiction’ is different from claiming to write ‘science’ in terms of the audience one seeks, the impact one might have on different

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publics, and how one expects ‘truth claims’ to be evaluated. These differences should not be overlooked or minimized (2000: 926) They should, therefore, always be acknowledged and especially when fiction is being used in order to create a sense of feel and place (Sikes 2005) and to help to ‘bring the written product of social research closer to the richness and complexity of lived experience’ (Bochner and Ellis 1998: 7). In these cases it may, perhaps, be easier for us to let the story run away with us, so we need to be acutely mindful of spelling out what we have done and how we have done it. Being honest in the accounts we give about how we conducted our research is essential. Such honesty can, at times, give rise to some uncomfortable reflections, not least with regard to how we write about the relationships we have had with the people taking part in our research. Think, for example, about those occasions, not uncommon in life history work, when we may invoke and describe the notion of reciprocity because, we say, we believe that by establishing ‘good’ relationships we are more likely to get quality data. Being candid about such a degree of instrumentality carries the risk of people we have apparently befriended in the course of our research reading our account and being hurt and feeling used. Of course, it is the case that people may enter into research relationships knowing the score, and it is also possible that relationships may endure after the research is over. The point is that we do need to think about and be aware both of the consequences of what we do and of what we write (see Measor and Sikes 1992 for further discussion of these issues). Repercussions that can follow for researchers when they write about lives Researchers who write about lives, whether other people’s or their own, need to be aware of the possible repercussions that so doing can have for them. In terms of ethical practice the issues here relate to authorial honesty when it comes to declaring one’s positionality and also to the question of protecting oneself. Since ethics review procedures and policies usually make some reference to whether or not researchers may themselves be harmed by the research they intend to carry out, it seems appropriate to mention this area here too. It seems to me that ethical practice demands that a researcher/writer states where they are positioned with regard to their work. Thus they should explain why they are interested in a particular topic, how it relates to them and their experiences, why they are choosing to use particular methodologies and methods, and what theoretical perspectives they are bringing to bear on their analysis. I don’t believe that research can ever be, or ever should be, value free and I think it is important that, as part of their ethical responsibility to readers, researcher/writers should acknowledge their relationship to their project thus

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allowing bias and partisanship to be taken into account. I did this when, in a journal paper, I explained that my interest in researching consensual relationships between teachers and pupils over the age of sexual consent was partly to do with the fact that I had, myself, married one of my teachers (Sikes 2006c). In the furore that erupted as a result of this work coming to the attention of the media (see Sikes 2008), I was variously described as a rape victim, an abused child and a paedophile. Furthermore I, my family and friends were subjected to harassment by journalists and evangelical Christian groups in the USA. Others (e.g. Cavanagh 2007; Johnson 2008a, 2008b) who have used auto/biographical approaches in researching questions around young people and sex have written about the way in which one can become identified with the people one writes about. As Sheila Cavanagh puts it: there is a curious way in which the topic of sex scandals implicates me as a researcher … I have had my share of raised eyebrows when I tell colleagues what I am writing about. People wonder why I am writing a book on teacher sex scandals and what this could possibly say about my own pedagogical practice or my ethics as a scholar. After all, who does research on sex, particularly in the educational milieu, without moralising or condemning what many people take to be obvious sexual transgressions and improprieties? (2007: 192) The potential problems of being associated with particular beliefs, values, practices and groups of people, especially those who attract social censure, are, obviously, compounded for autoethnographers. Identifying oneself as a stripper, as having a serious eating disorder, as a sadomasochist, as assisting in a ‘mercy killing’, as a victim of incest, as an adulterer, as sexually promiscuous, as suicidal, as middle or working class, as someone who has had an abortion (to mention but a few of the foci of autoethnographies) can have implications for careers and relationships (see Sikes 2006a). As Carolyn Ellis notes, ‘you become the story you write and publish’ (2009: 214). *** Final thoughts Researching and writing lives is intimate relational work. At the start of the chapter I stated that it was research that carried a heavy ethical burden and so it does. Within these pages I have been unable to do little more than scratch the surface but I want to close by emphasising the ethical responsibilities that life researchers and writers face. Richard Pring (2000) points out that each research situation generates its own ethical questions and issues that demand unique and contextual answers. It is nowhere near sufficient to take refuge in

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the apparent protection of ethics review procedures and ethical codes because these cannot address the specificities of singular circumstances or the idiosyncrasies of individuals. It may, for instance, be consistent with acceptable and indeed approved transcribing conventions to note down the ‘ums’ and ‘erms’, the ‘you knows’ and ‘kindalikes’ that litter the speech of a life story giver, but if the person concerned feels that such interjections make them appear stupid and incoherent, is it ethical to include them? Similarly, whilst respondent validation may usually be ethical practice, would it be if it might jeopardise the relationships we’re seeking to improve through our research or even put people in danger? (Ellis 2009: 314) And then, what about those instances where people tell us about beliefs and values which we do not agree with and which we believe to be wrong? What do we, ethically, do then? Do we, for instance, give voice to racists? These sorts of situations are quite different from being told about behaviours which are straightforwardly illegal and where we do have a responsibility to inform the authorities as would be the case with respect to child abuse. To say, yet again, that there are no easy answers is not a cop-out but rather, I think, the only honest and ethical answer. I often say to the students I work with ‘you can do what you like, providing you can make a justification for your case’. When it comes to justifications for ethical choices and decisions the aspects that need to be thought about and deliberated over can be legion. The task is one we simply have to face each and every time we research and write people’s lives. References Adams, T. (2008) ‘A Review of Narrative Ethics’ Qualitative Inquiry, 14(2): 175–194. Allen, A., Anderson, K., Bristol, L., Downs, Y., O’Neill, D. Watts and Wu, Q. (2009) ‘Resisting the Unethical in Formalised Ethics: Perspectives and Experiences’ in Satterthwaite, J., Piper, H. and Sikes, P. (eds) Power in the Academy, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 135–152. Barthes, R. (1966) ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ in Sontag, S. (1982) (ed.) A Barthes Reader, New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R. (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image-Music-Text, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins (originally published in French, 1968). Bergin, J. and Westwood, R. (2003) ‘The Necessities of Violence’, Culture and Organisation, 9(4): 211–223. Bochner, A. and Ellis, C. (1998) ‘Series Editors’ Preface’ in Banks, A. and Banks, S. (eds) Fiction and Social Research: By Ice or Fire, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 7–8. Boelen, W.A.M. (1992) ‘Street Corner Society: Cornerville Revisited’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 21(1): 11–51. Bruner, J. (1993) ‘The Autobiographical Process’ in Folkenflik, R. (ed.) The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Cannella, G. and Lincoln, Y. (2007) ‘Predatory vs Dialogic Ethics: Constructing an Illusion or Ethical Practice as the Core of Research Methods’, Qualitative Inquiry, 13(3): 31–353. Cavanagh, S. (2007) Sexing the Teacher: School Sex Scandals and Queer Pedagogies, Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Chase, S. (2005) ‘Narrative Inquiry: Multiple Lenses, Approaches, Voices’ in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd edn), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 651–679. Cole, B. (2004) Mother – Teachers: Insights into Inclusion, London: David Fulton. Delamont, S. (2007) ‘Against Autoethnography’ http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/qualiti/ QualitativeResearcher/QR_Issue4_Feb07.pdf (accessed 26/2/09). Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (1994) ‘Introduction: Entering the Field of Qualitative Research’ in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research, Walnut Creek, CA: Sage, 1–17. Ellis, C. (1986) Fisher Folk: Two Communities on Chesapeake Bay, Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky. Ellis, C. (1995) ‘Emotional and Ethical Quagmires in Returning to the Field’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 24: 68–98. Ellis, C. (2004) The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Ellis, C. (2007) ‘Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others’, Qualitative Inquiry, 13(3): 3–29. Ellis, C. (2009) Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Ellis, C. and Bochner, A. (2000) ‘Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject’ in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Ethnography (2nd edn), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 733–768. Fine, M. (1994) ‘Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research’ in Denzin, L. and Lincoln, Y. (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 70–82; in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edn), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 107–131. Goodson, I. and Sikes, P. (2001) Life History in Educational Settings: Learning From Lives, Buckingham: Open University Press. Halse, C. and Honey, A. (2007) ‘Rethinking Ethics Review as Institutional Discourse’, Qualitative Inquiry, 13(3): 336–352. Hammersley, M. (2008) ‘Against the Ethicists: On the Evils of Ethical Regulation’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 1–14 http://www.informaworld.com. libezproxy.open.ac.uk/smpp/content~content=a901809266~db=all~order=pubdate. Johnson, T.S. (2008a) ‘Qualitative Research in Question: A Narrative of Disciplinary Power With/in the IRB’, Qualitative Inquiry, 14(2): 12–232. Johnson, T.S. (2008b) From Teacher to Lover: Sex Scandals in the Classroom, New York: Peter Lang Lather, P. (1986) ‘Research as Praxis’, Harvard Educational Review, 56(3): 257–277. Lincoln, Y. (2005) ‘Institutional Review Boards and Methodological Conservatism: The Challenge to and from Phenomenological Paradigms’ in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds), Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research: (3rd edn), Walnut Creek, CA: Sage, 165–181. Lincoln, Y. and Cannella, G. (2009) ‘Ethics and the Broader Rethinking/Reconceptualization of Research as Construct’, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, 9(2): 273–285. Measor, L. and Sikes, P. (1992) ‘Visiting Lives: Ethics and Methodology in Life History’ in Goodson, I. (ed.) Studying Teachers’ Lives, London: Routledge, 209–233.

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Medford, K. (2006) ‘Caught With a Fake ID: Ethical Questions about Slippage in Autoethnography’, Qualitative Inquiry, 21(5): 853–864. Plummer, K. (1995) Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, London: Routledge Polkinghorne, D.E. (1988) Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, Albany, NY: SUNY Press Porter Abbot, H. (2002) The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter Abbot, H. (2005) The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2nd edn), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pring, R (2000) Philosophy of Educational Research, London: Continuum. Redwood, S. (2008) ‘Research Less Violent? On the Ethics of Performative Social Science’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9(2): article 60 http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/407/882 (accessed 11/3/09). Riessman, C. (2003) Narrative Analysis, Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Riessman, C. (2008) Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences, Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Richardson, L. (1990) ‘Narrative and Sociology’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19(1): 116–135. Richardson, L. (1994) ‘Research: A Method of Inquiry’ in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research, Walnut Creek, CA: Sage, 516–529. Richardson, L. (1997) Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life, New Jersey: Ruttgers University Press. Richardson, L. (2000) ‘Writing: A Method of Inquiry’ in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edn), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 923–948. Richardson, L. (2007) Last Writes: A Daybook for a Dying Friend, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Rudrum, D. (2005) ‘From Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition’, Narrative, 13(2): 195–204. Sikes, P. (1997) Parents Who Teach: Stories From Home and From School, London: Cassell. Sikes, P. (2000) ‘“Truth” and “Lies” Revisited’, British Educational Research Journal, 26(2): 257–270. Sikes, P. (2005) ‘Storying Schools: Issues around Attempts to Create a Sense of Feel and Place in Narrative Research Writing’, Qualitative Research, 5(1): 79–94. Sikes, P. (2006a) ‘On Dodgy Ground? Problematics and Ethics in Educational Research’ International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 29(1): 105–117. Sikes, P. (2006b) ‘Towards Useful and Dangerous Theories’, Discourse, 27(1): 43–51. Sikes, P. (2006c) ‘Scandalous Stories and Dangerous Liaisons: When Male Teachers and Female Pupils Fall in Love’, Sex Education, 6(3): 265–280. Sikes, P. (2008) ‘At the Eye of the Storm: An Academic(s) Experience of Moral Panic’, Qualitative Inquiry, 14(2): 235–253. Sikes, P. (2009) ‘The Study of Teachers’ Lives and Careers: An Auto/biographical Life History of the Genre’ in Satterthwaite, J., Piper, H. and Sikes, P. (eds) Power in the Academy, Stokeon-Trent: Trentham, 169–183. Sikes, P. and Piper, H. (2009) Researching Sex and Lies in the Classroom: Allegations of Sexual Misconduct in Schools, London: RoutledgeFalmer. Sikes, P., Measor, L. and Woods, P. (1985) Teacher Careers: Crises and Continuities, Lewes: Falmer Sparkes, A. (1995) ‘Physical Education Teachers and the Search for Self: Two Cases of Structured Denial’ in Armstrong, N. (ed.) New Directions in Physical Education, Vol 3, London: Cassell, 157–178.

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Stanley, E. (1992) The Auto/biographical I: Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stanley, E. (1993) ‘On Auto/Biography in Sociology’, Sociology, 27(1): 41–52. Steedman, C. (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, London: Virago. Stiver, C. (1993) ‘Personal Narratives’, Signs, 18(2): 408–425. Tolich, M. (2004) ‘Internal Confidentiality: When Confidentiality Assurances Fail Relational Informants’, Qualitative Sociology, 27(1): 101–106. Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the Field, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whyte, W.F. (1943) Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whyte, W.F. (1992) ‘In Defence of Street Corner Society’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 21(1): 52–68.

Chapter 3

A process of (un)becoming Life history and the professional development of teachers Christine Halse

Introduction This chapter traces the story of Sue, an elementary school teacher in Australia, and the process of (un)becoming that marked her experience of negotiating an identity as a teacher of a new anti-racist school curriculum entitled Studies of Asia. The concept of becoming is saturated with positive, progressive insinuations of growth, development and forward movement. Yet the process of becoming (someone? something?) is never a calm, linear course. It is a knotty path full of twists and turns that always involves, if only partially and in passing, a process of loss, abandonment or (re)alignment of subjectivity and identity. It is this doubleness of simultaneously making and unmaking the self that is captured in the notion of (un)becoming and that is the focus of Sue’s story in this chapter. Sue and I met ten years ago at the first professional development course for a new national initiative for a Studies of Asia curriculum. Thrust together by circumstance and serendipity, we continued our conversations irregularly over the ensuing years as our paths crossed at conferences and different professional development activities for teachers. On occasion, Sue would drop by my office at the university, ostensibly to ask my advice about resources and readings but more often, it seemed – at least to me – to talk about her school and to use me as a sounding board for ideas that she considered too dangerous to voice to her colleagues. In turn, Sue enjoyed and indulged my peculiar fascination with the stories of her experiences and learning and we became collaborators in mapping the biography of her educational journey. My absorption with life history has its origins – I think – in the seemingly endless conversations with friends as a teenager at a Catholic girls’ school. This was a world where there were few distractions or options for entertainment. The narrative shaping of our present and future lives became a bond of fascination and satisfaction that sustained us through those turbulent years: first loves; friendships formed, broken and renewed; school, study and exams; and teenage angst and rebellion. We would spend hours dissecting our own and each other’s lives: our feelings, motivations, anxieties and relationships.

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When we had exhausted the full range of (f)actual lives, we moved to fantasy: our desires, dreams, aspirations, and imaginings of the futures that we were sure we would construct. Our obsession with this pastime transgressed into the world outside-of-school, and we would while away hours continuing our conversations on the phone. Perhaps if I’d grown up in a different, freer, more open-minded world, things would have been different. But an alternative to the continuous critique and construction of real and imagined lives was not conceivable for a Catholic girl growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. This was an era that caught the tail-end of mantillas, the Latin mass, a culture of animus between public (government) and private (Catholic) schools, and a suite of social regulations that were vigorously upheld as essential for growing up (becoming) a ‘good Catholic girl’: school uniforms below your knee; clean white gloves; hair tied back and off your face (did the nuns need to see your eyes to penetrate your soul?); respect for parents and other adults (this meant no back-talking to ‘grown-ups’ because ‘children should be seen and not heard’); no dating until you were 16 years old and then only in groups chaperoned by an adult; and no sex before marriage. Only the last has survived the decades, nominally at least, if not in practice. To the best of my knowledge, the girls that I went to school with have moved beyond our once all-consuming interest in the history and formation of lives. Not me. Studying history and literature at university gave me scope to indulge my continuing fixation, and exploring race relations through the life of Australia’s most famous and infamous Anglican missionary, the Reverend Ernest Gribble, for my doctorate cemented my interest into a legitimate, academic concern (Halse 2002). Nevertheless, as a Professor of Education I continue to be surprised by how underutilised life history is as a research method, a framework for analysis, and a narrative strategy for communicating research findings. This is not because life history isn’t interesting, but because its relevance, value and virtue over or as a complement to other research methods hasn’t dawned on the horizon of those stakeholders whose decisions about research shape the sort of work that academics in education do: research funding bodies, policymakers, government bodies, school boards, principals, teachers, etc. In Australia, as elsewhere, there persists a (strong) preference for predictable and conventional research methods: surveys, focus groups, and sometimes interviews. Rarely is life history used as a strategy for exploring, understanding and addressing critical issues that impact on educational policy and practice. At its heart, this predilection speaks of an epistemological question about what knowledge is of value and of most worth, and an ontological question about the relationship between the private/personal and the public/professional realms. Of course, there are always exceptions, and this chapter draws on one such exception. Nearly ten years ago I formed a mutually productive research

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relationship with the national body responsible for the development and delivery of a national professional development program (PD) in Studies of Asia for teachers. The PD was part of a major policy shift by the newly elected Labour government to move beyond Australia’s historical economic and social ties with the United Kingdom and the United States and to position Australia more explicitly within Asia. The triggers for the change were largely economic: the growth of Asia’s tiger economies, the emergence of China and India as future superpowers, and the development of Asia as Australia’s major trading partner and primary source of new migrants. In this new environment, schools were assigned responsibility for creating a new generation of ‘Asia-literate Australians’ who could speak an Asian language and knew about the history, cultures, religions and societies of countries in Asia. The Studies of Asia PD had an explicit social justice agenda. Its goal was to create a more understanding and racially tolerant Australia by increasing teachers’ knowledge of different cultures and societies in Asia, and to equip teachers with the pedagogical skills to integrate a Studies of Asia focus into all curriculum areas. This chapter has emerged from a series of formal and informal conversations conducted on and off over the past ten years, and traverses a time during which Sue placed substantial emotional and professional investment in carving out an identity as an advocate of an anti-racist Studies of Asia curriculum in schools. While I focus on the life and work of one particular teacher, this chapter takes up questions that are central to the broader agenda of life history, identity and social justice: How is ‘self’ mediated by others? What is the subjective experience of engaging with issues of racial and cultural difference? What historical and personal resources empower or alternatively shackle efforts to bring about educational change for social justice? What are the implications for self-formation? What are the political possibilities of challenging normative ways of seeing and doing? Narrating the nation: the historian’s voice Sue’s story, and our relationship, cannot be isolated from Australia’s history with Asia. Long before the beginning of British occupation in 1788, Madagascan sailors visited Australia’s northern coast and traded with local Aboriginal groups. From 1832, indentured workers from China and India were brought to Australia to work in the sugar cane fields, and the gold rushes in the middle of the nineteenth century brought more than 100,000 migrants from south China. By 1861, Chinese migrants made up roughly ten per cent of Australia’s non-Aboriginal population. Racism, couched in terms of economic anxiety and concerns about the moral and religious purity of the British colony, fuelled racial tensions. In 1861, there were anti-Chinese riots on the goldfields and the New South Wales government responded by imposing a poll tax on Chinese immigrants to regulate and restrict entry. Similar

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riots and legislation followed in other states, prompting an inquiry by the Chinese government (1887) that concluded that the intensity of anti-Chinese discrimination was a breach of international treaties. Rather than triggering national shame, this reprimand inflamed anti-Chinese sentiment and, in 1888, the states introduced stricter restrictions on Chinese immigration that saw Chinese passengers prevented from disembarking in Victoria and New South Wales. This was the beginning of an assortment of policies designed to restrict non-white immigration and which collectively became known as the ‘White Australia Policy’, and which continued in various degrees of diminishing intensity until 1973. This era is long past. Nowadays, eight per cent of Australia’s population is of Asian descent, and migration, travel and globalisation have familiarised Australians with many aspects of Asian cultures and customs. In the mid1990s, barely two decades after the end of the White Australia Policy, there was less familiarity with Asia. It was this lack that the Studies of Asia PD sought to redress. Narrating a life: Sue’s story Sue had been teaching for five years when we first met. Her father John, like many men of his generation, did not finish high school but enlisted in the Australian army to fight in World War Two. When he returned from the war, John was restless and had a succession of different jobs. He settled down when he met Sue’s mother, got work on the assembly line for a large car manufacturer and progressively worked his way up from the factory floor to section manager. Sue’s mother, Clare, had more formal education than her father. If she’d been born in a different era or social class, Clare might have gone to university. Instead, she matriculated from high school, completed a diploma in secretarial studies and then worked in administration for an insurance company in the city. Like a generation of post-war newlyweds, Sue’s parents took advantage of a special government housing loan for returned soldiers to build their family home. At the time, many considered the semi-rural suburb they chose on the outskirts of Sydney too remote, too isolated from the city’s hustle and bustle and too poorly served by public transport to be a desirable location. John and Clare still live at the same address. The house grew as new rooms were added over the years and Sydney’s sprawling growth has meant that this isolated outer suburb is now a desirable locale in the inner city. Clare stopped work when the first of her three children was born and the couple became adept at stretching out each dollar. John’s veggie patch helped feed his hungry brood, Clare sewed clothes for herself and the children and, when her youngest began high school, Clare got a full-time job as the receptionist at the local doctor’s surgery. Clare insisted that her children complete high school and get a further qualification. Sue, the youngest of the three children, followed her mother’s

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example. She graduated from high school and then secretarial college, and worked as a clerical assistant for several large commercial businesses before she married in her early twenties. Sue left paid work to devote herself to homemaking and childrearing when the first of her two children was born. Sue remembers these years fondly as a time of immense physical activity, emotional rewards, and public acclamation as a valued volunteer at the schools and sports clubs her children attended. It was also a time when she was haunted by a niggling sense that she should be doing more with her life. When her youngest child started primary school, Sue enrolled in a Bachelor of Education degree at my university, joining a new wave of matureage women who benefited from a short-lived period of free tuition in government universities. Sue was the sort of mature-age student that young undergraduates loathe having in a class: she read all the readings; never missed a lecture or tutorial; slaved over all her assignments; consistently earned high grades; and loved her work as a trainee teacher. Beginning teaching

Sue was in her mid-thirties when she began her teaching career at a mediumsized government primary school in a low socio-economic district about an hour’s drive from her home. The school’s historically dominant AngloAustralian community had been gradually dwarfed by a swelling population of new immigrants from Turkey, Iran, India, south-east Asia, especially Vietnam, the Philippines and the Pacific Islands. In our conversations, Sue painted a portrait of a socially and racially complex school. On the one hand, many pupils came from a diverse, multicultural community consisting of large extended families where English was rarely spoken at home and household income was sometimes irregular but where the family was a tight, cohesive unit and education was regarded as a ticket to economic and social upward mobility. Any child who was fluent in English, however, usually only stayed for one or two semesters before moving to a nearby school with a reputation for the discipline and academic rigor needed to progress to a ‘good’ high school and university. On the other hand, the Anglo-Australian pupils in Sue’s school hailed from a neighbourhood with a strong historical and territorial sense of ownership over their local school, but whose influence was being diluted by the influx of new migrant families. At the same time, 30 per cent of this group came from families where the household income was low, welfare dependence was high and inter-generational unemployment was familiar. Because of its socio-economic and ethnic profile, the school was officially classed as ‘difficult to staff’. As is typical of the Australian teaching profession, the overwhelming majority of teachers in Sue’s school were women and Anglo-Australian. Soon after she began teaching, Sue found herself positioned between two loose groups in the school. Sue nicknamed the first group the ‘residents’ because it consisted of a small number of teachers, all in their

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late forties and early fifties, who lived nearby and had been appointed to the school soon after qualifying as teachers at a time when the socio-economic profile of the school community was more homogeneous and affluent. They had been at the school for more than a decade and were not contemplating moving; they had accumulated a comfortable repertoire of skills and resources that made them feel secure in their classroom practice and sure-footed during staffroom discussions. The second group, which Sue christened the ‘sojourners’, comprised nearly 70 per cent of staff. Like Sue, all were at the beginning of their careers and this was their first school. All lived outside the district and, with the exception of Sue, all were in their early twenties. They were enthusiastic and committed but history decreed that they would eventually transfer to a school in a more affluent, ethnically homogeneous district that was closer to their homes. Since they were inexperienced and lacked a longterm commitment to the school, the sojourners ultimately deferred to the ‘wisdom and experience’ of the residents in any staffroom discussion. Relationships between the two groups were sometimes strained. The residents treated the sojourners solicitously. They welcomed the sojourners’ enthusiasm to take on tasks that would relieve them of some of their irksome administrative responsibilities but were dismissive of their ideas about teaching. The stock advice to any new teacher was to ‘forget what you learned at university, this is the real world now’. Beginning to become a Studies of Asia teacher

Not long after Sue and I met, I asked her why she had enrolled in the Studies of Asia PD. Her reasons were personal – memories of fleeting, positive encounters with Asia in her past: chatting with Chinese students and collaborating on an assignment with two Sri Lankan students at university; an eye-opening three days in the Philippines during her first trip overseas; and four years as a host family to trainee Japanese students working at her son’s school. For Sue, the PD promised a continuation of these pleasurable, personal connections with Asia. There were also more complex, personal reasons: My father fought the Japanese in the Pacific during World War Two. My parents would never buy anything Japanese – no cars, radios, electronic equipment, food – nothing. Dad never talks about the war although he’d obviously had some firsthand experiences. My friends whose fathers went to the war were all the same. I was quite nervous when we agreed to have a Japanese student stay with us. For a long time, I wondered whether or not to tell Dad. Eventually, we decided it was better to be open and honest. Dad said, ‘Well, it was my war, and I don’t expect you to grow up with the same kind of attitudes as I have.’ I was surprised but that really made me realise that unless we educate our children about other cultures then we are going to be continually fighting and being confrontational to people of different cultures and nations. I decided to enroll in the Studies of Asia course for

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the same reason. Dad wasn’t as accepting about the course – he thought it was unnecessary and that different races should just get on with their own lives – but it’s not that simple or easy. Is it? One of the central goals of the PD was to stimulate teachers’ philosophical and ideological commitment to Studies of Asia across all curriculum areas. Sue placed particular importance on the social justice agenda of Studies of Asia and its potential to redress racial discrimination and build cultural equality: … over the past four years, we’ve had Japanese students living with us [and] these experiences were part of a gradual process of becoming more tolerant of people who are different … Understanding that difference has become an important goal for me both personally and professionally – and it is really very important to world peace. I know this is a very idealist view but, for me, it’s a very important part of why I’m so interested in Studies of Asia. Inevitably, professional development involves teachers in a process of deconstructing existing practices, acquiring new theory in the form of knowledge, understanding, skills, attitudes and values, and constructing alternative ways of doing, seeing and understanding. This process involves a realignment and remaking of subjectivity and identity. The anti-racist agenda of the Studies of Asia curriculum added a political dimension to this process by challenging teachers’ uncontested understandings of race and cultural difference that lie hidden in liberal discourses about race, culture and education (Gillborn 1997, Hall 1994). Sue, however, was unprepared for the new knowledge and understandings of culture and difference she encountered during the course and the ways in which it awakened a consciousness of her own ethnocentrism and prejudices. In this respect, the Studies of Asia course destabilised the investments and commitments that constituted her identity (Britzman 1992) and her heightened awareness of ‘difference’ also exposed her immersion in normative discourses of racial and ethnic identity. This event constituted what Sikes et al. (1985) call a critical incident and Denzin (1989) describes as a ‘turning point’. For Sue, the course stimulated her to reflect on the ways in which she had perpetuated ethnocentric ideologies under the guise of being ‘open-minded’ and ‘tolerant’ of others, and triggered a conscious turning point: to make a moral commitment to the social justice agenda of Studies of Asia. In Sue’s words, the course involved: challenging [and] re-thinking your own values; how you approach things; your own views; your own stereotypes; and re-thinking the way we may have reacted to people’s cultures at other times in our lives. That really changed the way I view things – I hadn’t expected as much personal development. The knowledge you gained of yourself as a person [was] a very, very positive experience … I came

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away revitalised and feeling that it was an area that I wanted to be more involved in … Because the content and pedagogy of the Studies of Asia PD worked to ‘call into question the authoritative discourses and the recipe knowledge that work to sustain the obvious’ (Britzman 1991: 62), it stimulated Sue to reflect on how discourses of race were communicated and perpetuated through the curriculum and pedagogical practice: That experience really made me sit up and think … it is good to question and challenge … I came away from the course thinking critical thinking is what’s missing … that’s where we need to start rather than with content … That part of the curriculum was missing. This snippet of Sue’s life illustrates the nexus between the individual lives of teachers and teacher professional development, particularly in relation to a curriculum dealing with issues of race, identity and social justice. Representations of teachers often script teacher identity as unproblematically synonymous with the teacher’s role and function: Socrates’ teacher-as-midwife, Dewey’s teacher-as-artist/scientist, Stenhouse’s teacher-as-researcher, Skinner’s teacher-as-technician (De Castell 1988). Sue’s story shows that the personal and the professional are not separate, independent domains in teachers’ lives – an ‘in-school’ and ‘out-of-school’ identity. Rather, as Britzman (1992) argues, teacher identity is constructed through a dialogical relationship between role, function and emotional investments: Role speaks to function whereas identity voices investments and commitments. Function, or what one should do, and investments, or what one feels, are often at odds. The two are in dialogic relation and it is this tension that makes for a ‘lived experience’ of a teacher. (Britzman 1992: 29) Encountering discourses of opposition

A key component of the Studies of Asia PD sought to give teachers the skills to communicate their learning to colleagues so that they could lead a wholeschool approach to Studies of Asia. Perhaps naively, Sue anticipated enthusiastic support for her new commitment to Studies of Asia. But schools are sites of contestation pervaded by a range of discourses, and discourses have moral and political effects because they ‘institute particular realities, establish regimes of truth, and organise particular ways of thinking about the world’ (Halse et al. 2007: 222). As Foucault (1974) reminds us, the power of discourses lies in their operation as tacit givens that conceal the mechanisms by which they discipline subjects, construct social relationships and limit the

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possibilities for particular thoughts and actions. While research suggests that personal transformation is integral to educational change (Butt et al. 1992, Fullan and Hargreaves 1992, Peca 1994, Rudduck 1991), the theorising of teacher professional development has been pervaded by a quest to identify ‘best practice’ models for transforming teachers and teaching (e.g. Hargreaves 1994). This goal implies a notion of liberal individualism and agency that ignores how particular discourses construct school cultures, affect the choices available to teachers and constitute teacher identity in ways that facilitate or inhibit change. Sue quickly discovered that constructing an identity as a teacher and advocate of Studies of Asia was a messy, difficult matter. During this stage of her life, she encountered a series of discourses that worked to undermine her desire and efforts to forge an identity as a Studies of Asia teacher. 1

Explicit racism When Sue and a colleague reported on their Studies of Asia PD at a staff meeting, they unleashed a flurry of comments from a small but vocal group of residents. By virtue of their age and experience, this group constituted the voice of authority in staff meetings and played a critical role in setting the boundaries of any discussion. By defining who was an authorised, legitimate and trustworthy person to speak on any issue, this vocal subgroup defined the approved discourse on any topic and delegitimised those who offered a different view or argument. This group, constituting what Henry and Tator (2005: 105–6) call the ‘dominant elite’, deployed two complementary discourses of deracialisation to resist change and justify preserving the status quo in the school’s curriculum. The first was a discourse of denial that takes for granted that racism does not and cannot exist in a liberal democratic society (Henry and Tator 2005). Thus, the subgroup of residents argued that racial tension was not a ‘problem’ in their school; that they were already doing a ‘good job’ in building a socially harmonious society; and that their school should just ‘maintain a steady course’. The second discourse was a discourse of national identity (see Henry and Tator 2005) that ignores and excludes the life, culture and interests of minority racial and ethnic groups from the grand narrative of national history. Drawing on this discourse, the subgroup of residents argued that despite Australia’s geographical location in Asia, Studies of Asia was irrelevant and a ‘waste of time’ for Australian pupils because Europe was the cradle of Australian civilisation; there were too few ‘Asian students’ in the school to warrant a Studies of Asia focus; and learning Australia’s history was a more important curriculum imperative. I doubt that Sue would describe or theorise these discourses of opposition as I have done but the vigour of the resistance that she encountered and the experience of finding herself sidelined and silenced when she tried to present a contrary view was a confronting experience. Sue

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confessed to being: ‘quite surprised at some of the stereotypes and brick walls that we hit … there were some almost racist comments that were coming from the staff. We were really quite stunned’. Implicit racism Invoking a strategy that theorists describe as a discourse of political correctness (Henry and Tator 2005), other teachers couched their opposition as a desire to preserve social harmony: a wholeschool focus on Asia might be disruptive, single out students from Asia as ‘foreign’ or ‘different’, and maybe even trigger dormant anti-Asian sentiment in the school community. Aligned with this claim was a discourse of reverse discrimination: that children from non-Asian backgrounds would feel excluded or ignored if a Studies of Asia curriculum was introduced. Other teachers invoked the familiar discourse of the overburdened teacher to rationalise their non-engagement with Studies of Asia: high workloads; lack of time; other, more important curriculum priorities; timetabling constraints; inadequate funding and resources; insufficient training and support, etc. Because these arguments had some basis in teachers’ everyday experience and because the notion of the overworked teacher was a familiar and well-worn discourse – a regime of truth (Foucault 1980) – they legitimated the indefinite deferral of Studies of Asia by constituting teachers as too exhausted and drained by their daily work to cope with a new curriculum initiative. Silent racism Sue found that the majority of teachers were either noncommittal or evasive about the introduction of Studies of Asia: ‘They haven’t been actively against it but they haven’t been actively for it.’ Trepagnier (2007) describes such passivity as silent racism: that is, the behaviour of often well-meaning people that works to produce and perpetuate institutionalised racism. At Sue’s school, passivity sometimes combined with more destructive forms of resistance, including criticism of Sue’s efforts to organise cultural events, purchase new resources or develop a teaching program focusing on Asian cultures and societies. The criticisms were always brief and never aggressive but they played on Sue’s anxieties as a beginning teacher with a heightened sense of responsibility for nurturing a new curriculum initiative: There were times when I’d done something that I’d put a lot of work into – you know, a display or an event or something – and I’d get one of these flippant, backhand remarks from one of the other teachers that just ridiculed all my efforts. I took it personally. I shouldn’t have, but it would put me down, [it] really hurt. I know I should have just thought ‘Oh yeah, get stuffed!’ but I took it personally. Simplistic understandings construe racism as an individual attribute expressed through explicit discrimination, vilification or verbal and physical attacks by one race against another. Yet everyday forms of racism are better understood as a collective rather than individual phenomenon

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and as a process grounded in a shared system of beliefs through which individuals and groups ‘construct a symbolic or imagined sense of community, a framework for interpreting who is “us” and who is “them” [that helps] to organise, maintain, and regulate particular forms of power and dominance’ (Henry and Tator 2005: 21–22). (Un)becoming a Studies of Asia teacher

The real tragedy of this state of affairs, as Deborah Britzman (1991) reminds us, is that the conversations generated through such processes colonise the social imagination and reshape subjects and subjectivities. As Sue and I continued our conversations, it appeared that Sue’s resistance faltered and that she increasingly fell captive to the logic and authoritative voice of the residents: I was very enthusiastic and wanted to really immerse myself in an Asian focus. The teachers aren’t racist. They are just strong women. They are larger than life characters and some are a bit long in the teeth [and] set in their ways. They have their comfort zone and they don’t want to move out of [it]. With teachers who’ve been teaching a long time, it’s very difficult to admit that you don’t know everything, and it’s very difficult to move out of a Eurocentric perspective, and several teachers pointed out that you can’t do everything. There were other programs with deadlines, the mid-year assessment, the class concert and the netball finals. There was just so much else going on that it was difficult to find the time or energy for anything else. Perhaps Sue needed more resilience or stronger skills in countering these oppositional discourses. Nevertheless, identity is constituted in relation to broader social, cultural and political discourses and negotiated through relationships with others. Consequently, the absence of collegial validation undermined the interactional frameworks through which Sue had sought personal and professional affirmation. It eroded the identity investments she had made to Studies of Asia, and ignited reservations about her ability to become a Studies of Asia teacher. Sue found herself progressively curtailing the inclusion of Studies of Asia in her class and abandoning whole-school initiatives because ‘the staff just weren’t receptive’. She persisted with different degrees of effort to build Studies of Asia in her school for nearly three years until one day she sat in my office, nursing a box of tissues, and confided: I now realise that what I want to do and what I can do are two different things. I haven’t changed my fundamental beliefs. In fact, I’ve just applied for twelve months leave so that I can live in Indonesia and learn the language. But now I realise that there are a lot more limitations on what is achievable in my school than I’d thought. It could change with time – though I’d reckon it’d only happen

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slowly. That doesn’t mean that the PD wasn’t worthwhile. It changed the way I see things and a lot of my personal priorities. That’ll continue – even if changing what and how we teach [about Asia] takes a lot longer. I guess my commitment to teaching about Asia will continue … although, honestly, I’m dubious about my enthusiasm – it hurts to keep banging your head against a brick wall. Coda At the end of last year, I sat down and wrote for the last time in the diary I had kept of my conversations with Sue about this phase of our lives and her struggles to become a Studies of Asia teacher. The diary was a mix of different texts: reminders about meetings and appointments; summaries of conversations together or on the phone; copies of notes and emails we had exchanged; my analyses of events in her life; and my own autoethnographic account of our experiences together. My last entry is in the latter category – an episodic (re)description of our last meeting: I can’t find Sue. I know she’s somewhere in the crowd but she’s so short and there are so many people swarming on top of each other, pushing and shoving to get a good vantage point. I can’t see her. I crane my neck and stand on my toes but without success. The thought occurs to me that if I stood on the nearby chair it would be easier to find her but I (reluctantly) discard this idea. Somehow a professor on a chair in full academic regalia seems undignified and inappropriate to the persona that I’m supposed to adopt on such auspicious occasions. Finally, time runs out. The music has started and the academic procession has already begun winding its way into the Great Hall. After the ceremony, the crowd scatters quickly, regrouping in smaller clutches around the stalls staffed by students and alumni to buy official photographs, university souvenirs, weak tea and biscuits already made soggy by the humidity of the encroaching summer heat. In the thinned out swarm, we have no trouble finding each other. We beam, hug, and coo: Who’d have thought this would happen? Aren’t you clever? Aren’t we clever for making it happen? Sue didn’t go to Indonesia for a year as she’d planned – I think her husband convinced her otherwise – but the entire family did go there for four weeks on holiday. Instead of staying in a beach resort like most Australian visitors, the family rented a house in the mountains. Sue studied Indonesian, her husband became expert at bartering in the local markets and cooking Indonesian food, and her children relished the freedom of a less restricted lifestyle and became firm friends with the local children in the village. The family fell in love with Indonesia and they’ve returned to the same village almost every year since that time. Sue did return to her school, reversing the trend of speedy departures by sojourners, and still works at the same school, teaching Grade 3. Her commitment to Studies of Asia as a strategy for increasing knowledge to

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build racial harmony has persisted but taken another form. Disheartened by her early experiences, Sue abandoned her efforts to convert colleagues but persisted with an Asia focus in her own teaching, supported by a growing array of resources and knowledge she picked up during her family’s travels to Indonesia. Ironically, her persistence has enabled her to win the enthusiastic commitment of a substantial cohort of colleagues – both sojourners and residents – to Studies of Asia. At the same time, Sue has directed her energies to a new, related goal. Five years ago she enrolled as a part-time student in a professional doctorate in education (EdD) at my university, with a specific focus on bringing together the world of academe and students’ professional lives. Based on original research and a social justice pedagogy, Sue’s research has concentrated on developing a scholarly suite of resources for teachers wanting to integrate Studies of Asia into their teaching. Professional and research implications Too often, education leaders presume that teacher professional development means a seamless, straightforward pathway from course to classroom, yet wonder and bemoan that so little PD is actually implemented in schools. Counter to this position is a body of evidence that the professional work of teachers cannot be disconnected from teachers’ personal lives or from the cultures and context of schools. Arguably, this is particularly the case when professional development deals with challenging issues of social justice and cultural understanding. Sue’s story demonstrates the extent to which teachers ‘invest their personal identities in their work, erasing boundaries between their personal and professional lives’ (Zembylas 2003: 225). The story of Sue’s life enables us to see with detailed specificity how teachers’ learning and implementation of professional development actually works in schools and impacts on teachers’ identities in ways that shape curriculum innovation, educational change, and the possibilities for social justice. It is through such insights that it is possible to develop the strategies needed to empower teachers to implement their professional development learning more effectively in schools. The implications for education researchers and policymakers are clear. Life history is a research method that provides a lens into the complex nexus of individuals and communities, socio-cultural conditions, and teacher professional development. It follows from this that incorporating life history methods into the conceptualisation, delivery and evaluation of teacher professional development opens up new strategies and possibilities for educational, social and individual transformation.

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References Britzman, D. (1991) ‘Decentering Discourses In Teacher Education: or, the Unleashing of Unpopular Things’, Journal of Education, 173 (3): 60–80. Britzman, D. (1992) ‘The Terrible Problem of Knowing Thyself: Toward a Poststructural Account of Teacher Identity’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 9 (3): 23–46. Butt, R., Raymond, D., McCue, G. and Yamagishi, L. (1992) ‘Collaborative Autobiography and the Teacher’s Voice’ in I. Goodson (ed.) Studying Teachers’ Lives, London: Routledge, 51–98. De Castell, S. (1988) ‘Metaphors into Models: The Teacher as Strategist’, in P. Holborn, M. Wideen and I. Andrews (eds) Becoming a Teacher, Toronto: Kagan and Woo Ltd, 64–83. Denzin, N. (1989) Interpretive Biography, London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1974) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press. Fullan, M. and Hargreaves, A. (eds) (1992) Teacher Development and Educational Change, London: Falmer. Gillborn, D. (1997) ‘Racism and Reform: New Ethnicities/Old Inequalities?’, British Educational Research Journal, 23 (3): 345–360. Hall, S. (1994) ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. Mcgrew (eds) Modernity and its Futures: Understanding Modern Societies, Book IV, Cambridge: Polity Press, 273–326. Halse, C. (2002) A Terribly Wild Man: The Life of the Rev. Ernest Gribble, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Halse, C., Honey, A. and Boughtwood, D. (2007) ‘The Paradox of Virtue: (re) Thinking Deviance, Anorexia and Schooling’, Gender and Education, 19 (2): 219–235. Hargreaves, A. (1994) Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture In the Postmodern Age, London: Cassell. Henry, F. and Tator, C. (2005) Racial Profiling In Toronto: Discourses of Domination, Mediation and Opposition, Toronto: Canadian Race Relations Foundation. Peca, K. (1994) ‘Focusing on the Individual Change Process In School Restructuring’, Paper presented at Texas Education Agency Institute on Reaching all Students Conference, Austin, TX, June 1994. Rudduck, J. (1991) Innovation and Change: Developing Involvement and Understanding, Milton Keynes; Philadelphia: Open University Press. Sikes, P., Measor, L. and Wooks, P. (1985) Teachers’ Careers: Crises and Continuities, London: Falmer. Trepagnier, B. (2007) Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide, Boulder CO: Paradigm Publishers. Zembylas, M. (2003) ‘Emotions and Teacher Identity: A Poststructural Perspective’, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 9 (3): 213–238.

Chapter 4

Becoming a gay male primary teacher Dealing with difference Elizabeth Newman

Introduction This chapter explores the development of the personal and professional identities of Ed, a gay primary school teacher. Through narrative we are pulled into his world and invited to ‘imaginatively identify’ with his perspective (Kohler Riessman 2008:9) from childhood through adolescence and work, but largely focusing on his move into primary teaching. Ed is a member of a minority group. He is ‘other’ as one of the 10 per cent of men in primary teaching in England (TES 2008), as a second career primary teacher – currently a third of the teaching population – and as working-class wanting to move into the middle class. Most importantly for Ed, however, is that he is ‘other’ as gay. Ed was one of a number of teachers interviewed for a thesis researching career changer teachers and I recount his story in this chapter. In engaging with the research I wanted to ‘turn up the volume’ (Clough 1998:129) on the ‘very personal business of being a man in a predominantly women’s occupation’ (Sargent 2000:411) and in Ed’s case being working-class, gay and making the journey into a middle-class heterosexual world which is numerically dominated by women. Ed’s urge to tell his life story was a strong one. When he talked he ‘storied’ himself in his core identity, his sexuality (Frankham 2001) and then into an identity as a primary school teacher. It was striking how, compared with his other male colleagues, he persistently referred to the importance of notions of identity, the significance of his ‘otherness’ (Smedley 1997:217) and the challenge it presented in primary schools, sites in which, to quote Epstein et al. (2003:15) ‘normative heterosexuality was maintained and enforced’. Maguire (2005:14) citing Bauman (1996) says that ‘one thinks of identity whenever one is not sure of where one belongs’. For Ed, identity was as Maclure et al. (1990:12) suggest, an explanatory device to draw together the personal and the professional, to justify and make sense of his conduct, career, values and circumstances. It was a ‘form of argument’ (Maclure 1993:312), a struggle between his ‘situational’ and ‘substantial’ self (Nias 1989:20),

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dynamic in its construction and reflecting his agency in his encounters with the structures surrounding working in a primary school. Ed’s view of identity was about the choices he made in the process of presenting himself to others. As a teacher he had a social code which focused strongly on integrity in relationships, both personal and professional, believing that effective learning was closely linked to a creative freedom which enabled the learner to ‘have a voice’, to explore and ‘own’ his own learning and make personal sense of it. The personal challenge Ed had engaged in ‘on the margins’ (Smedley 1997:147) appeared to form these beliefs, or as Connelly and Clandinin (1999) suggest, he was a teacher whose personal experience linked to his own practice. My perspective as a researcher As a researcher working in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) I became interested in ‘difference’ in primary teaching, first particularly in men, then career changers and then, as represented by Ed, gay teachers. I was aware that these groups often struggled in training and I wanted to know how they developed their professional identities as a minority group in their schools, and how their schools responded to this aspect of their development. Given the belief that university should provide what Epstein et al. (2003:149) call a ‘liberal space’ for matters of sexuality, I offered to work with Ed and be alert to any signs of discriminatory behaviour. Issues of equal opportunity hold only a marginal place in the crowded curriculum of Initial Teacher Training, especially on a one-year postgraduate programme. I recorded his progress through his year studying for a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) and then invited him to be a research participant during which I tracked him and others through the ‘roller coaster ride’ (his words) of his first year of teaching. He was pleased to tell his rich and interesting story, declaring on more than one occasion how useful it was and ‘better than therapy’. Men who train to be primary teachers There is international concern that men are under-represented in primary teaching (Carrington 2001) and that primary teaching is not a diverse workforce that represents society as a whole to children. In addition, the view that boys would behave better and work harder if taught by men (Sutton Trust 2009) is often quoted by the media but contested by researchers (Skelton 2009). It has also been argued that girls also benefit from contact with ‘morally centred men’ (Bullough 2001). Recruitment efforts to attract men in the UK have focused on male career changers, with the Teacher Development Agency (TDA) in its previous incarnation as the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), the government body

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established to raise standards in schools by attracting able people to teaching, describing them as ‘an untapped reserve of skills and talent’ (TTA 2002a). The TDA portrays becoming a male primary teacher as unproblematic, however the discourse surrounding this minority group of teachers constructs and reconstructs them through a particularly powerful and contradictory set of stereotypes: ‘unusual, ambitious, odd and deviant’ (Skelton 2001:1); ‘unambitious, effeminate or worse’ (Lords, Hansard 30.11.98); ‘wimps or perverts’ (Sumsion 2000:130); ‘homosexuals, paedophiles or principals in training’ (King 1998:3). Identity is about ‘sameness’ (Pullen and Simpson 2005) and male primary teachers are ‘other’ in a profession that continues to be described as ‘women’s work’. Research evidence (Foster and Newman 2005) suggests that men may not be aware of the full impact that ‘otherness’ might have on their feeling of belonging in primary teaching. Given that, according to Tabberer (Curtis 2005), men are ‘the hardest group to recruit’, and the groups most likely to leave teaching are black and ethnic minorities and men – the under-represented groups that the TTA were especially keen to retain (MORI/GTC 2003) – ‘otherness’ looks like a problem and Ed’s story offers some insights into how it feels. Once recruited, men are more likely to fail or withdraw from Initial Teacher Training (ITT) than women (Thornton and Bricheno 2006). One reason given is that in training, while all female teaching staff welcome men, they find dealing with difference difficult (Moyles and Cavendish 2001).This is unfortunate given that Beilhartz (2000, citing Bauman 1995), on education for democracy, suggests that difference is ‘unavoidable and good, precious and in need of cultivation’. ‘Becoming gay and middle-class’: from Tunnel Town, to retail, to teaching Ed identified himself as gay with no permanent partner. His father was an unskilled factory worker, his mother a housewife who lived in an ‘enclosed’ small town in the south west where Ed felt ‘really stifled’ and was never happy. Ed enjoyed school, recognising himself as ‘a reader and a thinker’. He described his parents as ‘wonderful’ (Dad) and ‘clever’ (Mum), ‘into reading but working-class’. He felt that neither of his parents had much ambition for themselves or their children; he recollected thinking he was a bit ‘above’ the way that his parents thought and lived, his language reflecting Bordieu’s framing of expressions of ‘working classness’ as a lack of ‘taste’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘right ways of being and doing’ (1986:511). Even as young as 11, Ed felt that there was more to the wider world: My father used to work in a factory, cellophane. I remember it used to smell terrifically, Tunnel Town does smell. He used to work there on shifts and come home. I remember him saying when I was seven or eight, ‘you’ll be working at cellophane

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when you get older’ and that thought really used to horrify me and I thought ‘I hope not’, you know. He loved primary school; it was a form of apprenticeship of observation (Lortie 1975) that he felt, looking back, made him want to become a teacher. He described one teacher as ‘particularly creative’ and it was this teacher who gave him his love of reading. At the end of primary school Ed began to recognise that he was ‘different from everyone else’ that he had ‘feelings’ for the head master at school and male friends. His description of this period sits with what Frankham (2001:457) describes as coping with the ‘binary divide’, where heterosexuality is portrayed as legal and normal and homosexuality as denigrating and dangerous. Ed described how the only gay men he encountered, through the media, presented negative models of manhood: I used to see John Inman on the telly and I’d think I would end up like that, or Dennis Nilsen, serial killer, you know horrible thoughts go through your head of how you would end up because you’re gay. Like the young men in Frankham’s study (2001:465) he was seeking versions of gay that were ‘other than criminal’. With the changes that came with adolescence was the frightening prospect of working out ‘where he might fit in’ and worrying that he might end up as the ultimate baddy – a murderer. He reported that ‘adolescence was a very scary time, knowing you are different’. In order to deal with what he described as his ‘emotional baggage’ he became an almost compulsive writer, keeping a diary focused on the ‘burden’ of being gay, conscious that it helped him to articulate his thoughts and rationalise his thinking, illustrating what Plummer (1995:18) says about the importance of stories forming the basis of identity. Ed’s parents had no aspirations for their son to go university but he surprised them by being very successful at secondary school where he was popular and voted head boy. He attributed his ‘drive’ to recognising that he was gay and that he had to get out of Tunnel Town where, as a gay man, there was nothing for him. He saw reading creative arts at university as an ‘escape’. He chose a university in a large city which was some distance away from his home and known as a centre for gay culture. Here, although he did not ‘come out’, as with the young people in the research of Epstein et al. (2003), the personal ties and community networks were vital to ‘[their] exploration[s] of what it meant to be queer’. At last he discovered positive role models, like Derek Jarman, who ‘pushed the boundaries’ and stood up for themselves as gay men, and this increased his strength and confidence. He graduated with a 2.1, recalling that as a working-class man, his knowledge of the system was so sparse that he didn’t know this was ‘good’. However, although he had ‘escaped’ at 18, after university, with no money, he had to return to live with his parents in

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Tunnel Town where he found a job in retail. He continued to write, believing that he had to find resolution for managing his sexual identity or what he described euphemistically as his ‘emotional issues’. Plummer (1995) citing Curtis indicates that every gay man has his coming out story which is a statement of worth and self-respect and dissent. Ed wrote a TV play called Ways to Tell Them which won the local heat in a competition and received a lot of local press attention. This publicity provided the impetus to ‘come clean’ to his parents: My dad said straight away ‘I know what it is’. My father was very accepting. My mum was very upset, I must admit my mum cried a lot that evening – a very emotional evening. I remember coming down to breakfast the next morning and thinking, this is the real me now, it was hard, very hard. It’s like you are hiding, you are hiding your true self. I had been hiding my true self till I was 21 … so the secret’s inside you. All that time it’s bound to have an effect on you. Then all of a sudden it’s like ‘wow’ I’m out of that closet. It was such a relief, like Technicolor. Ed now had to negotiate his obligation to his family and at the same time, continue on his emotional journey, ‘soul searching, rites of passage, coming out and becoming content with himself,’ adjusting to what Heaphy et al. (1998:123) describe as their ‘families of choice’. He moved again from the ‘narrow mindedness’ of Tunnel Town to the nearest big city. Here, he took what he described as a ‘day job’, working for the international retail store, Marks and Spencer, where he was overwhelmed by the tolerance and support their equal opportunities policy offered him and what he described as the acceptance of his colleagues: Their policy does not allow discrimination against sexual orientation. I can remember reading that when I first started and thinking ‘wow, this is good’. It’s just the culture, the way they treat their staff … the more I talked to colleagues the more they were coming to terms with me. I don’t think they had a gay man as open as me at Marks before, and because I don’t flaunt it but I will talk about it because people want to know and I will answer questions. Ed flourished in this respectful working environment. He moved up the store promotion ladder, becoming a personnel manager and managing 60 staff. At the same time he trained to be a youth worker. Here he met colleagues, one in particular called Ed, whose name my research subject chose as a pseudonym in tribute, who influenced his thinking, provided the positive models so lacking earlier and stopped him feeling apologetic: I used to think ‘wow’ he is amazing, he was so openly gay and did not care either; he’s got a voice and he has done something with his life as well. He is speaking and challenging.

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In his youth work he supported 14–19 year olds who faced the same frightening feelings that he had done in understanding how their sexuality was central to their identity. He advised young men on safe sex, HIV/Aids, and helped them to judge when they were safe to declare themselves as gay and when such a declaration put them into danger. He explained: Openly gay means not hiding your gayness unless you’re in danger basically, unless your life is going to be at risk basically. Openly gay means not lying, it’s just being honest. It’s not being flamboyant or camp, it’s just being yourself. I think that’s what I mean, it’s just being yourself. So honesty is a big thing for me. Although he acknowledged that it was ‘not all roses‘ with his parents, Ed saw them as ‘wonderfully supportive’ and realised that the young teenagers he encountered, self harming or into drugs, lacked the creativity, persistence and family support to ‘think their way through coming out’ as he had, through articulating their thoughts in writing: Even though it’s working-class and it’s not what I wanted out of life, I wanted the good things, I have really, really got a stable home life so I have had that security which I think helps considerably. Some teenagers don’t have those writing skills and can’t deal with things in that way. I was able to write about my fears. Others do things to harm themselves. Approaching 30, Ed decided on a lifestyle change. He wanted to build on his graduate status and move from the working class. At an age Ed described as a ‘turning point’ he became prepared to experience what Huberman (1993) describes as a discontinuity, and to exchange his gay lifestyle for something more rewarding and stable. His interest in creative writing, his arts degree, his organisational skills, youth work and encouragement from friends built up ‘like a snowball effect’. After a false start where lack of money prevented him training for secondary teaching, a £6000 training grant1 became available. He checked his suitability for primary teaching by securing a place for a day a week at a local council estate primary school which he recognised as similar to the one he had attended and where the ethos linked with his own interest in social justice: I loved it, as soon as I walked through the door, to me the atmosphere was wonderful, in such a deprived area, wonderful creative things here, the displays. The children were very happy. I am used to that type of environment, those types of people, those pushchairs and graffiti on the walls … I thought this Head is doing

1 A £6000 grant introduced by the UK Government in 2000 for students with a good honours degree to encourage them to train on the one-year Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE).

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great things for the school, he’s out for the community just like I am out for the gay community with pride and organising community events. He decided that he wanted the breadth that primary teaching offered, imparting knowledge in what he described as a ‘creative’ way acknowledged. Choosing teaching was a step towards responsibility. ‘It is a serious thing, teaching. It is a profession.’ He had a very successful journey through his training year. As he had in his undergraduate years he continued living in the large urban centre where he had set up gay community contacts. He became a pillar of strength to others in his tutor group, supporting them during the uncertainties of training. His ‘gorgeous box’ in which he kept letters and photos which reminded him when he was ‘down’ of ‘what a great person he was’ formed the centre of one Humanities session and provided a model of resilience for the rest of the group. One head teacher in whose school he was placed was very positive about his ‘lively and creative teaching’, remarking, in addition, on how his previous career experience made him confident with parents. The first year of teaching: sexual, gender and class identities Ed obtained a permanent post at Wordsworth Junior School which served a large council estate. He was pleased to be returning to the kind of school he knew as a child, what Burn (2001a:85) in her study of female teachers describes as ‘footprints in the past’ – a continuing engagement with their class origins’. Being paid at the end of September, compared with weekly pay in retail, was unexpected. Having to prepare his classroom in August, then teach for over two weeks, ‘working for nothing’, offended him. He felt foolish when he committed a faux pas asking if he was paid overtime for parents’ evenings and the head teacher laughed at his ‘blunder’. Sabar (2003) describes novice teachers as immigrants entering a strange land. After six years in retail, Ed’s feelings appeared to be similar. At the same time coming from a workingclass background, he had little idea of how the ‘professional’ work of a teacher, which he so valued, could overflow into personal life. Having ‘professional’ status did not compensate for the loss of working conditions at Marks and Spencer where the financial needs of employees were respected. He speculated on what he had lost: I had no pay; my (union leader) Dad said ‘what’s going on here?’ I love this job but you are working for nothing, M & S wouldn’t expect that. They had me back in the summer. I was quite swayed, subsidised meals, cheap food, discounts. The intensity of teaching in the first few weeks, which he found ‘emotionally and physically draining’, was exacerbated by early morning classroom visits

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from parents. Ed thought the reason for this was that his Year 3 class had never had a male teacher: I am a man so parents had me under a microscope. Parents came in to have a good look at me. This increased scrutiny (Oyler et al. 2001, Carrington 2001) generated by the perceived dangers to young children from men, was again unexpected and felt like a knock-back. Ed faced an additional and unwelcome bruising from a senior colleague appointed as his mentor. He was already acquainted with her when he started at Wordsworth. In a critical incident, and for reasons that were not clear to Ed, she had ‘outed’ him to some of the staff before he started working at the school. Anticipating that his sexuality might be a site of tension, and certain he had the confidence and experience to overcome it, he was not outraged or destabilised by this, but he was concerned about the breach of confidence. He was no longer apologetic for being gay but defiant in that he felt that his gayness should not be an issue for him in a professional context: I am not hiding things. It does not affect the professional me. It does not matter; being gay is part of me. If they don’t like the fact that I am gay then they don’t like me, basically, and it’s hard cheese really. It’s just part of me. He reported that this colleague found his more ‘feminine’ mannerisms troubling, and he tried to ‘play them down’. At a time when he was finding teaching very challenging, he found her support limited. On one occasion, when he was troubled by the intensity of his workload, he indicated to her that he felt tearful and that he wanted to cry; ‘she looked at me really funny because a man would not normally say that.’ It was unpleasant being reminded of what it was to feel an outsider, on the edge of the school community. Christmas in a primary school and the attendant festivities lifted his flagging spirits. He also unexpectedly received presents from the children in his class and took this as a sign of his popularity among parents. Although this is something enjoyed by many primary teachers, Ed’s colleagues jokingly indicated that he did particularly well because the mothers had formed a ‘fan club’ around him. Perhaps the reaction to this also reported by Benton de Course and Vogle (1997) was ‘mothering’ of male primary teachers. One more challenging aspect of this attention was the assumption by parents that as a young teacher he was engaged in what Epstein et al. describe as the normative heterosexual imperative (2003:149) of ‘settling down’, choosing a career and a partner. Indeed, he was ‘set up’ on a heterosexual date by the mother of one of the children in his class. He extricated himself tactfully by indicating that it would not be ‘professionally acceptable’ to pursue such a liaison, but found it awkward and embarrassing.

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In the New Year, the imminent school inspection increased tensions. Ed perceived the head, who was relatively new, as ‘all right with me, but a bit of a bully’. His requirement to get the teachers to produce what Ed reported was ‘excessively detailed planning’ resulted in constant complaining from the staff and Ed found himself comparing, in a negative way, the head’s ‘dictatorial’ management approach with the more positive interpersonal working environment at Marks and Spencer. The mismatch with his previous experience came from his view of how a ‘professional’ head teacher should manage his staff and a construction of himself as an ‘experienced newcomer’ with management skills from his previous career: No one is allowed to challenge him. The staff are terrified of him. He can be good, fair and supportive, but I can see where he is going wrong. Ed felt that if he had been asked, he could have drawn on his skills to relieve the problem. As the inspection grew closer, the children in his class were finding the work hard and ‘playing up’. He began to ‘worry and lose sleep’. His mentor was unsupportive. His work/life balance became highly disrupted and he missed his gay lifestyle. He decided to return to retail and quickly got an interview. This ‘down’ was rapidly followed by an ‘up’, the appointment of another male teacher in January which, Ed indicated, brought a much needed male friendship for him into an all-female staffroom. The inexperience of the new teacher also generated a reference point (Nias 1989) which reminded Ed of how much he had learnt about teaching and what he had invested in his new career. Paradoxically feedback from the inspection was positive. Although one of the most ‘horrific experiences’ of his life, it resulted in ‘extensification’ (Woods et al. 1997:122), intensive preparation followed by an enhanced sense of professionalism. He decided not to attend the retail job interview. Being a creative teacher; the struggle for professional autonomy Even after the inspection, Ed continued to find that his mentor, and the head who completed his assessments, kept him ‘under surveillance’. Although he found his mentor ‘well organised’, Ed also experienced her as ‘controlling’ and a ‘cascade bully’ (Woods et al. 1997:15), a teaching colleague who, under pressure from their manager, put others under pressure. Both used their power negatively. He contrasted this teaching experience with the level of high responsibility he had enjoyed as a retail manager. A youthful-looking 32, Ed commented that the school did not appear to be aware of his age or capitalise on his previous experience.

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Ed did, however, find his confidence and sense of identity as a teacher boosted by attendance at local authority (LA) courses. Mixing with other newly qualified teachers (NQTs) made him realise that his head teacher had a reputation for being a ‘very hard task master’ and also led him to understand that it was not unusual for an NQT to be finding their early days a challenge. In addition, at his second NQT training session, the tutor noticed his knowledge of management and personnel, and realised that his skills would be valuable in mentoring less experienced NQTs. This confirmation of his worth, and acknowledgement of his previous experience, was a counterbalance to the way he was being managed in his school, although the head acknowledged that his enhanced role reflected well on Wordsworth. This was the first of a series of incidents in which Ed, by being pro-active, began to understand that he had the ability to become a lever in his school; one who is able to contribute to development of future practice. Ed’s teaching credo emphasised creativity. However, at Wordsworth, Ed found that the constant monitoring of planning and teaching was a strong inhibitor to curriculum freedom. This was not the creative cross-curricular approach that had impacted on his decision to change career and become a teacher. He disagreed with the head’s policy of teaching all subjects separately, with a rigid timetable. Initially he complied with the school’s approach. However, after six months he realised that his values were being compromised. In juxtaposing his expectations of primary teaching against his previous work he saw that autonomy, a valued aspect of his past identity, was being lost. He started to resist the prescribed programme, working in a way that fitted his values. As an experienced newcomer, his confidence from his earlier career gave him the courage to experiment with the curriculum, researching his lessons carefully to incorporate different subjects into cross-curricularity. This made his mentor uncomfortable: I said, ‘We’re going out to measure shadows, I’m spending a whole afternoon on it, then we’re going to make some sundials.’ She said, ‘You can’t do that, you’ve got to do your hour of maths, the parents will complain.’ She totally freaked. He found that the children and the parents very much enjoyed his approach. The head initially ‘turned a blind eye’ but to Ed’s surprise, at his final assessment, expressed his approval, both of Ed’s approach to curriculum and pedagogy, and his ability to support colleagues with ‘troubled children’ – an ability he had acquired when he was a youth worker. His professional identity felt much more secure. Being a gay teacher, balancing identities By the end of his first year of teaching Ed had become successful in developing routines which restored his work/life balance – a source of considerable

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dissatisfaction at the beginning of the year. He found himself able to find time to write. He was able to resume his ‘jaunts’, to gay centres like Brighton but he kept what he described as his gay lifestyle geographically separate from his professional life, confining it to a city on the other side of the country and holidays in Ibiza. He was quite clear that he didn’t flaunt his sexual activities in the staffroom or talk about relationships with men, but in terms of his work/life balance he was relieved that he was again able to engage in gay activities and forget the pressures of the classroom. Describing a ‘one night stand’, he said: I sat in the back of the car with him and then all of a sudden I thought of my children. I thought of my children in school … and then I thought, ‘no, push that out now. It’s weird.’ I thought ‘oh gosh’ I am a teacher, I shouldn’t be doing this … oh no I have to … I have got to have my life as well. I need this. Almost without the other teachers noticing he had ‘come out’ to the staff. When over a lunchtime exchange a fellow teacher asked him in the staffroom if he thought another person in the school community was gay he replied ‘Don’t you know I am gay?’ He had ‘come out’, this time himself, to the whole staff, in what now felt like a safe place to do so. Postscript Ed is now in his sixth year of teaching under a different head ‘who gets the best from me’. He has achieved significant promotion. Asked by a male parent if being a male teacher meant he got ‘any stick’ from other teachers because he was the only man, he replied that colleagues had always been very supportive and he believes this to be so. Although the staff knew he was gay he had never been explicit with parents. He takes the precautions that he believes any male teacher in a primary school should take. He is always very careful about physical contact – never holding hands with children. Working recently with more tactile five year olds, he gently pushes them off, directing them back to their work, saying, ‘you are grown up now, you don’t need to hold hands’. He remains very happy in primary teaching, so happy, in fact, that he worries that it might end. He has recently openly moved in with a partner near to school and has some concerns about whether there will be speculation about his sexuality which might be damaging for him. However, he is also confident: As long as you are a good teacher and are professional about your job your personal life is not an issue. The parents value that much more than whether you are gay. In the time I have known him, Ed has been travelling along what might be described as a continuum through acknowledgement of his sexuality,

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finding positive role models to emulate, feeling confident to come out to his parents and then his colleagues, and finally being defiant when confronted with prejudice in teaching. He has never suggested that being gay should be celebrated rather than just tolerated as Hammond (2008) suggests. However, his desire to work with newly qualified gay teachers and support them with any difficulties they might face might take him this step further. More than anything he wants to be a good teacher: I love teaching, within a creative curriculum being my own boss, linking the children’s ideas into what makes meaning for them … you can say ‘that maths session can wait, they are really enjoying this’ … No other job will give me this satisfaction, I feel very privileged to be doing it. I am part of the community. I love it. Why Ed’s story, why narrative and what is to be learnt? Vicars suggests that ‘good story telling may come very close to life as experienced’ (2008:348). Ed’s story offers insights into dominance, points of resistance and the result of the peripheral life experience that can be produced as a result of being gay or male in a primary school (Okley 1996). In addition, as Kohler Riessman (2008) suggests, its reported narrative form arguably gives it more power than even the resistant subversive acts themselves; telling the story ‘makes the moment live beyond the moment’ (Kohler Riessman 2008:63). Whilst there is evidence that considerations of notions of the ‘self’ and personal identity, and engagement with individual teachers’ cognitive and emotional selves are re-emerging as a key to teacher effectiveness (Day et al. 2006), there is little place for such considerations in today’s initial teacher training curriculum. Lessons learnt from stories of teacher identity like Ed’s should be offered as a useful tool to give a view of the world to those beginning in their career to help them understand barriers they may have to surmount, or changes of attitude that they may have to initiate in order to develop an identity in teaching that allows them to remain in and enjoy the profession. Such insights offer the potential to enable new teachers to articulate their expectations to their school, and enable schools to enter into a dialogue which meets all new teacher needs. For male trainees it might mean being aware of and countering what King describes as the ‘multiple ossified layers of popular belief about men who teach children’ (2000). I recognise a degree of ambivalence as a woman working to understand and effect changes to the working conditions of men in primary schools, while not impeding the progress of women. On one hand I do not see men as Kenway’s ‘new disadvantaged’ (1996:447), rejecting the notion that the recruitment of more men will, in some way, compensate for an implied deficit in the many

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women working in primary teaching (Burn 2001b). I am also conscious of the political tensions that exist in ‘emphasising too much the costs, rather than the benefits, of masculinity’ (Coltrane 1994:55). However, as a teacher educator, and one who would support the rights of all minority groups, I am concerned that Ed, like other male primary teachers I have researched, found that the identities that were initially made available (Osborn et al. 2003) in his first school were not matched by his perceptions of himself as a teacher and as a result he experienced what Foster and Newman (2005:5) describe as ‘identity bruising’. Like Rowe (1998) I believe that ‘an acute awareness of the pressures of being within one minority group gives a gay man or lesbian an insight into the pressures of other minority groups and illuminates issues of power and marginality’. This view is supported by David Waters (2009) who, writing about his popularity as a godfather, suggests that as a gay man he has early life experience of being an ‘outsider, an oddball a scapegoat … with a lived experience of otherness and a rich seam of empathy for all kids on the rocky road to adulthood’. Skelton (2009) points out that in studies of teacher identity, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and social class receive little attention and that for gay teachers the aspect of their personal identities that they felt had the most impact on how they experienced their careers were the ‘expectations created through the interrelationship of (hetero) sexuality and (hegemonic) gender’ (Skelton 2009:42). Ed’s narrative gives appropriate attention and provides an ‘interpersonal bridge’ to facilitate mutual understanding, growth and change (Kaufman 1974) for all minority groups and those that induct them into teaching: men, career changers, but predominantly gay teachers of whom there is an unconfirmed figure of 25,000 teaching in our school system (Teachers’ TV 2008). Ed’s insight into his first year of teaching, ‘grounded in the study of the particular’ (Kohler Riessman 2008:11) offers a view of minority newcomers entering primary school culture that can be generalised to teachers in other schools. For gay teachers it may be the challenge of ‘coming out’ in the school community, addressing the conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia and facing presumptions of normative heterosexuality. For those of working-class origins it could include understandings of what it is to be ‘professional’. Greater understanding of the range of identities that teachers bring to teaching may ultimately lead to greater retention of teachers as well as the primary school workforce desired by the TDA (TTA 2002b) ‘which is more representative of the wider community’. Acknowledgements My thanks to ‘Ed’ for his bravery and knowing that his story was important to tell.

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Bibliography Bauman, Z. (1995) Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1996) ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist. A Short History of Identity’, in S. Hall and P. Du Gay (eds) (1996) Questions of cultural identity, London: Sage. Beilhartz, P. (2000) The Bauman Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Benton, C.J. DeCorse and Vogle, S.P. (1997) ‘In a Complex Voice: The Contradictions of Male Elementary Teachers Career Choice and Professional Identity’, Journal of Teacher Education, 48(1). Bordieu, P. (1986) Distinction (trans. R. Nice), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brine, J. (2001) ‘Wading through the Practices of Policy’. Inaugural lecture presented at the University of the West of England, November 2001. Bullough, R.V., Jr (2001) Uncertain Lives: Children of Promise, Teachers of Hope. New York: Teachers’ College Press. Burn, E. (2001a) ‘Battling through the System: A Working-Class Teacher in an Inner-City School’, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 5(1): 85–92. Burn, E. (2001b) ‘Do Boys Need Male Primary Teachers as Positive Role Models?’. Paper presented to BERA Conference, Leeds, 2001. Carrington, B. (2001) ‘A Quintessentially Feminine Domain? Student Teachers’ Constructions of Primary Teaching as a Career’. Paper submitted to the European Journal of Teacher Education, August 2001. Clough, P. (1998) Differently Articulated? Some Indices of Disturbed/Disturbing Voices from Articulating with Difficulty: Research Voices in Inclusive Education, London: Paul Chapman. Coltrane, S. (1994) ‘Theorizing Masculinities in Contemporary Social Science’ in Brod, H. and Kaufman, M. (eds) Theorizing Masculinities, London: Sage. Connell, R. (1987) Gender and Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. Connelly, F. and Clandinin, D. (eds) (1999) Shaping a Professional Identity, New York: Teachers’ College Press. Curtis, P. (2005) ‘Wages No Barrier to Teaching, Report Says’. Report in Guardian Unlimited, available at www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/sep/06/schools.uk2. Day, C., Stobart, G., Sammond, P., Kington, A., Gu, Q., Smees, R. and Mujjtaba, T. (2006) ‘Variations in Teachers’ Work Lives and Effectiveness’, Research Report 743, London: DfES. Delamont, S. and Coffey, A. (2000) Feminism and the Classroom Teacher: Research, Praxis and Pedagogy, London: RoutledgeFalmer. Easthope, A. (1990) What a Man’s Gotta Do: the Masculine Myth in Popular Culture, London: Unwin Hyman. Emery, H. (1997) ‘Men into Primary Teaching’, British Journal of Curriculum and Assessment, 7(2): 35–37. Epstein, D., O’Flynns, S. and Telford, D. (2003) Silenced Sexualities in Schools and Universities, London: Trentham. Foster, T. and Newman, E. (2005) ‘Just a Knock Back? Identity Bruising on the Route to Becoming a Male Primary School Teacher’, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 11(4): 339–356. Frankel, H. (2008) ‘What’s the Problem Here?’, Times Educational Supplement Magazine, 05.12.08. Frankham, J. (2001) ‘The Open Secret: Limitations on the Expression of Same Sex Desire’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(4): 457–469.

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General Teaching Council (2003) as MORI poll www.gtce.org.uk.gtcinfo/mor.asp. Published in the Guardian 07.01.03. Guardian Unlimited (2005) ‘Retention is Better than Lure’, available at www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/oct/14/schools.uk3. Hammond (2008) ‘The Gay Teacher’, Teachers TV. Heaphy B., Weeks, J. and Donovan. C. (1998) ‘That’s my Life: Researching Stories of NonHeterosexual Relationships’, Sexualities, 1(4): 453–470. Hodkinson, P. (1998) ‘Career Decision Making and the Transition from School to Work’ in Grenfell, M. and James, D. (eds) Bourdieu and Education, London: Falmer. Huberman, M. (1993) The Lives of Teacher; (trans. J. Neufield), London: Cassell. Kaufman, G. (1974) ‘The Meaning of Shame: Towards a Self Affirming Identity’, Journal of Counselling Psychology, 21: 568–574. Kenway, J. (1996) ‘Reasserting Masculinity in Australian Schools’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 19(4): 447–466. King, J. (1998) Uncommon Caring: Learning from Men Who Teach Young Children, London, New York: Teachers’ College Press. King, J. (2000) ‘The Problem of Men in Early Education’ in Lesko, N. (ed.) Masculinities at School, London, New Delhi: Sage. Kohler Riessman, C. (2008) Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences, London: Sage. Lords Hansard (1998) Text for 30.11.98. Lortie D. (1975) School Teacher: A Sociological Study, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maclure, M., Elliott, J., Marr, A. and Stronach, I. (1990) ‘Teachers’ Jobs and Lives (Phase 2)’. End of award report presented at ESRC, Centre for Applied Research in Education, Norwich. Maclure, M. (1993) ‘Arguing for Your Self: Identity as an Organising Principle in Teachers’ Jobs and Lives’, British Educational Research Journal, 19(4): 311–322. Maguire, M. (2005) ‘Not Footprints Behind but Footprints Forward: Working Class Women who Teach’, Gender and Education, 17(1): 3–18. Moyles, J. and Cavendish, S. (2001) ‘Male Students in Primary ITT: A Failure to Thrive, Strive or Survive?’. Paper presented at BERA Conference, Leeds. Nias, J. (1989) Primary Teachers Talking: A Study of Teaching as Work, London: Routledge. Okley, J. (1996) Own and Other Culture, London: Routledge. Osborn, M., Broadfoot, P., McNess, E., Planel, C., Ravn, B. and Triggs, P. (2003) A World of Difference? Comparing Learners across Europe, Maidenhead: McGraw Hill. Oyler, C., Jennings, T. and Lozada, P. (2001) ‘Silenced Gender: the Construction of a Male Primary Educator’, Teacher and Teacher Education, 17: 367–379. Payne, I. (1980) ‘Sexist Ideology and Education’ in Spender, D. and Sarah, E. (eds) Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education, London: Women’s Press. Plummer, K. (1995) Telling Sexual Stories, London: Routledge. Pullen, A., and Simpson, R. (2009) ‘Managing Difference in a Feminized World: Men, Otherness and Social Practice’, Human Relations, 62: 561–587. Rowe, J. (1998) ‘Some Experiences and Reflections on Being a Gay Teacher’ in Equal Opportunities in the Primary School, Redland Centre for Primary Education School Development Programmes, Bristol Polytechnic. Sabar, N. (2003) ‘From Heaven to Reality Through Crisis: Novice Teachers as Immigrants’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 20: 145–161. Sargent, P. (2000) ‘Real Men or Real Teachers? Contradictions in the Lives of Men Elementary Teachers’, Men and Masculinities, 2(4): 410–433. Schmitt, R. (2001) ‘Some Final Thoughts’, Men and Masculinities, 3(4).

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Skelton, C. (2001) ‘Real Men or New Men? Changing Images of Male Primary Teachers’. Paper presented at BERA Conference, Leeds. Skelton, C. (2009) ‘Failing to Get Men into Primary Teaching: a Feminist Critique’, Journal of Education Policy, 24(1): 39–54. Smedley, S. (1997) ‘Men on The Margins: Male Students Primary Teachers’, Changing English, 4(2):147–159. Sumsion, J. (2000) ‘Negotiating Otherness: A Male Early Childhood Educator’s Gender Positioning’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 8(2): 129–139. Sutton Trust (2009) ‘Teach Primary: Improving the Status and Quality of Primary School Teaching’. National Education Trust. Times Higher Education Supplement 2.10.08 ‘Gender Gap in Teaching Expands’. Higher Education Statistics Agency. Times Educational Supplement (TES) ‘Last Man Standing’, 07.03.08. Teacher Training Agency (TTA) (2002a) ‘Education Champions Make Their Mark’. Press release, 26.06.02. Teacher Training Agency (2002b) Teacher Training Agency Corporate Plan 2002–3, London: TTA. Teacher Development Agency (2007) Supporting Induction for Newly Qualified Teachers, London: TDA. Teachers TV (2008) ‘The Gay Teacher’. Thornton, M. and Bricheno, P. (2006) Missing Men in Education, London: Trentham. Vicars, M. (2008) ‘Who Are You Calling Queer? Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones but Names Will Always Hurt Me’, British Educational Research Journal, 32(3): 347–361. Waters, D. (2009) ‘Gay Godfathers Rule’ Guardian, 04.04.09. Weekes, J., Donovan, C. and Heaphy, B. (2001) Same Sex Intimacies, Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments, London: Routledge. Woods, P., Jeffrey, B., Troman, G. and Boyle, M. (1997) Restructuring Schools, Reconstructing Teachers: Responding to Change in the Primary School, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Chapter 5

Changing identities through re-engagement with education Narrative accounts from two women learners Richard Waller

Introduction This chapter features accounts of two white British middle-class women, ‘Maria’ (aged 47) and ‘Fiona’ (52), participants in a longitudinal study of adults returning to formal learning via an Access to Higher Education (HE) programme. The women reflect upon their educational biographies, from schooling in the 1960s through to early experiences at university as mature students, and consider how these have impacted upon their wider lives. Changes in their sense of identity are explored in the chapter, and the value of using biographical research in highlighting the social context of individual lives is examined. However, before considering the life stories of Fiona and Maria (their chosen pseudonyms), I will explain my choice of the narrative methodology and contextualise the findings by reference to my personal and family educational biographies. Reflections on my autobiography Like many British people of my generation, I was the first in my family to go to university. That I – or rather we – did resulted from changing social forces, notably the fracturing of dominant work patterns and roles (Beck 1992, Giddens 1991), and legislation expanding opportunities for further and higher education (e.g. DES 1987, DfES 2003). As Christine Halse suggests in her chapter, I too doubt if any of my school or university peers are as reflexive over how our family educational background shapes our ontological and epistemological positions, and this chapter starts by considering that background. Like anyone else, including research participants discussed at length later in the chapter, my educational and wider life biography was, whilst not determined absolutely, at least informed by those of my parents, so I will outline something of this to contextualise my interest in narrative or life history research. On one level my biography is unique, everyone’s is, including those of Maria and Fiona. However, we are all ciphers or products of our environment too, and as

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demonstrated in the final section of this chapter, the exploration of the interplay between social structure and individual agency as influences upon lives is why I find biographical research especially powerful. My mother and father were both born in the 1940s into working-class families from London’s East End. Unlike their own parents each was successful at primary school, doing well in the 11 plus examination determining the type of secondary education children would receive.1 By the time I left home at 19 for university, my parents would have been described objectively as ‘middle-class’, albeit ‘lower-middle-class’, and ‘first-generation middle-class’ at that. Their class position later became more established in occupational roles, housing tenure, social capital and habitus, whilst markers of their background were retained – moderated Cockney or Estuary English accents for instance. Lawler (2005:797) suggests class is essentially a ‘dynamic’ concept, not a ‘set of “empty” signifiers … waiting to be filled by interchangeable social actors, but as something we are’ (emphasis in original). Irrespective of structural positioning, people see themselves ontologically as being workingor middle-class, and tensions between subjective and objective components of identity are central to this chapter. In the late 1990s my parents both took voluntary early retirement during restructuring at work. Like many peers, they were in the appropriate age, geographical location and occupational position to benefit from opportunities presented by changing macro-economic conditions; changes illustrating the shifting social context to the study from which the narratives of Fiona and Maria are drawn. It seems a trite observation, but had my parents grown up in a slightly different location or period, their lives would probably have been dramatically different. This reflection is relevant when considering the lives of those participating in the research project, as discussed implicitly and explicitly throughout this chapter. When my sister and I became settled at secondary school, my mother, then in her mid-30s, entered nursing, and subsequently trained as a midwife, fulfilling an academic potential frustrated whilst raising a family and working in successive short-term, part-time, low-skill jobs. Her career culminated as a university lecturer after nurse and midwife training was devolved to that sector. So, whilst I was the first in my family to enter HE, my mother (and sister) did so subsequently, as mature students, as have other friends and acquaintances, offering a vicarious experience of being an older learner, a further personal impetus to my research.

1 Following the 1944 Butler Education Act, British children sat an examination towards the end of their primary education, determining which one of three distinct types of school they attended. Whilst the precise figures varied between regions depending upon the provision available, some 20–25 per cent of children went to grammar schools, 70–75 per cent to secondary modern schools and around five per cent to technical schools. See Jacky Brine’s chapter in this volume for further discussion of this policy’s impact.

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Whilst my male peers and I could have followed our fathers into car manufacture, working in the docks or Fleet Street’s printing presses as our inherited right, in stark contrast to the previous few generations, hardly any of my acquaintances actually did. The ontological security of working-class communities and their extended family structures ruptured during the 1970s and 1980s economic and social upheavals. My school contemporaries, male and female, broke with traditional employment patterns, with many getting non-manual work in London’s booming financial services markets – ‘The City’. Whilst it would be naive to ignore the influence of nepotism, during this relatively meritocratic period what you knew – your cultural capital – was becoming more important than whom you knew – your social capital (Bourdieu 1984). To me, commuting daily to work in London’s financial markets appealed no more than becoming a docker or car manufacturer did. I chose to study further, attending sixth form college after school, and then higher education. Unlike most people in the wider study from which Fiona and Maria’s narratives are drawn, my family actively encouraged and financially supported my studies. The intergenerational impact of educational experiences The impact on my father of a secondary education experience somewhat at odds with his working-class background profoundly affected his sense of identity, his familial and community relationships, and his aspirations for himself and his own children (Hoggart 1958, Jackson and Marsden 1962). This ontological challenge resonates through successive generations; in terms of educational experiences and parental expectations, my upbringing and my sister’s differed from those of our four cousins. My father’s two brothers ‘failed’ the 11 plus exam, leaving school with minimal qualifications and following older male relatives into traditional local industries, whilst my father became a design engineer. My cousins, too, all left school with few or no qualifications and still work in semi-skilled manual or routine white collar roles, whilst my sister and I became university lecturers. Our lifestyle differed from our wider family’s; in contrast to aunts and uncles who remained in the urban working-class communities they were born into, my parents left London for the leafier suburbs of Essex, as families in classic sociological studies by Willmott and Young (1960) had. Whilst not wishing to construct or portray the lives of my wider family and other working-class people as ‘deficient’ to mine, I acknowledge the greater life choices I have. Without oversimplifying the issues, this is a direct (although not inevitable) consequence of my father’s greater educational success than his siblings; and of mine compared to my cousins. These generational advantages are passed on to our children too, further illustrating education’s power to transform the lives of individuals, families and wider communities, and its potential for moving us towards a fairer, more just society.

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Reflecting upon my family educational biography/ies led me to teach adults, wanting to improve the lives of people I worked with, empowering them and giving them greater life choices. Seeing the impact on older learners of studying courses leading to university led me to research their experiences. It meant I could help others, ‘giving something back’ (Brine and Waller 2004, Reay et al. 2002) to those without the opportunities I had enjoyed. The richness of data generated through life history research offers the most valid understanding of the tensions and transformations encountered during the process, and having outlined briefly my own family educational biography and suggested how this has informed my understanding of educational processes, I will turn to consider the life stories of two participants from a recent research project. Rationale for narrative and life history methodologies This section examines how to appreciate the wider context of individuals’ lives to understand their narrative accounts, and how apparently highly personal stories can illustrate wider processes of social change. This involves, as Sparkes (2003:3) puts it, ‘illuminat(ing) the social context of individual lives while … allowing space for individual stories to be told. To comprehend the social context of participants’ experiences they are placed amongst events shaping their lives and those of others. Fiona and Maria, whilst sharing characteristics including ethnicity and age, nevertheless come from different structural positions regarding social class ascribed at birth, family or household make-up, and patterns of engagement with paid and unpaid labour across their adult lives. They were chosen from the study to explore the methodological implications of biographical research, drawing out similarities and differences in their lives and their narrative accounts. My particular focus here is how formal education impacts on learning, informing, developing and framing their sense of identity. I explained above how my biographical narrative and that of my immediate and wider family has been shaped by education, and I now turn to those of Fiona and Maria, after outlining the course they joined. Later in this section I also consider issues of power in biographical research. Background Access to higher education courses

Maria and Fiona joined the Access programme with the intention of getting into university the following year. Access to HE courses take place in the UK further education college setting, aiming to redress educational exclusion amongst low participating groups – primarily mature students from

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working-class and/or minority ethnic backgrounds. They provide adults with no or few formal qualifications a route into university otherwise denied to them (Parry 1996). They feature a curriculum concerned with preparation for HE, with study skills, numeracy, literacy and communication skills at their core, in addition to subject specific knowledge. An informal curriculum operates too, with courses aiming to increase students’ confidence, and to develop transferable ‘soft’ skills including time management and effective group working. The wider research study

In the larger research project, semi-structured interviews were conducted up to five times with each student (n=20) over two years. The research explored the impact of studying upon individuals, their significant relationships and sense of identity. A longitudinal approach enabled changes in these areas to be tracked over time for one person, and comparisons made across the cohort at any given moment. The interviews regularly asked questions on their (changing) sense of identity, how relationships differed from before the course, and what their hopes and ambitions were. Previous research on Access students (e.g. Baxter and Hatt 1999, Wakeford 1994) had illustrated the complexity of people’s experiences and its impact upon them and those closest to them, and I wanted to consider a similar area, particularly in terms of learner and class identities. The interviews, which with Fiona and Maria lasted on average about an hour, occurred at college or in the respondent’s home. This choice of venue was offered partly to redress the power imbalance in terms of role, gender and control over the interview process and direction. Discussions were recorded and transcribed. Similar questions were asked of each respondent for a given set of interviews, and whilst some themes were revisited, others only arose at appropriate times, reasons behind university choice for instance. The interviewees knew I was an Access tutor at the college, and an educational researcher at a local university. Mentioning I too was a mature student, balancing academic studies with family responsibilities and part-time work commitments, aided the development of rapport necessary to produce the richly detailed qualitative data sought. Other life histories could have been chosen for this chapter but these two participants, whilst coming from nominally similar social positions, revealed very different past experiences of formal education, of current motivations and future aspirations. Two narrative accounts Fiona – a ‘pre-feminist’ education

At 52 Fiona was the oldest of the wider study’s participants, and a Masters’ degree and professional credentials meant she was also the best qualified. Fiona’s family was upper-middle-class – her father had been a doctor, as had his

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father before him, whilst her mother worked as a receptionist and administrator in his GP’s surgery. Fiona was the second of four children, all girls. Despite ‘doing reasonably well’ at her private school, Fiona grew up with neither the expectation nor aspiration of continuing her formal education beyond then. Although all the men in her family had been to university in recent generations, Fiona was the first woman to do so, and not until her late 20s: I went to quite an academic school, but my parents didn’t push us at all academically, they didn’t really think that girls needed much in the way of education… I remember my father saying ‘OK, so you’re going to do “A” levels, but you don’t want to go to university’ … so it took me quite a long time to get there. Fiona, like others had ‘hated school’, suggesting her dominant memories were of ‘coercion, sarcasm and ridicule’. She blamed negative parental attitudes towards education on the period’s prevalent values regarding appropriate classed gender roles. After her eldest sister left school at 15, Fiona herself started ‘A’ levels in 1964 initially against parental wishes. When her second sister left school in 1972, early feminism’s impact had changed expectations a little. Fiona’s youngest sister was educated just beyond a significant social cusp regarding women’s changing roles. These shifting social norms meant her youngest sister was, unlike Fiona, encouraged academically, attending university in her late teens. Without children of her own, Fiona suggests current expectations within her wider family were of both her nephews and nieces progressing to university, and all had. By contrast, Fiona had been expected to ‘leave school, marry the curate and raise a family’ by her conservative-sounding parents. Of her sisters she said ‘there’s no question, if we had been boys we would have been pushed and pushed’, like her male cousins were. Expectations of progressing to university are now firmly entrenched in all fractions of Britain’s middle classes, and increasingly in the upper-working-class too following government initiatives to expand participation in HE (for example DfES 2003). It would be exceptional for a woman from Fiona’s background not to start university at 18 or 19 now. Fiona’s return to education

Before the Access course Fiona was a social worker ‘for about 25 years’ but wanted to be a marine biologist, a decision which came to her ‘in a flash’ whilst diving in the Caribbean on one of her trips. Although single at our first meeting, Fiona had other relationship commitments; her mother and father were still alive, and a source of worry and responsibility to her: I’ve got elderly parents (and) my father was ill last summer. They live 200 miles away, and I got ‘caught up’ being with them most of the time last summer.

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I decided I either had to move up there, or have something very definite going on in [city] that would give me a ‘cast iron’ reason for being down here. Despite her filial demands, Fiona felt she had relatively few other calls upon her time. Comparing her position to fellow Access students at a later meeting, she suggested: I’ve got an advantage, in two ways. I’m used to studying before … and I didn’t have family demands. In the last couple of months I’ve started a new relationship, and that’s got me thinking … I’m really glad this didn’t happen six months ago! A whole new level of ‘timetabling’ has to come in. It’s quite difficult, and I’m so full of admiration for people who’ve got children and do this. Literature on mature women students (e.g. Betts 1999, Burke 2002) cites the difficulties in balancing study and family commitments. Despite the further progression of feminism women still generally organise family life, carrying a mental ‘map’ or ‘menu’ of household responsibilities (Waller 2006). Fiona’s closest friend on the course was a younger woman with two small children, whose mother suddenly became seriously ill, and who left the course to care for her. Fiona reflected upon the fragility of anyone’s ability to commit to such a demanding programme of study; the impossibility of legislating for all potential eventualities. As she suggested, ‘it only takes something like that, and the whole thing comes down, like a house of cards’. Fiona’s personal experience illustrated this. Just before the end of her university first year, her father and her partner of some 15 months both died. Whilst the first death had been anticipated, the second was unexpected and really knocked her back. Others in the wider study also experienced major personal traumas during the two years of fieldwork. For instance, Maria’s elderly father became seriously ill during the Access programme, necessitating major input in assistance and respite care for her elderly mother before his eventual admission to a nursing home. Drawing upon Beck (1992), Reay et al. (2002) suggest despite people’s life chances remaining highly structured, processes of individualisation mean solutions are sought on an individual not a collective basis. A consequence of this is that situations beyond their control, over which people were previously assumed to bear no responsibility, are increasingly experienced as ‘personal failures’: There are some things it is just so much more difficult dealing with than if you’re 18. Sometimes, I’m just so envious of the young ones. It’s an assumption because some 18 year olds have a lot of responsibility and stuff, but the ones who just move down to university, that’s it for the year, and in June they get picked up with their duvets and their music and that’s it … If you’re embarking on something like this in your middle years, things happen, don’t they?

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Maria – always putting others first

Upon starting the Access course, Maria had two sons at university, although none of her wider family had been before. She took the opportunity offered when her youngest son left home to ‘do something for me for a change’, having ‘the time to devote to myself’. Spending a number of years abroad – the family had returned 11 years earlier – had restricted her personal career plans. Upon returning it ‘took a while for things to settle down’, and her husband was unemployed for a few years, so Maria worked to support the family. Maria ‘would have started the course about ten years earlier’ otherwise, and consequentially be established in a graduate career. She attended Catholic primary and convent schools, an experience she characterised as ‘narrow’. The convent closed when she was 17, before her ‘A’ levels, so Maria’s highest qualifications were ‘O’ levels. She recalls that: Instead of being ‘sensible’ and going off to do another two years elsewhere, I went off to France to be an au pair, so my education effectively stopped (then) … I didn’t have parents that thought a girl needed to be well educated. Maria’s family ‘had no great horizons – you got a job, got married and that was it’. Her parents were ‘very supportive’, and although ‘not ambitious for their children academically’, made financial sacrifices to send Maria to her fee-paying convent school. Using narrative methodology highlights similarities to Fiona’s account, although Maria was from a lower social strata; another fraction of Britain’s complicated class system. Maria’s parents were from ‘very different backgrounds’ to one another – her father ‘a working-class Liverpudlian’, whilst her mother came from ‘a very middle-class background’, having been privately educated herself. Maria considered her parents ‘a very strange mixture’, who ‘wanted me to have a good schooling, but didn’t think past that’. Returning to study improved Maria’s family relationships – she understood her sons’ lives better; she could empathise, rather than just sympathise with challenges they faced: It’s certainly made me understand a bit more about the goings on at university … about university life from [sons’ names] point of view, which has done me good, and my relationships, certainly with my eldest. He’s had his final year this year, it’s been tough, and I’ve appreciated that, whereas possibly I might not have appreciated it quite so much had I not done the year that I have. Before the course Maria had been a secretary. Comparing being a mature student with her working life, she found it far more demanding: When you go to college, the work doesn’t finish there. When you’re doing a nine to five job, at five o’clock when you go home, that’s the end of your day. I used to come

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home and think ‘how I’m going to spend my evening?’ Your day is very different when you’re studying, and you just have to get on with it … You spend the whole year thinking about the work you’ve got to do, it’s never away from you … it’s always there at the back of your mind. Whilst some jobs cannot be left behind upon closing the door at five o’clock, Maria’s comments reveal her changing self-identity from ‘secretary’ to ‘mature student’. Maria identified another ‘personal’ cost of studying in how it limited her activities outside college. An active woman, walking and swimming most days, Maria was also a Cub Scout leader and sang with a local choir. She chose to prioritise these commitments in her reduced ‘free time’, sacrificing other activities including socialising with her husband and friends: There’s no social life because I still ‘do Cubs’ and because I still sing, that has taken precedence, so from that point of view there has been an impact … We do see friends, but [not] so much of them, [though] it’s not the end of the world. I recognised these limitations from my own experience of being a mature postgraduate student with work and family commitments. Maria suggests how she anticipates the sacrifices in her social life are short term, and how she again prioritises commitments to others, albeit those from outside her family. Maria’s career choice reflects this apparent altruism too. She joined the Access to Health pathway, seeking to become an occupational therapist (OT), considering working to help others as something important: This really has a sense of doing something for someone else, which will be nice, a source of satisfaction … that I’m actually doing something useful. Discussing narrative accounts – education as a transformative experience Understanding Fiona

I briefly explained the provenance of Access courses earlier in the chapter; they were established with a commendable social justice agenda (DES 1973, Parry 1996) seeking to widen HE participation to ‘non-traditional’ social groups. Knowing my family’s educational biographies committed me to this wider political project, leading me to teach and research students studying these programmes. They aim to be inclusive, with easy academic entry requirements given their aim of getting people into university within a year. It is a steep learning curve for those with little history of success in formal education, and the less academically capable particularly rely upon a high level of personal support from tutors and fellow students to succeed. This description would

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not apply to Fiona; unique within my wider study, Fiona enjoyed a high degree of academic success throughout and beyond compulsory schooling. In terms of her prior qualifications, ascribed and achieved social class, and to a degree, age, Fiona is an atypical mature student. Narrative accounts from across a two-year timeframe help understand this and explore its implications, my epistemological rationale for employing a biographical methodology. Unlike most Access students, Fiona’s place on the course had not been planned in advance: The Access course was in a sense an accident, but a happy accident, because I planned to do ‘A’ levels. I rang up to ask about doing biology and environmental science ‘A’ levels, in September … I spoke to somebody on the phone who just said ‘have you thought about doing an Access course?’ … and there happened to be an Open Day that day, and I went along, had an interview a couple of days later and started the following week. Despite early challenges associated with studying new, hitherto unconsidered subjects – she said during our first meeting, for example, ‘I’m finding Chemistry fascinating, but I don’t have a “filing system” in my brain that I can fit it into’ – Fiona fared extremely well. She acquired an unheard of maximum possible 28 Level 3 credits, despite needing just 16 to pass the course. An ideal student, Fiona demonstrated what Avis (1997:83–4) referred to as the ‘motivated and committed’ mature student, typical of ‘the preferred and celebratory Access discourse’, albeit it from a highly unorthodox background. Fiona employed her well-honed educational skills, strong learner identity and cultural capital to great effect on the course. As well as seeking to progress to university, Fiona was also a lifelong learner, learning for its own sake, that is, in liberal education, ‘where the process of learning is as important as the outcomes’ (Brine and Waller 2004:101). She was not after career advancement or accumulating academic capital which the dominant policy discourse assumes motivates students. Given her new academic direction, one of Fiona’s friends dubbed her ‘Renaissance Woman’, a tag she enjoyed. She relished studying new subjects, suggesting ‘I didn’t know things worked like that’, and considered herself as ‘somebody who’s been told that the world is really round, when I know it’s flat’. This seismic shift in learning, in her ontological perspective, is reminiscent of Kuhn’s (1996) notion of scientific paradigms. Understanding Maria

The importance of Maria’s family is demonstrated in her narrative accounts. Although it was a theme for everyone I spoke to, Maria spent longer than any other interviewee in the wider study discussing them, usually without prompting. As a woman of a particular age and class background, the ‘wife

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and mother’ role was prioritised over her individual needs – it was her form of ascribed femininity, and this shone through her narrative accounts. Like the gendered class assumptions limiting her educational opportunities at school, Maria’s primary roles as ‘mother and home-maker’ were socially ascribed. She had followed her husband’s job abroad, and had her children overseas. Not working whilst away, Maria commenced paid employment upon returning home as her husband could not find work himself. She was, in Marxist feminist terms (Beechey 1987), her family’s ‘reserve army of labour’, finishing work when her husband found a permanent position. Maria’s career ambitions were unimportant to the family. And, despite wanting to return to formal education ‘for about ten years’, she dutifully waited until her sons left home before seeking self-actualisation at work. Maria’s choice of career reflected traditional gendered caring roles too. Initially seeking ‘something in the health service’, she eventually settled upon OT. For Maria, ‘doing something for someone else’ appealed, putting their needs first, but reviewing again the interview transcripts, it appeared that, like several other female interviewees, she had rarely done anything else! Maria’s career choice is gendered, a caring role often ascribed to women in the UK and wider afield. Her chosen – or ascribed – form of femininity is akin to the ‘community stalwart’ (Brine and Waller 2004), the woman always seeking ‘to give something back’ – not just to her family, the choir or Cub Scout group, but to unknown others through her chosen career. This gendered class identification exists beyond that of the individual (Reay et al. 2002, Reay 2003), and, through her rich narrative accounts, we can see Maria embody this identity. Maria felt her eyes were opened as a result of studying on the course. Such developments are usually organic and evolutionary, not revolutionary or instantaneous. This partly explains why longitudinal research methods were employed here, to explore the process as it occurred. It is similar to taking a series of snapshots over a particular time, of ‘lives in progress’ (Ball et al. 2000), limiting difficulties associated with research participants recalling events with memories ‘coloured or redefined by subsequent experiences’ (Betts 1999:126). Maria’s developing awareness of politics and social affairs came through both the formal curriculum studied and meeting students from a range of backgrounds. The process of Maria’s developing social awareness can be tracked throughout her comments across the period of fieldwork, as illustrated below: I’m beginning to change … It opens up your mind to an awful lot of things that you probably wouldn’t bother thinking about before. First interview Mostly the changes have been having my eyes opened to a different world. No, not so much a different world – because I think the world is the same – but understanding

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more perhaps about how things work … finding out about things which perhaps you just ignored or never really thought about before. Second interview I certainly read a newspaper in a different light. It probably opens your mind to a lot of things that you didn’t bother thinking about before, especially things like sociology … I read a whole article whereas before I might have only read the headline. Third interview I probably think more. There’s a lot of issues that come up that you don’t ever think about, but when you’re presented with them … it’s interesting what you learn, and there’s no doubt about it, you do learn an awful lot. Fourth interview Maria’s account of her deepening social understanding offers insight into a changing personal identity, illustrating the power of biographical research to capture and (re)present this phenomenon. Learning from both the formal curriculum and the wider social, political and economic context of the course contributed to her developing world-view. For example, before the Access programme she knew few people living on state benefits, whilst she now knew people of the ‘type’ she studied in sociology modules on her course. Marion Bowl’s (2003) study of an Access group also includes examples of this, but from the perspective of the disadvantaged student themselves. The subtitle of her powerful book Non-traditional Entrants to Higher Education is an extract from one participant, Selma, a working-class single mother from a minority ethnic group. She said ‘they talk about people like me in Social Policy’, and ‘I feel I’m living social policy rather than just reading it from textbooks’ (p. iiix) (my emphasis). Whilst Maria was not reading about herself in textbooks, her learning was contextualised and understanding strengthened by having people ‘like’ Selma in her class, people from backgrounds she had not encountered intimately before. Maria will become a more empathetic occupational therapist through having her social horizons broadened accordingly. Conclusions: professional and other implications of the research The best narrative and life history research demonstrates how lives are led under the dual influence of social structures and personal agency, and the impact of this intersection shines through Fiona and Maria’s stories. Whitty (2002) likens using micro-research methods to examine social phenomena as looking through the eye of a vulture (see also Waller and Simmons 2009). The vulture’s lens enables it to ‘zoom in’ upon a small area in its field of vision, whilst simultaneously maintaining a coherent image of the wider landscape.

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Using this image we can understand how, for example, Fiona’s experience of limited family support when at school results from dominant social values of the time. Likewise, when reading Maria’s account of always putting others first, we realise she too is acting according to socially expected gender roles. Sparkes’ (2003:3) suggestion that biographical research can ‘illuminate the social context of individual lives’ (my emphasis) is clear within their narratives. Whitty’s image resonates with Wright Mills’ (1959) idea of private troubles highlighting public concerns, demonstrating the value of knowing an individual’s personal history to better understand their social situation. Bourdieu’s extensive writing on this topic (for example, 1984) used Bertaux’s (1981) notion of ‘representativity’ in demonstrating how individual actors carry wider histories and social contexts, including class, habitus and other dispositions, as illustrated by Maria and Fiona. Meanwhile Ferrarotti (1981), also drawing upon Sartre’s (1960) philosophical treatise, highlighted the need to simultaneously comprehend an individual’s narrative and its public context, in ‘a heuristic movement “back and forth” from biography to social system, from social system to biography’ (Ferrarotti 1981:22). The longitudinal, life history methodology adopted in my study enabled an exploration of sensitive issues in the participants’ past, present and anticipated futures, that is ‘the three temporal phases of life’ (Abbs 1974). The intimacy invoked by the approach helped develop the rapport necessary for participants to ‘open up’ and discuss these phases. I told research participants something of my life too, partly to assuage guilty feelings about learning so much about theirs, and partly to encourage frank talking from them. Whilst the interviews gave me a degree of power in regard to my knowledge of the participants, it presented ethical concerns over exploiting their goodwill through ‘doing rapport’ and ‘faking friendship’ (Duncombe and Jessop 2002). I also fretted how to represent their narratives, including ethical considerations over what to reveal and what to leave unsaid. They agreed to participate, and to continue to do so, and were protected by a degree of anonymity, though problems persist with the notion of ‘informed consent’. Could interviewees have predicted the impact of their participation in my project? I knew I intended no harm by my research, but some participants may have had concerns over this, concerns revisited when seeking to update Fiona and Maria’s stories for this chapter. Update Thinking what to write here I decided to contact the two women again, to catch up on events since we last spoke some five years previously. After several attempts I spoke with Fiona by telephone, and she invited me to her house to talk. As we drank coffee in her sunny conservatory, we discussed how our lives had changed since our last meeting. I explained my doctoral research including how I interpreted and represented her narrative accounts, mentioning how she and her peers featured in several academic publications, some of

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which I remembered sending her previously, though without seeking or receiving feedback. I sensed a different power dynamic operating now. Unlike in my project’s data gathering phase I now felt genuinely accountable for my thinking, fearing her saying I had ‘got it all wrong’. What would I do if she did – how would I deal with this? What if Fiona asked me not to write about her again? However, these challenges remained theoretical as she seemed happy with my account. I was pleased to discover she had graduated successfully, narrowly missing a first class degree, and was contemplating further study, possibly even a PhD. She actually cited my research as having inspired her to undertake her own, and I felt proud. Meanwhile, I called Maria’s house but was told that whilst she still owned it, she no longer lived there. Her lodger said she had moved to Cyprus, and I asked him to pass on a message that I would like to speak to her. Again, the power dynamic was unlike before. I felt unable to press for her contact details, or probe as to what she was doing abroad; asking that my email address be passed to Maria seemed the best I could get from her lodger. She did not contact me, and I hope it was because my message was not conveyed, rather than because she rejected the chance to talk. I decided not to challenge that assumption, for instance by calling Maria’s home again or writing to her, though I may send her a copy of this book, to see if that prompts a response, for my own sake rather than for inclusion here. References Abbs, P. (1974) Autobiography in Education, London: Heinemann Educational Books. Avis, J. (1997) ‘“What’s this got to do with what I do!” Contradictory Views: Students in Further Education’, Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 49: 81–106. Ball, S., Maguire, M. and Macrae, S. (2000) Choice, Pathways and Transitions Post-16: New Youth, New Economies in the Global City, London: RoutledgeFalmer. Baxter, A. and Hatt, S. (1999) ‘Old and Young Mature Students: Painting a Fuller Picture’, Journal of Access and Credit Studies, 1: 137–152. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Beechey, V. (1987) Unequal Work, London: Verso. Bertaux, D. (1981) ‘Introduction’, in D. Bertaux (ed.) Biography and Society – the Life History Approach to the Social Sciences, London: Sage. Betts, S. (1999) ‘From Access Through HE: A Gendered Journey’, Journal of Access and Credit Studies, 1: 124–136. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bowl, M. (2003) Non-Traditional Entrants to Higher Education: ‘They Talk about People like Me’, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Brine, J. and Waller, R. (2004) ‘Working-Class Women on an Access Course: Risk, Opportunity and (Re)constructing Identities’, Gender and Education, 16: 97–113. Burke, P. (2002) Accessing Education: Effectively Widening Participation, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Department of Education and Science (DES) (1973) ‘Adult Education: A Plan for Development [Russell Report]’, London: HMSO.

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Department of Education and Science (DES) (1987) Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge, London: HMSO. Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2003) Widening Participation in Higher Education, London: HMSO. Duncombe, J. and Jessop, J. (2002) ‘“Doing Rapport” and the Ethics of “Faking Friendship”’, in M. Mauthner, M. Birch, J. Jessop and T. Miller (eds) Ethics in Qualitative Research, London: Sage. Ferrarotti, F. (1981) ‘On the Autonomy of the Biographical Method’, in D. Bertaux (ed.) Biography and Society – the Life History Approach to the Social Sciences, London: Sage. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Oxford: Polity. Hoggart, R. (1958) The Uses of Literature, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Jackson, B. and Marsden, D. (1962) Education and the Working Class, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kuhn, T. (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd edition), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lawler, S. (2005) ‘Introduction: Class, Culture and Identity’, in Sociology, 39: 797–806. Parry, G. (1996) ‘Access Education in England and Wales, 1973–1994: From Second Chance to Third Wave’, Journal of Access Studies, 11: 10–33. Reay, D. (2003) ‘A Risky Business? Mature Working-Class Women Students and Access to Higher Education’, Gender and Education, 15: 301–317. Reay, D., Ball, S. and David, M. (2002) ‘“It’s Taking Me a Long Time but I’ll Get There in the End”: Mature students on access courses and higher education choice’, British Educational Research Journal, 28: 5–20. Sartre, J.-P. (1960) ‘Questions de Methode, Gallimard’, in D. Bertaux (ed.) (1981) Biography and Society – the Life History Approach to the Social Sciences, London: Sage. Sparkes, A. (2003) ‘Editorial’, Auto/Biography, XI (1 and 2). Wakeford, N. (1994) ‘Becoming a Mature Student: The social risks of identification’, Journal of Access Studies, 9: 241–256. Waller, R. (2006) (Re)constructing Identities: Mature Students Accessing Further and Higher Education, unpublished PhD thesis, UWE Bristol. Waller, R. and Simmons, J. (2009) ‘Vidas a Través de la Lente de un Ojo de Buitre: Interpretando Cuentos de Aprendices’ [‘Lives through the lens of a vulture’s eye: Understanding learners’ tales’] in J.-I. Rivas and D. Herrera (eds) Voz y Educación. La narrativa en la comprensión del sujeto [Voice and Education: Narrative as understanding of the subject], Barcelona: Octaedro. Whitty, G. (2002) Making Sense of Education Policy, London: Paul Chapman. Willmott, P. and Young, M. (1960) Family and Class in a London Suburb, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wright Mills, C. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 6

Interrogating identity and belonging through life history Experiences of overseas nurses in post-colonial Britain Shekar Bheenuck

Departure and arrival – a shared experience In December 1970, aged 18, I left Mauritius and travelled to Britain to train as a nurse. Two years earlier Mauritius had achieved independence from Britain. Postcolonial Mauritius provided limited employment opportunities. Like thousands of young Mauritians, I faced the dilemma of searching for a job. Nurse training in Britain offered an opportunity to obtain a professional qualification. I landed at Heathrow Airport, London, on a cold, damp winter morning. The first step on British soil symbolised my arrival; the encounter with immigration officers confirmed the temporariness of my stay, a reminder of my status as an outsider. A bus journey to Paddington train station was followed by a train journey to Cardiff and then a taxi to the Royal Infirmary. Finding my own way to the training hospital was an experience I shared in common with many student nurses arriving in Britain at the time (Thomas and Williams 1972). I was shown to my room in the nurses’ accommodation. I could not help notice that all the rooms in the building were occupied by male overseas student nurses. Across the road there were other houses reserved for white male and female students. My first experiences in Britain were not unique. Thousands of other overseas student nurses would have made similar journeys to other British destinations and many more would do so throughout the ’70s and ’80s. This chapter explores the life histories of ten of these nurses, three women and seven men who, like me, arrived in Britain as trainee nurses during the 1960s and 1970s. Originating from various parts of the British Empire we are now coming to the end of our working lives. Two of the women are from the West Indies, and the other from Africa. Of the seven men, one is from the Indian subcontinent, two from countries within Africa (the countries of origin have deliberately been left vague to safeguard anonymity of the participants), and four from Mauritius. One of the women was a practising midwife before she retired from service. All of the others are registered mental health nurses. Their lives and sense of ‘selves’, like mine, have been strongly influenced by

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colonialism and experiences of working in the National Health Service (NHS). However, as retirement approaches, work which for many of the nurses provided a sense of fulfilment and of doing something worthwhile, no longer provides the anchorage and security which once gave meaning to our lives and sense of ‘self’; other matters are now becoming more important, in particular, our sense of belonging in Britain. There is little written about our experiences, including the motivating factors that influenced us to leave our countries of birth, at a relatively young age, to work in a service of which we had no knowledge or experience. Our voices have remained mostly silent, our stories waiting to be told (Bheenuck 2005). Exploring lived experiences through life history A life history approach is used to give ‘voice’ to the ten nurses. To listen, interpret and understand the stories there was a need to select a research method that allowed in-depth exploration of their lives. Individuals experience and interpret their lives through narratives, making life history ideal for exploring these experiences (Dhunpath 2000) and for giving ‘voice’ to the marginalised including those whose voices are missing (Denzin 1989, Fontana and Frey 1994, Tierney 1994, Dhunpath 2000). Through narrating their stories individuals develop greater insight into their lives (Mishler 1986, McAdams 1993, Atkinson 1998), identity and history (Sarup 1996). Stories can be a factor in healing and personal growth (McAdams 1993), in enhancing individuals’ self-esteem (Atkinson 1998); allowing lives to be lived more fully (Plummer 2001), leading to deeper insights into future possibilities (Atkinson 1998). Overseas nurses working in the NHS need to have their voices heard and their stories told, for it is in listening to others’ stories that individuals are able fully to understand others’ experiences (Conle 2000, Dhunpath 2000). Stories can become a tool for change, enabling practitioners and managers to reflect on the experiences of others, leading to change in professional practice (Goodson and Sikes 2001) and the hope that ‘… out of dialogue we may build transformative communities of difference’ (Tierney 1994: 112). A number of previous studies (Baxter 1988, Beishon et al. 1995, Carter 1997, Culley and Mayor 2001), exploring the experiences of black and minority ethnic nurses, have focused primarily on the work setting. Whilst it was important to reflect on the nurses’ work experiences, this chapter also focuses on other aspects of their lives. A life history approach enabled these lives to be explored from a broader frame of reference: the push and pull factors in the individuals’ decision to migrate, the challenges they faced on arrival and the adjustments they continue to make as they adapt to life in Britain. More importantly, as retirement looms, the nurses were given an opportunity to talk about life outside work, providing useful insight into their current concerns.

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Searching for a ‘better’ life: looking to the ‘Mother Country’ In 2008 the NHS in Britain celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. For most of its history it has experienced difficulties recruiting professional nurses, and with worsening recruitment problems during the 1960s and 1970s it attempted to deal with the crisis by increasing the number of student nurses in training. Inability to attract sufficient numbers from within the United Kingdom (UK) led the NHS to look overseas to meet the recruitment shortfall. Significant numbers of student nurses were recruited from overseas (Beishon et al. 1995), predominantly from previous British Colonies. Although the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 aimed to limit migration of black and minority ethnic individuals into Britain, it allowed enough flexibility to accommodate labour shortages in industries such as the NHS (Walvin 1984). Students were recruited, under contract, to work in the NHS for a minimum of five years (Ramdin 1999). A lack of reliable data makes it difficult to estimate the actual numbers of black and minority ethnic nurses in the NHS (Culley 2001); however, at the end of 1966, it was estimated that a quarter of all nurses and midwives in training were born outside the UK, with three-quarters coming from countries within the New Commonwealth (Institute of Race Relations 1969). These countries proved a successful source of cheap labour for meeting staffing shortages in the NHS (Baxter 1988, Ramdin 1999). The ten nurses left their homes at a time of great historical and social change. Prospects of unemployment at home and the promise of a better future in Britain were important factors in choosing to travel to Britain. Victor was born in Mauritius and is one of seven children. His father was a labourer and his mother a housewife. A common theme within his story is the economic hardship the family faced, a theme revisited several times during the series of interviews. Financial constraints at home meant he could not continue his education and was unsuccessful in finding employment: ‘There seemed to be no hope with high unemployment and economic climate worsening. I decided to apply for nurse training in the United Kingdom.’ Bill was born into a Christian family, within a country in the Asian subcontinent. His parents were both teachers and he is one of six children although two died in early childhood. Despite both parents being in paid employment he talks of the hardship faced by the family. The financial difficulties worsened when his mother died and his father retired; he was 16 at the time: ‘I didn’t have as many clothes as I used to have, because we just could not afford them.’ On completing his secondary education he could not continue his studies as the financial costs were prohibitive. With employment prospects limited he looked to nursing in Britain as an option: ‘I knew there was no choice … maybe there were other choices but we never explored them.’ James, Richard, Tom and John, from Mauritius, also talked about financial difficulties faced by their parents. All four talked about having to work hard

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outside school hours to assist their families, and spoke of the difficulties of finding employment on leaving school. Prior to coming to Britain, James drove a van delivering cakes to hotels and restaurants. John described having a job doing ‘road works’, although he would not elaborate what this entailed. Tom found a post in the sugar industry but with no career opportunities he chose nursing, in Britain, as an option. Although poverty is a significant factor in migration (Soguk 2000) for the three women this does not appear to have been a significant issue in their decision to leave. Lisa, from Trinidad, describes having a job with ‘good opportunities’ but decided to leave to move away from a ‘domineering’ mother. Mary, from an African–Asian family, wanted to leave Africa to follow her brother to England, and Kathy’s decision was influenced by the fact that she did not have the qualifications to study nursing in Jamaica. Nine out of the ten nurses in this study did not choose a career in nursing because of their desire to nurse, only Kathy, a midwife, indicated an interest in nursing at an early age. For all ten nurses, however, there was a perception that nursing in Britain would provide them with opportunities not available in their own country. Inability to meet one’s goals and aspirations is a common factor in migration decisions (Eisenstadt 1976). Experiences of the nurses support the notion that the pressure for migration arises in both sending and receiving countries (Coleman 1996, Castles 2000), often a result of economic disparities between developed and developing countries (Sivanandan 1987, Parnwell 1993, Castles 2004). The effects of colonisation continue to be felt in many previous colonies and according to Said: … it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts. (Said 1993: 403) Making compromises – early experiences of nursing On arrival the nurses found little initial support from employing hospitals to help them settle; socialisation of new arrivals was often left to other students (Thomas and Williams 1972). Victor’s adjustment to life in Britain was facilitated by other students from overseas, aided by the fact that overseas students were housed in one hospital accommodation block. Bill recalls his early experiences: I didn’t know the culture, I didn’t know the etiquette, I felt that whatever I did didn’t seem to fit in with what the other people, the white people did … One of the

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things that it did was to restrict my friendship only with people from either Mauritius or from other countries, where people were black you know. Even when in the ‘nurses’ home’, he felt uncomfortable to use the kitchen to cook his meals, embarrassed by the fact that his food would be different to what others would be cooking. With no perceived sources of support he spent most of his time in his room: ‘Nobody came and said how are you today, are you ok, are you eating well, are you sleeping well, you know … Nobody talks to you.’ Paul, a Muslim from Africa, talks of similar experiences. Although he was allocated hospital accommodation, there was no one to welcome him; he was left to fend for himself: I sat in my room and cried for days … The local priest came and he used to come and take some of us out. So, for the first time in my life, I had to go to church not because I am a Christian but he would take you to church and so people spoke to you. James provides a further perspective on these early experiences: ‘It was hard to make friends. I had some Mauritian friends … we felt more relaxed with those people you know and who come from the same country … It’s natural.’ Although all ten individuals travelled to Britain to train as nurses they were unaware of the distinction between the two-year pupil nurse and the three-year student nurse training programmes. The latter led to registered nurse status, a qualification which was transferable to other parts of the world. The former led to an enrolled nurse qualification which offered limited career prospects but more significantly, as it was not recognised outside Britain, it would have been of little use to those nurses choosing to return home after training. Completing the pupil nurse training and subsequently completing the student nurse programme would have taken most individuals five years or more before achieving registration. During the 1960s and 1970s significant numbers of overseas nurses trained as pupil nurses (Baxter 1988, Carter 1997, Ramdin 1999), although many were expecting to undertake student nurse training (Thomas and Williams 1972). Victor accepted an offer of pupil nurse training, unaware of the student nurse programme. Although he met entry criteria for the latter he was not allowed to transfer. He points to five other Mauritians who were on his course despite all meeting the criteria for student nurse training. On completing the course they were not offered the opportunity to train as student nurses at the same hospital. Victor appears bitter about these early experiences: ‘I feel angry at being abused … we met our requirements for registered nurse training and we felt maybe we were conned.’ Bill, although offered a place on the student nurse programme, transferred to the pupil nurse course after a meeting with a teacher who felt his command of English was poor. He cannot recall being offered any support or help to improve his English, relying instead on a colleague from Trinidad.

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Two other individuals talk about their experiences as pupil nurses. James, the student from Mauritius, states there was a delay of six months before the start of the student nurse course and he was therefore encouraged by the education team to start pupil nurse training. Lisa, from Trinidad, also started the pupil nurse programme despite meeting requirements for student nurse training. She was advised to do so by the course tutor who stated that it was ‘best for her’ without explaining this decision further. All four individuals on the pupil nurse programme indicated that they were reluctant to challenge the situation too strongly. There was a perception they had to be grateful for what they were offered and, as with previous studies (Beishon et al. 1995, Carter 1997), they found it difficult to take their complaints to management. Achievements and frustrations – building a nursing career Once Victor achieved registered nurse status, opportunities were available to him to progress and he sees his current post as a senior manager as the pinnacle of his career. Bill is less positive, feeling his career has been hampered by racism and discrimination. He has not applied for another job during the past five years because of his experiences of not being offered posts in the past. He was not successful in a recent application and felt managers could not offer concrete reasons for his non-appointment. Reflecting on his disappointments he adds: ‘I got so pissed off. I thought I will never apply for jobs again. I don’t know why I did this time, you know, and I won’t. From now on I will not apply for jobs again.’ His inability to be promoted, he feels, is due to discriminatory practices within the service: ‘… they would rather have one of their own in there with them … Why should they want to bring a black face amongst themselves, it does make sense.’ Bill’s experiences are not unique, a number of other individuals refer to disappointments when applying for posts. John points to the large number of Mauritian nurses employed within the hospital where he works indicating that none is above charge nurse level. As a ward manager he feels he has reached the top of his career. The perception of having reached a ceiling beyond which one cannot progress is shared by most of the nurses in this study, although they could not explain the reasons for this. Mary, in explaining her disappointments, states: ‘I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it. It’s just that feeling you get that you know the reason you didn’t get the job is because of who you are.’ Paul talks about having reached a ‘ceiling’ in his career beyond which he is reluctant to progress: ‘sometimes I had a fear that if I aspired too strongly, some people might take that negatively.’ Tom points to younger and less experienced nurses being promoted above overseas nurses. His experiences have left him in a pessimistic frame of mind. He feels senior posts were only reserved for white nurses. Referring to senior posts in the hospital he adds: ‘I think I was

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one of the last Mauritians to try to get on the ladder … this has been a mainly white area in this hospital.’ Kathy also talks about less experienced nurses being appointed to senior posts: ‘Very few hospitals I went to you would find a black person in charge, they wouldn’t promote you … It was something you just had to put up with or leave.’ It is difficult to determine the degree to which the experiences of these nurses were influenced by discriminatory practices within the NHS. Their experiences, however, are not unusual. Other researchers (Beishon et al. 1995, Baxter 1998, Carter 2000) have found that black and minority ethnic nurses are disadvantaged throughout their career; with few willing to formally address their grievances (Culley and Mayor 2001). In their survey of nurses working in the NHS, Beishon et al. (1995) found that black and minority ethnic nurses were under-represented in senior grades, with a quarter of those surveyed believing they had been denied opportunities because of their colour. Carter concludes ‘… the evidence that ethnicity remains a powerful concept in shaping the careers and life chances of nurses within the NHS is irrefutable’ (Carter 2000: 82). Fitting in – life outside hospitals For migrants, one of the challenges is how easily they would be assimilated in the host society (Kymlicka 2001). A number of the nurses talked about specific difficulties encountered during their early days in Britain. The adjustments they continue to make, both in and outside work, are testimony to the fact that, for the migrant, acculturation is a process of continuous negotiation. The process of ‘fitting in’ and being ‘accepted’ has not been an easy experience for many of the nurses. Victor states that his experiences of feeling different can be traced to his early days in Liverpool. He refers to specific incidents which appear to have shaped his sense of ‘belonging’ in Britain, recalling an early experience on a bus when a passenger shouted: ‘you bloody paki, go home’. He states that it was the first time that he was made to feel different. He refers to another incident where his friend was physically assaulted by a group of youths and was left badly injured: ‘I was very frightened, I wouldn’t go on the bus in the evening … there was a lot of other places I wouldn’t go.’ Other nurses provide similar accounts. For John, fear of violence still impacts on his life and he avoids going out on his own at night; if he has to, it is always in the company of friends: ‘There was some conscious fear that if you went out you might be beaten up.’ Paul, a nurse from Africa, talks of similar fears and tends to avoid certain situations: ‘I have never been to a football match in England … because I am afraid … I don’t go to pubs regularly, because I am afraid. I choose carefully where I go.’ He feels that his length of stay in Britain has not resulted in him being totally accepted by the wider community: ‘There are factors that make it much more difficult for people to accept people from a particular cultural group.’

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As an African–Asian, Mary talks of her early experiences on trains where white people would change seats if she sat next to them. Like Victor she recalls an occasion when she was referred to as a ‘paki’ and explains her feelings at the time: ‘We are not from Pakistan, how can they call us “pakis”? … you could sense that you were treated differently.’ For many migrants such a label was assigned to them on arrival in Britain (Rattansi 2000). People from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, he argues were ‘… forced to recognise their “Asianness” and – more rudely and abusively – their “Pakiness” …’ (Rattansi 2000: 128). Application of racial labels has social and psychological consequences for the individuals concerned, helping to shape their experiences and sense of self (Appiah 2000). Kathy also provides examples of incidents in her early life which continue to shape her experiences. She refers to an incident in London where she was refused a room because of her ethnicity: ‘I went to the desk and they said no, we don’t cater for the likes of you.’ Victor feels anxious about the future and his place in Britain. He feels that recent media coverage of asylum seekers has generated anti-immigrant feelings amongst the indigenous population. He feels comments about asylum seekers are also directed at him and is convinced he will never be totally accepted by the wider community: ‘I see myself as a foreigner and I am being classed as a foreigner.’ Bill on the other hand feels much more at ease in Britain. He feels Britain is more tolerant of his religious beliefs. He attends the local church and is made welcome and feels part of the community. His negative experiences at work are quite different from his experiences within the wider community. Richard also appears to have settled in quite well in Britain. He left home after a disagreement with his father and did not return for several years. In Britain he feels more at ease and able to pursue his ambition without interference from his parents. However, Bill’s and Richard’s experiences are quite different from the other individuals in this study. James states that he finds it difficult to be part of British society because of his culture and beliefs. Although he gets on well with his neighbours, he would not see them as friends. He has few friends and his life revolves around his wife and son: ‘You are more careful when you are making friends. You try to make friends with people you feel more confident with.’ John also has a small circle of friends, all Mauritians. He feels a strong need to keep in touch with Mauritian culture: ‘It is something you are born with and this is precious to me. It’s like a magnet and I don’t want to lose that.’ Mary’s friends are mainly from the Asian community. She feels a strong need to preserve her culture and religion, and feels quite content within the social circle of her Asian friends. Tom also talks about having a small circle of friends and like John they are all Mauritians. He states that when he is with his Mauritian friends he does not feel a stranger. Tom’s and John’s decisions to restrict their friends to Mauritians appear to provide a sense of stability in their lives. Paul also

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has a small group of friends. He has found it difficult to develop a wider circle of friends because of work and his studies. He also found it difficult to meet many African Muslims. He appears slightly unsure as to who he is: ‘I don’t quite know which cultural background to identify with.’ He feels that he has had to adapt to British society which has impacted negatively on his personality: Normally I would have been quite gregarious, talked freely and interact with more people, but I find that I am having to interact less because that is what, maybe rightly or wrongly, I believe society expects of me … You are afraid of being rejected. The pressure placed on migrants to assimilate is counterproductive in situations where significant racial discrimination exists (Modood 1992). The assimilation model, according to Nagel (2002), is based on the false assumption that migrants can be easily integrated within the dominant society. Hence, the assimilationist model continues to marginalise minority groups in a culture where they are seen as inferior (Rex 1997). For many black people in Britain, belonging to a British culture is problematic as ‘… the British love of playing fair does not currently include recognising the possibility that blacks can belong’ (Gilroy 2001: 160). Negotiating identities: making compromises During one of the interviews Victor spoke of his Mauritian friend, whom he refers to as Jason. Jason is an unusual name for a Mauritian and when questioned about this he stated that it was common for overseas nurses to change their names and adopt ones closer to the norm in Britain: ‘When I came here most Mauritian guys had an English name … when I asked they said “oh, yes, that’s common practice” … because they feel our names are too difficult to pronounce.’ He talks about having to change his name; his wife, a Mauritian, also adopted a Christian name: ‘I don’t think I should have changed my name … I think I probably accepted it too easily, too readily.’ Tom and John also talk about adopting a different name. Changing one’s name or shortening it to something simpler appears to be a common experience of overseas nurses. Although the name was not imposed on them there was an expectation that they should choose a new one. Many nurses continue to be addressed by their adopted name, finding it difficult to revert to their original one. Young (2000) refers to cultural imperialism as a form of oppression experienced by subordinate groups within a dominant culture. In such situations, the individual instead of being recognised for what she is, ‘… receives from the dominant culture only the judgement that she is different, marked, or inferior’ (Young 2000: 45). It could be argued, from Young’s perspective, that in changing their names,

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overseas nurses were to some degree indirectly being stripped of their identity and invested with one deemed acceptable to white colleagues. In unequal relationships subordinate groups often make compromises as they attempt to cope and adapt (Tatum 2000). Bill, on the other hand, feels that coming to Britain has enabled him to identify more closely with British culture. He feels a strong sense of belonging in Britain; however, his views are not shared by others. James points to feeling a stranger in Britain despite the years he has spent here. He feels that preserving his Mauritian identity provides him with a sense of belonging to his country of birth. In the post-colonial world experiences of displacement and dislocation contribute to a crisis of identity (Ashcroft et al. 1989). For the migrant, identity is an unfinished project (Sarup 1996), always in the process of negotiation (Goodson and Sikes 2001). Paul refers to the difficulties and adjustment he continues to make: Sometimes I feel I don’t have an identity. I am not sure what identity I possess because on one hand the black African … then there is my own Muslim community. When I go home they claim I don’t behave like I should. So I don’t quite belong and when I am in England, of course, I don’t feel I belong in England at all. Paul feels his experiences of being between two worlds have impacted on his identity: I think identity and culture kind of mutate … so it’s kind of an amalgam of the two cultures but never being either. So I have never fully integrated and become English … it may be that you have concocted a new identity which is different with bits of the two but never the same, that’s what I found. Paul’s experiences appear to relate closely to what Bhabha (1994) and Anthias (2001) describe as a ‘hybrid’ identity, one that is shaped by the experiences of colonialism. It manifests itself in terms of an individual having a sense of existing between two cultures and not quite belonging to either. A number of the nurses refer to experiences of ‘multiple belonging’, a feeling of being ‘… a mimic subject: not quite, not white’ (Ahmed 1999: 97). ‘Cultural hybridity’ refers to the adjustments black individuals have to make in a society that appears hostile (Rassool 1996). According to Papastergiadis (2000) the migrant’s identity is constructed in the ‘third space’, a zone located between what is known and what is unfamiliar. For many of the nurses, adapting to life in Britain has meant making compromises, particularly concerning aspects of their social and cultural lives. For many, after more than 30 years in Britain, there is a feeling that they no longer belong to the society they left behind or totally to the host one. What appears to emerge is an individual identity which is different, shaped by past and current experiences.

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Lessons from life history This chapter has primarily been about the experiences of overseas nurses as migrants to Britain. Their experiences as migrants and nurses continue to impact on all aspects of their lives. Their stories provide testimony to the experiences of thousands of overseas nurses who made similar journeys. Although most of the nurses continue to enjoy working in the NHS, for many there is a perception that the profession has not adequately acknowledged the contributions they have made and continue to make. The difficulties they encountered in the early years in terms of economic hardship, adapting to a new culture, perceived impediments to career development, and continuing experiences of discrimination and racism are some of the issues, they feel, the profession has yet to recognise. According to Larson ‘… knowledge is produced through the social process of questioning and exchanging views’ (Larson 1997: 458). Bringing to the attention of others the experiences of those marginalised should be undertaken from the premise that change is possible in both the subordinate and dominant groups (Tierney 2000). Tierney suggests that the aim: … is not simply to bring to light the mangled and distorted histories of the subaltern, but to claim that the present and future must be different, that not only is the subaltern able to act in a different manner by claiming voice, but that the dominant must readjust the ways they have interpreted and lived in the world. (Tierney 2000: 106) Most of the ten nurses in this study left their country of birth over 30 years ago, leaving behind parents, siblings and relatives in search of a home in a foreign land. Listening to the stories of these nurses provided an opportunity to understand the reasons for and the consequences of the decisions they made. The nurses’ stories provide an alternative account of a significant episode in the history of British nursing. Little attention or opportunity has been given to listening to their version of history. Personal reflections Listening to the nurses’ stories has been personally rewarding, in the sense that Mason describes: ‘… in those few brief moments when we feel we have participated in an informed choice, when we have acted freshly and appropriately, there is a sense of freedom, of meaning, of worthwhileness and self-esteem’ (Mason 2002: 8). There is a feeling of having travelled along a long and complex path, recalling distant memories on the way. My ethnicity and shared history with the participants, to some extent, provided me with an ‘insider’ status; but as an academic I was also perceived as an ‘outsider’. The researcher’s position as ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ can affect the research

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process (Bhopal 2001). Like Bhopal I did feel like an intruder when listening to the experiences of the nurses, whilst at the same time recognising that my ethnicity provided a sense of ‘empathy’ and ‘belonging’ with the respondents. There is feeling of admiration for all the nurses. Despite the negative experiences there was an overwhelming feeling of having enjoyed working in the NHS and several of the nurses indicated a willingness to continue working part time in the service after retirement. At the end of their working lives, for most of the nurses, such issues as identity, sense of self, notion of home and belongingness are matters that they continue to wrestle with. Listening to these stories has made me more aware that these are also important issues for me. Larson (1997) refers to reflecting on her own stories and experiences as climbing an enormous oak tree than walking along a neatly paved path. Listening to the stories enabled me to look at important aspects of my own life. Painful memories of departure, separation and loneliness in the early years are shared with many of the nurses. At the same time I also recognise in their stories pleasant memories of marriage, the arrival of children and career successes. In listening to the nurses there is a realisation that it is the similarities in the stories and experiences that provide the threads of a common bond among overseas nurses. Stories of migration and travel, living and working in Britain, difficulties and successes encountered are the experiences overseas nurses share. For me, and for thousands of overseas nurses who have worked in the NHS, including those who continue to do so, these stories are a reminder of what we all have in common. References Ahmed, S. (1999) ‘She’ll Wake Up one of these Days and Find She’s Turned into a Nigger’. Passing through Hybridity. Theory, Culture and Society, 16(2): 87–106. Anthias, F. (2001) ‘New Hybridities, Old Concepts: the Limits of “Culture”’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24(4): 619–641. Appiah, A.K. (2000) ‘Racial Identity and Racial Identification’, in L. Back and J. Solomos (eds) Theories of Race and Racism. A Reader. London: Routledge, 559–615. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, London: Routledge. Atkinson, R. (1998) The Life Story Interview, London: Sage. Baxter, C. (1988) The Black Nurse: an Endangered Species. A Case for Equal Opportunities in Nursing, Cambridge: National Extension College. Beishon, S., Virdee, S. and Hagell, A. (1995) Nursing in Multi-Ethnic NHS, London: Policy Studies Institute. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bheenuck, S. (2005) Lives and Experiences of Overseas Nurses Working in the British National Health Service, unpublished thesis, University of the West of England, Bristol. Bhopal, K. (2001) ‘Researching South Asian Women: Issues of Sameness and Difference in the Research Process’, Journal of Gender Studies, 10(3): 279–286.

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Carter, J. (1997) Ethnicity, Equality and the Nursing Profession, PhD thesis, University of Bristol. Carter, J. (2000) ‘New Public Management and Equal Opportunities in the NHS’, Critical Social Policy, 20(1): 61–83. Castles, S. (2000) ‘International Migration at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century: Global Trends and Issues’, International Social Science Journal, 52(165): 269–281. Castles, S. (2004) ‘Why Migration Policies Fail’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27(2): 205–227. Coleman, D.A. (1996) ‘UK Immigration Policy: “Firm but Fair”, and Failing?’ Policy Studies, 17(3): 195–214. Conle, C. (2000) ‘Narrative Inquiry: Research Tool and Medium for Professional Development’, European Journal of Teacher Education, 23(1): 49–63. Culley, L. (2001) ‘Equal Opportunities Policies and Nursing Employment within the British National Health Service’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 33(1): 130–137. Culley, L. and Mayor, V. (2001) ‘Ethnicity and Nursing Careers’, in L. Culley. and S. Dyson (eds) Ethnicity and Nursing Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 211–230. Denzin, N.K. (1989) Interpretive Interactionism, London: Sage. Dhunpath, R. (2000) ‘Life History Methodology: “Narradigm” Regained’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(5): 543–551. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1976) ‘The Absorption of Immigrants’ in G. Bowker and J. Carrier (eds) Race and Ethnic Relations. Sociological Readings, London: Hutchinson, 41–47. Fontana, A. and Frey, J.H. (1994) ‘Interviewing. The Art of Science’, in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln. (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research. London: Sage, 361–376. Gilroy, P. (2001) ‘Joined-up Politics and Postcolonial Melancholia’, Theory, Culture and Society, 18(2–3): 151–167. Goodson, I.F. and Sikes, P. (2001) Life History Research in Educational Settings. Learning from Lives. Buckingham: Open University Press. Institute of Race Relations (1969) Colour and Immigration in the United Kingdom 1969, London: Institute of Race Relations. Kymlicka, W. (2001) ‘Multicultural Citizenship’, in S. Siedman. and J.C. Alexander (eds) The New Social Reader. Contemporary Debates. London: Routledge, 212–222. Larson, C.L. (1997) ‘Re-presenting the Subject: Problems in Personal Narrative Inquiry’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(4): 455–470. Mason, J. (2002) Researching Your Own Practice. The Discipline of Noticing. London: Routledge. McAdams, D.P. (1993) Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. New York: Guildford Press. Mishler, E.G. (1986) Research Interviewing. Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Modood, T. (1992) Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship. London: Runnymede Trust and Trentham. Nagel, C.R. (2002) ‘Geopolitics by another Name: Immigration and the Politics of Assimilation’, Political Geography, 21(8): 971–987. Papastergiadis, N. (2000) The Turbulence of Migration. Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Oxford: Polity Press. Parnwell, M. (1993) Population Movements and the Third World. London: Routledge. Plummer, K. (2001) Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to Critical Humanism. London: Sage. Ramdin, R. (1999) Reimaging Britain: Five Hundred Years of Black and Asian History. London: Pluto. Rassool, N. (1996) ‘Fractured or Flexible Identities? Life Histories of “Black” Diasporic Women in Britain’, in H.S. Mirza (ed.) Black British Feminism. A Reader. London: Routledge, 187–203.

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Rattansi, A. (2000) ‘On Being and not Being Brown/Black-British. Racism, Class, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Post-imperial Britain’, Interventions, 2(1): 118–134. Rex, J. (1997) ‘The Nature of Ethnicity in the Project of Migration’ in M. Guibernau and J. Rex (eds) The Ethnicity Reader. Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Migration. Cambridge: Polity Press, 269–283. Said, E.W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto Windus. Sarup, M. (1996) Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sivanandan, A. (1987) A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance, London: Pluto Press. Soguk, N. (2000) ‘Poetics of a World of Migrancy: Migratory Horizons, Passages, and Encounters of Alterity’, Global Society, 14(3): 415–442. Tatum, B. D. (2000) ‘The Complexity of Identity: “Who Am I?”’ in M. Adams, W.J. Blumenfeld, R. Castaneda, H.W. Hackman, M.L. Peters and X. Zuniga (eds) Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, New York: Routledge, 9–14. Thomas, M. and Williams, J.M. (1972) Overseas Nurses in Britain: A PEP Survey for the United Kingdom Council for Overseas Student Affairs. Broadsheet 539. London: Political and Economic Planning. Tierney, W. (2000) ‘Beyond translation: Truth and Rigoberta Menchu’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(2): 103–113. Tierney, W.G. (1994) ‘On Method And Hope’, in A. Gitlin (ed.) Power and Method. Political Activism and Educational Research, New York: Routledge, 97–115. Walvin, J. (1984) ‘Passage to Britain’, Immigration in British History and Politics. Middlesex: Penguin Books in association with Belitha Press. Young, I.M. (2000) ‘Five Faces of Oppression’, in M. Adams, W.J. Blumenfeld, R. Castaneda, H.W. Peters and X. Zuniga (eds) Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, New York: Routledge.

Chapter 7

Researching learning in and out of school A narradigmatic approach Jane Andrews

Introduction: multilayered stories of learning in and out of school Bruner (1987) proposed that as human beings we construct ourselves autobiographically and he asked us to give no less importance to narratives than we do to other representations of experience. Dhunpath (2000) proposes a new paradigm for research in education with the increasing use of narrative approaches and names this a ‘narradigm’. In this chapter I draw on a child’s and a mother’s narratives of learning to explore experiences of learning mathematics in and out of school in the context of a minority ethnic, multilingual family in a UK city. Part of this piece of research involves an interweaving of my own story as a researcher investigating others’ learning lives, as I acknowledge Squire’s (2008:16) observation that stories emerge from interactions between storyteller and listener and researcher and research participant. I also acknowledge Kohler Riessman’s (2005) attention to the value of the researcher’s reflections on the processes involved in engaging in narrative research; following in her footsteps, part of my goal here is to produce a ‘narrative about narrative research’. In the chapter Saqib, his mother Farah and myself are not the only narrators, however. This layering effect is added to by the fact that the research was conducted within a multilingual home (Punjabi and English were used) and I collaborated with a community interpreter whose perspectives on the research contributed to the narrative-laden accounts generated. My focus in the chapter is therefore to explore both the insights into learning provided in the stories of Saqib and his mother Farah and also to consider the processes involved in producing the narratives which all four of us created. The urge to recount our life stories is a strong one and it manifested itself in the stories of learning experiences which are explored in this chapter. The stories were elicited as part of a large Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) funded research project looking at Home–School Knowledge Exchange in primary education in two cities, one in England and one in Wales. The project extended over a

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period of three years and had as its goal to explore children’s learning lives at home and at school and to explore the extent to which these two worlds might be brought closer together to the overall benefit of children’s learning (Hughes 2002). The project focused on literacy, mathematics and the transfer from primary to secondary school, reflecting concerns within primary education at the time of the project design in the two policy contexts of England and Wales. The project team was large and our collaboration brought together teachers, children, parents, teacher–researchers, and university researchers (see acknowledgements at the end of this chapter). Only a small part of the data gathered in the project is explored here for the reason that each research encounter provided rich opportunities for exploring learning stories and I chose to focus on a family I got to know over a period of two years. In the broader project multiple methods were used for gathering data and methods and findings are reported elsewhere, e.g. Hughes and Pollard (2005), Greenhough and Feiler (2005), Feiler et al. (2007) and Winter et al. (2009). Further background to the Home–School Knowledge Exchange project (HSKE) is given here to provide contextual information to explain the initial motivation to engage with children and their families about their learning in the way explained in this chapter. The research used methods such as case study, semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, participant-produced videos and testing of attainment and disposition. There were two project teams: a group of ‘teacher–researchers’ who worked closely with schools within a loose action research paradigm to develop activities bringing school life and home life closer together. The second team consisted of educational researchers whose work involved quantitative and qualitative studies of learning and perceptions of learning on the part of teachers, children and parents. It is a case study of one child and his family carried out by me (a member of the researcher team) that forms the basis for this chapter. Unlike the already cited works which report the HSKE project in terms of substantive and methodological findings for the academic and teaching communities, this chapter provides a personal reflection on my experience of researching home–school knowledge exchange and learning and the opportunities it provided for me to engage with notions of power and identity in learning and researching in one family’s home. As such there may be aspects of out-of-school learning from the case study reported which are being newly reported here and other aspects may have been written about and discussed in previously published sources. Researchers and identities In her exploration of the definition of narrative Elliott (2005: 4) identifies that narratives, as well as being chronological and meaningful representations of events, are recounted in a social context for an audience. The understanding then of who the audience is or are is important and raises questions of

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researcher roles and identities. The question of how I negotiated my positionality as a researcher in this study of learning out of school connects with other researchers’ considerations of researcher roles and identities both in the field of study and in written accounts of research. As a researcher I asked myself how I should present myself to research participants and as a writer I reflected on how to report the richness of the interactions within the home setting and where my impressions of those encounters belonged within the accounts I have generated for personal and a more public readership. Examples of other researchers’ work that have stimulated my reflections in this area include Crozier (2003) who discusses being a white, middle-class female and a parent of a mixed race child investigating black parents’ views of their children’s education. Crozier questions the rights of researchers to explore their participants’ lives and experiences and considers the responsibilities of researchers in representing others’ lives in their writings. Frankham (2001) gives consideration in her research into young gay people’s stories of coming out, to her position as a heterosexual female, albeit one with insights into so-called marginalised experience. Within the research accounts I present here, my identities as a parent, as a former teacher, as a university researcher, as a white female, emerged for me as factors framing issues being studied as well as ethical issues. Questions I asked myself at various stages of the research process, that is to say during interviews, while reading through transcripts, reflecting on encounters and writing about the encounters included: • • • •

How do we perceive each other? Which of our multiple identities are we foregrounding? Why are we telling each other these stories? How are our perceptions of the encounters shaping what we are telling each other?

While I primarily engaged with Saqib and Farah about issues relating to the learning of mathematics (due to the focus of this part of the HSKE project) and learning in and out of school in general, the question of how each of us constructed ourselves emerges as influential on the stories told. Similarly the role taken by the community interpreter as an additional participant within the research demands consideration in terms of her influence on the stories generated, in particular linguistically. Her answers to the questions above present themselves as important in addition to my own and the research participants’ responses. The opportunities for varying identities to be explored and displayed when research encounters take place is an area I have explored elsewhere with a co-researcher (Yee and Andrews 2006). In that paper we propose that the location of a research encounter can shape interactions within it and in our research on the HSKE project the home environment played a distinctive role in this shaping, according to our perceptions. Researchers’ impact on data

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and their research participants, in particular when the research takes place in an authentic setting such as the home, is explored in the work of other writers. Shah (2004) discusses the ways in which an interviewer may be conceptualised as an intercultural intruder by their intervention within a specific setting in order to engage with their research participants by asking questions which may involve interactions crossing unseen cultural boundaries. In the case of the HSKE project all homes could be seen to have their own cultural characteristics or to be ‘small cultures’ in the sense defined in the applied linguistics literature by Holliday (1999) thus having their own norms which may not be apparent or familiar to the researcher. Heath (1983) has also had a particular effect on my reflections of working on the HSKE project by her observations of the effects a researcher may have on their research participants in a particular setting as she expresses below: Every anthropologist involved in long term fieldwork has to recognise that his presence affects in some ways the on-going stream of behaviour of those with whom he has a long term association. (Heath 1983: 357) Bearing in mind these influences, when I explore Saqib’s and Farah’s stories of out-of-school learning I will take the opportunity to reflect on myself as an intercultural intruder and the cultural specificities of the home setting. Eliciting Saqib’s and Farah’s learning stories In this section I present a case study of Saqib, a child in Year 5 (9–10 years) at a UK primary school and his mother, Farah. The relationship between me and the family developed over a period of two years. As already stated Saqib appears in previous accounts of the HSKE project (see e.g. Andrews et al. 2005, Winter et al. 2009). Here, in addition, Farah’s educational story is explored as a way of understanding Saqib’s learning experiences both in and out of school. Saqib was in Year 5 (aged 10) at the beginning of the period of study and the focus of the study was his engagement in mathematics both in and out of school. I am drawing on conversations I had with Saqib and Farah and the other children in their home. A layer of complexity to these interactions and relationships was provided by the presence at my invitation of a city councilemployed interpreter who facilitated interactions between me as an English-speaking researcher and Saqib’s mother Farah whose preferred language of communication was Punjabi. The literature on educational research methods has grappled with the impact and position of interpreters on data gathered and following Temple and Edwards (2002) I recognised the interpreter as part of my research process rather than denying her impact on the research stories generated. Social researchers in areas outside education have also explored issues and challenges in cross-linguistic research, e.g. Bradby’s

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(2002) work in health with Punjabi speakers in Scotland. Some of Bradby’s issues such as the ways in which terms and concepts translate between different languages were relevant in the HSKE study but will not be explored in depth here. A word is needed about the various sources of data I reflect on and quote from in this chapter. A further word is also needed on the languages used within the interactions and texts produced as part of this research. The extracts explored in my account include audio recorded interaction which has been transcribed. In addition, I refer to a text written up by me shortly after each visit to Saqib’s home and to his school which was produced for the research team in order to feed into thinking and discussion of learning in and out of school, and I refer to this source as my field notes. I use the field notes together with transcribed interaction to build the narrative account here. Discussions about the research encounters between me and the community interpreter written up as field notes are also drawn upon in this chapter as they contributed to the research stories presented here. The interviews which took place within the home of Saqib and Farah could be said to have emerged from what Squire (2008: 16) refers to as ‘story-eliciting questions’. These questions were open in nature given that I as the interviewer (speaking to Farah via an interpreter) did not know the answers to the questions I was asking. This meant that I was not, as Squire (2008: 30) terms it, eliciting ‘obvious’ stories and thus risking ‘skewing’ the data I gathered by applying a bias towards certain aspects of experience. Where’s the beginning of the story? The story of my encounters with Saqib and Farah needs a prologue in that contact with the family was not as straightforward as had been the case in my research encounters with other families in the HSKE project. My field notes reported my experience and reflections: My early contacts with this family were via the telephone and involved leaving my desk to use a public telephone box elsewhere in the building as the family telephone number would not accept ‘anonymous’ calls i.e. from phone numbers which could not be traced. My first thoughts were whether this could have been due to the family’s experience of racism. In order to develop my strategy in contacting Saqib and his family, who had, via his school teacher, indicated their willingness to participate in the project prior to my contacts, I consulted the class teacher to ask for her advice at a practical level. This seemed to me at the time to be a valuable move given that she shared the linguistic and cultural heritage of Saqib’s family and might, given that I did not share these background factors, have additional insights. This did emerge to be the case, however it was in an unanticipated

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way. The class teacher (whose beliefs about learning in and out of school were explored in Andrews et al. 2005) gave her advice which added a new perspective to my understanding of Saqib and his family. Saqib’s family, in the view of his class teacher, were not as supportive of him and his education as she would have wished them to be. She concluded that when contacting the family this school-oriented agenda regarding Saqib’s learning could be brought up in addition. The class teacher’s own professional agenda seemed at odds with my purpose as a researcher into learning. The potential pitfalls of my aligning myself with the school through the well-meaning goals of the teacher were stark at this stage in my encounters with Saqib and his family. The question of identity and my position with regard to the research participants had raised itself from this early stage in the research process. Whose story? The prologue to this story continues with questions which were in my mind at the time as to not only how to contact the family but who to engage with in relation to learning in the home. Given the linguistic gap between myself and Farah this issue emerged as important. Also, stories of learning in the home and other out-of-school settings could be recounted differently depending on childcare and parental roles within families. The next instalment of my field notes indicates further complexities relating to who to contact and how to contact them: My early conversations with the family were on the telephone and if a female voice answered then a male family member was sought so that the interaction could proceed in English. The response was always positive when I asked about setting up a visit … When I arrived at the house at the first agreed time (in a road adjoining the road where Saqib’s school is) Farah answered the door and said that she didn’t speak English and, although she was smiling, she was on the verge of closing the door. I asked if there was another family member who could help us to communicate in English and she went back into the house to check. When she returned she said sorry but there wasn’t anyone there who could or who was willing to interpret for us. I arranged another visit, again over the phone, and was reassured that at the time we had arranged, Saqib’s dad would be there and ready to talk about Saqib and maths (in English). Although arranging visits turned out to be a longwinded process for me I always felt that the family was willing to be involved in the research. The approach to communicating across linguistic boundaries in the HSKE project had tended to be to use project families’ social contacts or resources at hand for interpretation where it was needed. This was relevant in several families’ cases given the commitment of the project to reflect the linguistic and cultural diversity of the schools in the project and the children in those

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schools. In the study of Saqib I found that using the resources at hand for interpretation did not function in a way which seemed valuable: In December I arrived at the house on my second visit and Saqib’s mum answered the door again. She said that Saqib’s dad was not there but Saqib was as he was off school ill that day. I asked if we could ask Saqib to interpret for us which she agreed to. Saqib, his mum and younger brother (a toddler) and I sat together in the front room of the house where two large photos of pilgrims at Mecca were hanging on the wall. I embarked on asking Saqib to ask his mum the questions on the first target interview schedule (re home numeracy practices). It quickly became obvious that this was a less than ideal situation given that the questions Saqib was interpreting for his mum were all about him! For example, Saqib asks his mum ‘what am I like?’ etc. Mum and Saqib both laughed at this situation which seemed to reflect a warm relationship between them and in this context there seemed to be a camaraderie between them. As Saqib began to see where the questions were leading he added in his own answers as we progressed through the schedule. This made for an interesting meeting between myself and Saqib and his mum but meant that the data for the target interview was not exactly what had been anticipated, i.e. reflections from parents about their children’s numeracy learning in and out of school. Reflecting on the challenges of meeting with a family member as well as Saqib who I would be able to communicate with led to the approach I eventually took. This involved recognising that Saqib’s father tended to be working during the daytime so although he had the skills in English which would enable me to discuss Saqib and his learning experiences, he would be unlikely to be available. Therefore I decided to develop my relationship with Farah and approached a community interpreter who could join me for future research encounters. After gaining Farah’s agreement to this idea a further meeting was set up between myself, Farah and Aisha, a community interpreter. Multilingual storying: Farah’s story A process central to a narrative approach to social and educational research is referred to as storying and it took on a distinctive note in encounters with Saqib’s family due to the presence of the interpreter, who was taking an equal part in the interviewing process along with me. Our process involved the interpreter posing questions in Punjabi to Farah which had been designed in a semi-structured format by the HSKE team. The interpreter then relayed Farah’s responses to me and the whole bilingual interaction was tape recorded in order for transcription to take place. Clearly this interaction could have taken place in different ways, for example, with the interpreter conveying the questions I asked and thus taking a more functional role within the interaction. My choice to ask the interpreter to work with the interview themes and

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questions was to enable her to develop a more direct rapport with the research participants and thus foreground her as an active contributor to the process. Farah’s beliefs about her own and her children’s education were explored within the research as a way of gaining an understanding of the wider goal of the project to seek to bring children’s home and school lives closer together in order to promote their learning. The premise was that if children’s learning lives in or out of school are recognised in the other settings and valued in both settings, then benefits in their learning and motivation will result. Against this backdrop Farah’s beliefs on education were deemed important and were recounted through narratives she offered about her past and current life, beginning with a reflection on her ability to help her four children with mathematics. Farah (via the interpreter): The simple questions I understand because it’s adding, subtracting, multiplication. But when it’s a question written in English, I don’t understand. I’ve studied maths up to 6 or 7 class – junior/infants, isn’t it? But after that I didn’t go to school but I was taught how to do basic maths. I’ve been here thirteen years and I’ve learnt a lot even in that time. Things have changed back home now. My younger sisters are doing very well in English and maths. Interviewer (JA through the interpreter): Are they here or back in Pakistan? Farah: Pakistan. I feel very bad that I’ve missed out on that. They’re doing quite well nowadays, you know, about maths. It’s very important to learn maths, it’s their future. I want my children to learn what I missed out on. The interpreter below is relating to me in English what Farah has just told her about her attitude towards and confidence in mathematics in an interview which takes place a year later than the one quoted above. It is also worth pausing to note the style of reporting used by the interpreter in her interpretation of Farah’s own account. The interpreter appears to fall comfortably into a storying mode by telling Farah’s story for me rather than interpreting word for word what Farah says: Just basically, she feels a lot of confidence in dealing with numeracy when out shopping with friends and things. What Mum is saying is that the early days were very, very difficult. But over the years she’s picked up maths and English and now she’s very confident. The dad’s away for three months’ holidays and she feels she’s coped very well in his absence.

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Insights into the life experiences of Farah were thus conveyed through this three-way interaction between myself, Farah and Aisha in our efforts to explore Saqib’s home life and the environment in which he lived. A focus on Saqib himself and his learning stories follows. Saqib’s learning out of school As already outlined the goal of the HSKE project was to talk to children and their families about what they did in their time out of school which involved learning of some kind, formal or informal. Work in this area by writers such as Luis Moll in the USA (e.g. Moll and Greenberg 1992) has established the richness of minority ethnic children’s lives which may not be recognised by schools and teachers. Moll and Greenberg use the concept of ‘funds of knowledge’ to describe and give respect to community knowledge and values which may differ from those espoused within schools. This concept presents a powerful challenge to the continued application of deficit models to children and families with diverse linguistic and cultural practices which are raised within mainstream education, such as the UK politician David Blunkett advocating the use of ‘English only’ in the home (cited in Edwards 2004: 43). Using a similar philosophy of valuing diversity, in the UK, Gregory and colleagues (e.g. 2004) have explored both formal and informal learning of minority ethnic children in London and raised awareness of linguistic richness in home settings and the involvement of extended family members in supporting children’s learning, e.g. grandparents as well as siblings. A discussion of the possible impact of differences between home lives and learning practices and practices in schools with a particular focus on the lives of South Asian children and young people is given in Abbas (2002). In Saqib’s life out of school both notions referred to above – that of funds of knowledge residing in communities and the importance of support from the extended family – played a part in Saqib’s story. The richness and diversity of children’s out-of-school lives and activities become important in a consideration of home–school knowledge exchange and relationships between home and school generally. Saqib’s father worked as a taxi driver and his class teacher commented in an interview that he was ‘obsessed’ with cars. During the research encounters Farah talked proudly about how Saqib had collected coins dropped by passengers in his father’s taxi. This insight into Saqib’s out-of-school persona is at odds with the messages coming from school from his teacher which Farah alludes to in the following comments: He’s got a bit naughty over the last year, there’s been a lot of changes, a lot of lectures and things. He seems OK at home, but it’s at school, especially with other children.

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Farah and Saqib recount how support for his more formal learning takes place and who is involved. Farah explains that Saqib’s father tends to be the person who helps with homework when help is needed. Via Aisha, the interpreter, she conveys the following: Because I don’t understand much English, he asks Dad if he gets into difficulties with schoolwork or homework. Saqib himself reports that his aunt who lives nearby often helps him with mathematics. Farah adds that because Saqib’s aunt, her sister-in-law, attended school in the UK she was better placed to support Saqib and his siblings with their school work. Formal learning also featured in Saqib’s out-of-school life through his attendance at his local mosque where he spent time each day after school. Over the period of the study lasting three years clearly the lives and interests of participants are likely to change and in the final visit to the family home I learnt of new interests that Saqib had developed. Farah explained how, under the influence of his uncles, Saqib had begun to take an interest in fashion and was expressing an interest in working as a model. To summarise Saqib’s story of learning out of school from talking to Saqib himself and his mother I gathered a picture of a lively young boy engaged in a variety of interests who was strongly supported by an extended family both in the UK and in Pakistan. As I have already stated Saqib’s learning story has been explored in other publications which set out a different image of Saqib as a learner. This alternative image of Saqib is alluded to by Farah (his being ‘a bit naughty’) and also by Saqib himself but features only briefly within a richer picture of his life. Reflecting on using narrative methods in research into home–school knowledge exchange and learning out of school Dhunpath (2000: 545) reflects on the popularity of using narrative methods within educational research. She considers this to be a potential risk if the focus on the personal and individual excludes the social, political and historical issues at play in a given educational context. Hence my question to myself is whether I have overloaded the stories of Saqib and Farah with meaning and by presenting these I run the risk of inviting unwarranted generalisations being made to children and parents in similar circumstances. Dhunpath’s solution to this risk is to locate biography within the larger ‘tapestry’ of individual, community and institutional inquiry. The way in which I address the risk and temptation to overgeneralise from two people’s stories is explored here. Firstly, the methods used within the HSKE project sought to provide multiple participants’ perspectives to come

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to light in the following ways. Heath’s work (1983), referred to earlier, sought to bring families, teachers and researchers together as inquirers as has Moll et al.’s work investigating community funds of knowledge (1992). In the HSKE project a degree of collaborative inquiry was incorporated into the full study with the use of teacher–researchers as initiators of action-based research into home–school knowledge exchange. So, a teacher–researcher engaged with Saqib’s class on activities which sought to increase the flow of communication between home and school. Also the use of technology by children and families (e.g. video and disposable cameras) to document their out-of-school learning was designed to empower them in exploring and sharing aspects of their lives that they chose to share. In her review of the use of narratives in social science research, Squire (2008: 8) also sounds a note of caution to the narrative researcher community that we should question ourselves as to: … whether life events, or even life progress, can be ‘read off’ from the structure and contents of stories and what, in general, is the possible and allowable extent of interpretation. Squire asks us to reflect on the feasibility or desirability of learning from narrative data and in doing so reminds us as readers to heighten our critical reading faculties when engaging in narratives within social research. These lines of argument become very relevant to me when considering parents’ experiences of learning and any associations with their children’s learning. The tapestry of Saqib’s and Farah’s lives comes across as complex and challenging and the encounters I had with each of them need to be considered in a non-essentialising way so that invalid perceptions of families in similar circumstances (in terms of ethnicity and socio-economic status, for example) are not generated. In terms of the wider concept of home–school relations, the stories of Saqib and Farah seem to demand to me that we cannot take a linear or unproblematic model of what communication between these two domains is applied. Questions emerge from these stories such as where family priorities lie when school plays only a small part in the busy lives of a family and where home is conceptualised given regular visits to the family’s heritage country. Research into parents and their involvement in their children’s learning has been undertaken in a variety of ways; a distinctive example is the survey of quantitative research studies into parental involvement carried out by Desforges and Abouchaar (2003) for the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) in England. Their study illustrates, for me, the strong argument for exploring issues from a range of perspectives given that method and outcome are strongly associated. The outcome of their survey was to recommend a postcode approach to targeting support for parental involvement. While the demands of policy making may be satisfied with such broad brush approaches,

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I remain convinced of the importance of learning from individual lives and the experiences of parents and children. To conclude on a reflective note, I return to the questions I posed earlier regarding my positionality within the research. I questioned how Farah and Saqib perceived me and how my perceptions of them shaped the interactions we engaged in over a period of time. As Yee and Andrews (2006) proposed, it is clear that being in research participants’ homes changes the relationship between the researcher and participants as compared to, for instance, meeting in a community centre or a school. The interaction, which was planned to focus upon family practices given the nature of the HSKE research, took a personal tone with the interpreter Aisha and myself sharing family stories with Farah and Saqib and in the way that our questions invited them to share their stories. In this way our sharing of learning experiences and interests and motivations allowed us to explore an aspect of the life of Saqib beyond the perception of him as ‘naughty’ which was one of the few glimpses of his school life which Farah and Saqib alluded to in their interactions. The goal of the HSKE project was to develop understandings of children’s lives and learning out of school with the goal of bringing different aspects of their lives closer together. The complexities and richness of a narradigmatic approach provide challenges for researchers but also allow otherwise absent insights into learning to take their place in research into learning. Acknowledgements This chapter was a personal reflection on my work within a larger team whose inspiring collegiality I acknowledge with grateful thanks here. The HSKE project team was directed by Martin Hughes and included Anthony Feiler, Pamela Greenhough, David Johnson, Elizabeth McNess, Marilyn Osborn, Andrew Pollard, Leida Salway, Mary Scanlan, Vicky Stinchcombe, Jan Winter and Wan Ching Yee. I also wish to thank all of the families and children whose homes I entered to talk about their learning, and in particular Farah and Saqib. Finally I wish to acknowledge the insights and support provided by Veena Bassi, who provided excellent interpreting support for the multilingual interviews reported here. References Abbas, T. (2002) ‘The Home and the School in the Educational Achievements of South Asians’, Race, Ethnicity and Education, 5(3): 292–316. Andrews, J., Yee, W.C., Greenhough, P.M., Hughes, M. and Winter, J. (2005) ‘Teachers’ funds of knowledge and the teaching and learning of mathematics in multi-ethnic primary schools: Two teachers’ views of linking home and school’, Zentralblatt für Didaktik der Mathematik, 37(2), 72–80.

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Bradby, H. (2002) ‘Translating Culture and Language: a Research Note on Multilingual Settings’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 24(6): 842–855. Bruner, J. (1987) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crozier, G. (2003) ‘Researching Black Parents: Making Sense of the Role of Research and Researcher’, Qualitative Research, 3(1): 79–94. Desforges, C. and Abouchaar, A. (2003) ‘The Impact of Parental Involvement, Parental Support and Family Education on Pupil Achievement and Adjustment’: A Literature Review Research Report 433, London: DfES. Dhunpath, R. (2000) ‘Life History Methodology: “Narradigm” Regained’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(5): 543–551. Edwards, V. (2004) Multilingualism in the English-speaking World, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Elliott, J. (2005) Using Narrative in Social Research – Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, London: Sage. Feiler, A., Andrews, J., Greenhough, P., Hughes, M., Johnson, D., Scanlan, M. and Yee, W.C. (2007) Improving Primary Literacy – Linking Home and School, London: RoutledgeFalmer. Frankham, J. (2001) ‘The “Open Secret”: Limitations on the Expression of Same Sex Desire’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(4): 457–469. Greenhough, P. and Feiler, A. (2005) ‘Getting Engaged: Possibilities and Problems for Home–School Knowledge Exchange’, Educational Review, 58(4): 451–470. Gregory, E., Long, S., and Volk, D. (eds.) (2004) Many Pathways to Literacy: Young Children Learning with Siblings, Grandparents, Peers and Communities, London: Routledge. Heath, S.B. (1983) Ways with Words, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holliday, A. (1999) ‘Small Cultures’, Applied Linguistics, 20(2): 237–264. Hughes, M. (2002) Learning in and out of School, Inaugural Lecture, Bristol: University of Bristol. Hughes, M. and Pollard, A. (2006) ‘Home–School Knowledge Exchange in Context’ in Educational Review 58/4. Kohler Riessman, C. (2005) ‘Exporting Ethics: A Narrative about Narrative Research in South India’, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9(4): 473–490. Moll, L. and Greenberg, J. (1992). ‘Creating Zones of Possibilities: Combining Social Contexts for Instruction’ in L. Moll (ed.), Vygotsky and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 319–348. Shah, S. (2004) ‘The Researcher/Interviewer in Intercultural Context: a Social Intruder!’, British Educational Research Journal, 30(4): 549–575. Squire, C. (2008) ‘Approaches to Narrative Research’, National Centre for Research Methods Review Papers NCRM/009. Temple, B. and Edwards, R. (2002) ‘Interpreters/Translators in Cross-Language Research: Reflexivity and Border Crossings’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1(2). Winter, J., Andrews, J., Greenhough, P., Hughes, M., Salway, L. and Yee, W.C. (2009) Improving Primary Mathematics – Linking Home and School, London: Routledge. Yee, W.C. and Andrews, J. (2006) ‘Professional Researcher or “Good Guest”? Ethical dilemmas Involved in Researching Children and Families in the Home Setting’, Educational Review, (58)4: 397–414.

Chapter 8

Going to the pictures Learning to see the life histories of minorities within majority narratives Dean Smart

Teachers are shaped, in part at least, by their life experience and the values, aspirations and beliefs which develop as a result of such experiences. This chapter explores life history through two dimensions: the personal learning journey of the individual professional and its importance in illustrating what all teachers should possess as professional knowledge and awareness; and the way that the life histories of ‘ethnic others’ can be forgotten, ignored or marginalised in the generalised and generalising narratives of textbooks, unless those in positions of power are sensitive to the excluding nature of traditional historiography and representation of the past. The learning journey cited is my own, based on movement from an unproblematised, comfortable, mono-ethnic and mono-cultural, semi-rural early life and small-town history teaching career, before relocating to a multiethnic, multi-faith, multicultural inner-city school where I learnt that there is more than one version of the past, and discovered how some young people felt excluded from society and the historical narrative by what they encountered in schools. During this process a personal questioning of the inclusiveness of the secondary (pupils aged 11–18) curriculum in England led to an interest in multicultural education; involvement in professional work to better tell a more diverse and fully representative version of the past; and a later movement into university-based teacher training. Becoming an academic with working-class origins, and experience of working with a range of minorities, gave me the sensitivity to reflect on whose history was told and how. It also provided the opportunity to research representations of visible minorities in English school history textbooks and to consider how minority groups are portrayed in the historical narrative. This chapter thus considers what I discovered about how life history shapes understanding, and how life histories are retold in textbooks. The importance of time and place: reflecting on my personal and professional life history Life is a situated narrative, shaped by experience and shaping identity, related to physical place, and developed in a chronological flow. Keith and Pile (1993)

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shows how place helps construct identity, and Mason (2000) stresses the importance of change on the individual. My personal–professional journey is a narrative related, in part at least, to a growing personal awareness of inclusion and exclusion, with social justice focused research emerging from this awareness as I moved into university-based initial teacher education from teaching at secondary school level. To locate my journey in time and place it is necessary to consider the influences that shaped my personal–professional persona, and to situate these chronologically and professionally. Childhood in an ethnically changing England Ethnic diversity is a long term feature of English history, but it is only within the last half-century that very significant numbers of immediately visible ethnic minorities have settled in England. Before this there were Britons of Asian and African ethnic origin, but these citizens were largely, but not exclusively, settled in port cities and the larger urban areas, and especially in London, home to just under 20 per cent of the English in modern times and a magnet to incomers and settlers since Roman times. My working-class parents relocated from urban inner London, and an increasingly ethnically diverse community, in the mid-1960s to one of the smallest and last ‘new towns’ built to relieve pressure on London. We moved 80 miles north to a sleepy small town in west Suffolk in the largely agricultural east of England, a step taken intentionally to combine a change of environment, lifestyle and opportunity for the family. Instead of an urban, population-dense and increasingly multiethnic north London childhood, my upbringing and surroundings were largely monocultural, mono-ethnic and almost exclusively nominally Anglican-Protestant and relatively liberal. Life included easy access to open space and forest instead of negotiating an urban landscape; home was a new housing estate close to the more historic small town centre rather than terraces of workers’ houses a century old in a working-class borough in a very large city: rare glimpses of population diversity came from sightings of personnel visiting the town from nearby American air force bases rather than being the everyday event my cousins experienced in London. Subsequent teacher training in the south-west of England, and a first post in suburban southern England teaching British and European History to ‘white’ British children, brought relocation but little experience of ‘otherness’. It was a contented, comfortable and slow paced experience, and probably typical of much of semi-rural Britain then and now: cultural or ethnic diversity was not a strong feature in our experience or consciousness – a life history typical of much of my generation, class and country. Moving to a multiethnic environment In the later twentieth century Britain faced a series of challenges: a changing status in world affairs; decolonisation and the end of Empire; and a serious

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labour shortage in a struggling post-1945 world and cold war economy. One of the features of this period was the official encouragement of New Commonwealth immigration to Britain, particularly to the towns, to supply the service industries with workers. This resulted in a rapidly changing ethnic mix in urban areas and some stereotyping and racism from established communities which felt threatened by incomers. In education the growth of greater consciousness about diversity, inclusion and exclusion in the 1970s and 1980s led to a challenging of schoolbooks which carried stereotypical and outdated attitudes to ethnicity and gender, and the removal of books from schools which risked reinforcing prejudice, negative attitudes to the ethnic other or minorities (Broderick 1973; MacCann and Woodard 1977). This purge raised awareness of issues of representation and sensitised liberals to social justice issues in printed form, but also had the unintended impact of reducing the visibility of minorities, as withdrawn books were not always replaced with more acceptable volumes and diversity became sensitive and thus, in a very British way, avoided for fear of giving offence. Teachers learnt that some images were unacceptable, but little was done to ensure that a more balanced presentation of the past was offered. During the late 1980s and 1990s a personal location and career move led to teaching history in a secondary school in multiethnic, multi-faith, innercity Bristol which suddenly brought significant new challenges and an accelerated learning journey for my own awareness of marginalisation and exclusion. I was working in a community where well below average incomes, and well above average unemployment restricted engagement with education. Limited aspirations were the norm and challenged me to reflect on my values and beliefs, reinforcing and sharpening my view of structural inequalities in society. My life history bore restricted resemblance to the lives of the community in which I worked. My professional journey was supported by learning from, and with, remarkable colleagues and young people; in my experience there is often a real sense of mission and shared purpose amongst the staff in schools in socio-economically challenging circumstances and a deep desire to raise achievement and address social justice issues. Certainly I was encouraged to re-evaluate my view of power and life chances. The school was very inclusive, and on roll there was a large number of pupils with English as an Additional Language (EAL), significant numbers with restricted literacy skills and a broad range of special educational needs. Accessing aspects of the curriculum was difficult for some young people, and disengagement was not uncommon. At different points over 25 mother tongues were spoken in the school community, upwards of 60 per cent of the 1000-pupil school was from ethnic minority groups and more than 40 per cent of the school was listed on the Special (additional educational) Needs register. Districts served by the school were within the lowest ten per cent of socio-economic wealth in England, and represented a broad spread of communities, faiths and ethnic origins: Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs;

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Africans and African-Caribbeans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Indians and others. Achievement was, on average, low, but the school was adding value and changing young people’s life chances for the better. Multiculturalism was something the school staff saw as a positive feature of our work, and which was to be celebrated and embraced. I strongly identified with the raising achievement agenda, seeing an engagement with history as a way to develop lifelong critical and transferable skills and a route to success. Challenges to the curriculum narrative: ‘where are we in this (his)story?’ In retrospect I am not sure if I assimilated this collective drive to ‘make a difference’, embracing the school’s sense of purpose and commitment to social justice – or if it assimilated me. However, I had learnt enough for the question in history lessons from ethnic minority pupils ‘Where are we in this story?’ to have a significant impact on my thinking. Resultant discussion of the young person’s meaning exposed a feeling of exclusion for many pupils of colour from the British and European history being studied. Although pupils’ intellectual challenges to the nature of what was being studied often included a very underdeveloped concept of the term ‘black history’, there was nothing that they regarded as covering ‘their heritage’ in the textbooks or curriculum. They were unable to see life histories with which they could identify, and thus felt excluded from the historical narrative, and the study of history. As a head of a history department in school my focus on ‘What history should we study?’ was replaced by ‘Whose history?’ and I started to re-educate myself about Britain’s past and diversity. As Mason (2000: 8) notes ‘disturbance is often the trigger to action’, and as I reflected on what I was learning I also considered the teaching materials being used and the topics covered by my department. Gundara (2000) argues that Britain’s long multicultural past is largely neglected in the history curriculum in England, and although the fragility and transitory nature of evidence may explain aspects of the ‘missing minorities’, textbooks take an ethnocentric position in their narrative. My response to this was to create new, more inclusive resources for use in schools (Levy and Smart 2002) and to take a more focused and self-critical approach to my learning and what happened in my department. Becoming sensitised to the power of the textbook as a life story of communities A logical aspect of my work to question was the textbook. Textbooks remain the most frequently encountered pedagogic tool after the teacher in secondary school classrooms, and arguably give ‘a sanctioned version of human knowledge and culture’ (De Castell et al. 1989: 78), gifting a quasi-official status to

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topics included while suggesting a lower significance for excluded topics (Apple 1993). For me, working in a school community with restricted literacy placed a heightened significance on visual materials, including the illustrations in the textbooks, which often formed the ‘clues’ about lesson content and emphasis for weaker readers, and those working outside their mother tongue. However, as a young teacher and a member of the majority ethnic group, the nature of schoolbook narratives, and their power to include and exclude, had not been at the forefront of my thinking. It was the movement to working in a marginalised community, and pupils’ subsequent questioning about the curriculum, that helped sensitise me more deeply to social justice issues, and in particular to the textbook’s potential to exclude certain life histories. To be accurate, any overview of British history should be woven as a multiethnic narrative, since our collective past as an island people is formed not from one single people’s story, but from thousands of years of incomers and immigrants, migration and emigrants. For Britain, experiencing diversity is normal and integration and assimilation are long term trends, particularly in port cities such as the one in which I worked as a teacher. To the young people with whom I worked however, their claim was that ‘our’ school curriculum was excluding and Anglo-centric. I began to reflect on the nature of textbooks and other resources, concerned that all my pupils should be learning about diversity over time, and reflecting on the potential impact on young people of skewed and mono-cultural narratives. My own life history had failed to give me an awareness of diversity until well into my career, and I felt it important that this gap be addressed for those that I would teach and would train as teachers. The curriculum context: how is the historical narrative constructed? In England there is relative freedom for the classroom teacher to choose what is taught in history lessons, with four outline British History period studies required to be followed by young people from the age of 11 to 14, at which age most young people cease studying history. The required units: 1066–1500; 1500–1750; 1750–1900; and a wider study based on the twentieth century, have very little specified subject matter to cover, and do not form a ‘course’ or list of a body of knowledge in the sense recognised in other parts of Europe, Australia or North America. Instead emphasis is given to developing historical and generic skills and concepts alongside a broad sense of British history. This approach continues the traditional Anglo-centric emphasis that has always dominated the history curriculum in England. My initial process of informally reviewing departmental resources suggested that the 1970s and 1980s sensitisation to explicit stereotypes in textbooks and the removal of books with newly recognised biased or racist

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material had led to only superficial change by the 1990s. On first viewing there had been no significant or substantial move towards teaching a less Anglo-centric narrative, and no real addressing of gaps and omissions: main topics remained broadly the same as in earlier years, and visually there seemed to be little evidence of ethnic diversity within or beyond Britain. Pieterse (1995) suggests that during the late twentieth century ‘white’ Western society retained its stereotypes, but learnt not to openly express its racism and sense of cultural superiority. It seems possible that teachers adopt textbooks because they carry familiar, comfortable, unproblematic narratives, and tell a majority community history that is comfortable and largely unchallenging, and therefore the curriculum continues to replicate in a self-perpetuating cycle. Since the teaching force is not representative of diversity in wider society there is little to challenge the status quo, and unless there is intervention the self-replicating cycle may remain unbroken. Presence or absence? Images of ‘ethnic others’ in textbooks My curiosity had been stimulated by speaking to young people about their reaction to the curriculum, and later how they respond to and interpret images, leading to reflection on how images present life, and how far the life histories of people of colour and the lives of ‘ethnic others’ are represented in history textbooks. An initial textual content analysis had shown that few references to ‘ethnic others’ appear in the history textbooks, but that there are occasional ‘mentions’ of ‘ethnic others’ in the textbook pictures. This again heightens the importance of the visual, making it the main or only route for young people to construct narratives about the place, importance and significance of people of colour in the past. To investigate further I completed a content analysis of the images of visible ethnic others in 70 textbooks for the compulsory study units of the English National Curriculum for History (Smart 2006), concentrating on how often and in what ways visible minorities were presented. Each book, and each image, was analysed and recorded in a multi-field frequency count, allowing a complex content analysis in order to ascertain how many, and what sorts of images were being used and with what sorts of messages and meaning. Therefore, visually, history for 11–14 year olds is populated almost entirely by ‘white’ Western European, notionally Christian people, with a ratio of images containing Caucasians (who are non-Jewish) to mixed or other ethnic groups of 13:1. Thus seven per cent of textbook images tell the life histories of ‘ethnic others’, and further studying what stories they tell becomes very important to reveal how ‘minorities’’ life histories are narrated, and thus what young people might be expected to learn.

Going to the pictures

Number of textbooks for 11–14 year olds

70

Number of textbook images excluding those on book covers

8117

Mean average number of illustrations per book

123

Percentage depicting people

71%

Percentage of images showing people that include one or more Caucasians

97% (5937)

Percentage depicting only Caucasians

93%

Percentage showing ethnic groups other than Caucasians without Caucasians shown1.

7% (439)

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Includes those denoted by image or text as Jewish because of the way that texts position them as an excluded or outsider group: effectively an ‘ethnic other’

Figure 8.1 Textbook research results: number of images.

Constructing (and reconstructing) the life histories of ‘ethnic others’ My analysis showed that people of colour are more likely to be depicted in more recent (post-1750) historical events rather than in earlier times, and my initial response was that this is legitimate: although Britain has a long history of having resident ethnic minorities and of contact with ‘ethnic others’ via trade, other contacts and colonialism, the periods of most intense contact and population movement occur after the acquisition of the British Empire. However, we might also expect textbook coverage of the twentieth century to include a significant number of images of ‘ethnic others’ since it was a period of continuing population movement and also of considerable Empire and ‘New Commonwealth’ immigration to the UK. This greater diversity in the UK population is not represented and a Euro-centric focus is taken on modern world history with almost no mention of Africa, Asia, South America or the Antipodes. Status and power: representations of ‘native bystanders’ and ‘white masters’ As I analysed the images it was clear that pictures shown in textbooks overwhelmingly originate from sources of British origin, and that they contain subtle messages about power, status, gender and life history. If such images are used or accepted uncritically by teachers or pupils then important signposting about status might also be accepted uncritically or unwittingly.

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Composition of image is a strong indicator of power and status relationships. In many of these Western-created images the role of the people of colour is incidental to the narrative rather than central: they are shown as slaves, victims, workers or bystanders rather than in positions of power, initiators of the events or action: people of colour are galleried as the ‘set dressing’ of history rather than at the centre of the narrative. Whose stories, anchors and signposts? The tethering of ‘ethnic others’ to particular ‘life stories’ The historical events and narratives with which some ethnic groups are repeatedly associated are those which Western and British historiography have chosen to select as significant rather than those which the group itself might have emphasised. This process of anchoring or tethering groups to particular events may distort the historical record. It may also have the effect of associating groups with particular characteristics or status, and signposting the narrative in a way chosen by politically dominant groups, thus disempowering minorities. For example, the European Jewish community is mentioned in relation to narratives about the medieval period solely in relationship to antiSemitic attacks during pogroms, and then only reappears in order to be persecuted during the rise of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, signposting the community as relatively powerless victims. Africans appear in connection with transatlantic slavery and its aftermath; the Japanese in order to commit war crimes, and those from the Indian subcontinent in order to be subjects of the British Empire. These weighty topics anchor the main narratives of these communities at particular points in history and historiography, but these communities might chose to give a different emphasis to the event(s). History textbooks in England unintentionally deny people of colour the chance to visually recount their own life histories; instead their lives are recorded or represented by outsiders, with very few images of people of colour created within their own cultures shown. The images have been generated by European artists and photographers, creating compositions according to the values and belief systems of a people and place often remote from the people they were recording. Individual life stories or generalised narratives? One of the key features of textbooks is their need to collectivise and generalise in order to exemplify key features of the past: the typical or common experience of the majority of people(s) is often presented as if it is the experience of all people in a particular group; the individual life story is lost in the generalisation process. Alternatively an individual can be presented in textbooks as representative of the larger group from which they are drawn, becoming

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emblematic of particular events, qualities or aspects of an age in order to provide an example and demonstrate the key features of that period. Regional and individual variations rarely gain a mention because of the pressures on space, and the need for clear, manageable narratives for the intended core audience. However, this denies the right to self-representation of life experience and the acknowledgement of the individual. Visual anchors In my analysis I recorded any themes which had five or more related images in order to see how the stories of people of colour are told. Great Exhibition Class/Wealth of 1852 1.9% Religion 1.4% Exploration (8) Atomic bombing of 1.4% (6) 1.4% Japan 2.9% Historical skills (6) (6) (12) 2.1% (9) International co-operation 2.9% (12) Racism 2.9% (12)

British Empire 20.7% (87)

Politics and democracy 3.3% (14) Trade 5.0% (21) Japan & World War 2 5.5% (23) The Crusades 6.7% (28)

Transatlantic slave trade 18.8% (79)

World Wars 10.7% WW1-(23) WW2-(22)

Holocaust 12.6% (53)

Figure 8.2 Thematic areas to which images of visible ‘ethnic others’ are linked in English textbooks for history units. (Numbers of images across 70 books.)

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This established that people of colour are galleried in 16 areas of study, with three very dominant visual anchors: Empire, enslavement and Holocaust. Five themes shape textbook users’ understanding of the lives of minorities: I. The benign British Empire Narratives related to the British Empire in textbooks for the periods 1500–1750 and 1750–1900 are largely based on a traditional Anglo-centric interpretation of the British Empire as a benign historical force with, for example, Native North Americans shown as friendly ‘Indians’ happy to support British colonists. Colonialism is shown from the colonisers’, unproblematised viewpoint. II. The enslaved African Less positive is the coverage of the transatlantic slave trade, which is the principle marker or anchor against which images of ‘black’ people’s lives are shown. Although some more recently published textbooks give greater acknowledgement to ‘black’ agency in resisting enslavement, images of abuse and apparent passive acceptance of enslavement gallery and position ‘black’ people as the victims of racism and hardship. The bicentenary commemorating the British abolition of trading in enslaved people (2007–2008) demonstrated how significant it is to be aware of sensitivities to the past. In this case, recognising and acknowledging ‘black’ resistance, resilience and survival is key to denying passivity and providing a ‘community’ life history, and also breaks down stereotypes and myths. Also important for some people in identifying with the past is the emergence of heroic figures, however fragile or flawed, and although ‘black’ agency in the abolition campaign is beginning to be covered by textbooks in the figure of Olaudah Equiano, less urbane and more violent resisters are mentioned infrequently despite their national hero status in parts of the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the emergence of individual life histories of people of colour is a positive move, and may be able to ‘speak to’ modern readers by simultaneously creating positive iconic figures, and by challenging previous theories about power and activism. III. The marginalised ‘black’ community Outside of discourses related to Empire and enslavement, ‘black’ people are given very restricted life histories visually in 11–14 year olds’ textbooks: a couple of images show 1930s AfricanAmericans in discourses on hardship and racism; as 1940s GIs; and in 1960s civil rights protests. Elsewhere Africans less frequently are depicted as freedom fighters and post-apartheid leaders, but also as famine victims, illiterates and participants in war. Thus the ‘black’ experience of history is positioned as highly marginal, and generally one of negativity: although racist stereotypes have been dispensed with, other stereotypes are more resilient. IV. Jews as outsiders and history’s victims Thirteen per cent of the pictures depict members of European Jewish communities, almost exclusively

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with reference to their victimisation, using sources created by perpetrators rather than by the community itself. This raises concerns about the manner of representation of the Jews of Europe. The risk of reinforcing stereotypes and deep-seated cultural and religious prejudices is evident; and the ethical challenges presented by transmitting the historical truth of the events whilst not encouraging a voyeuristic approach to the almost incomprehensible horror of the destruction of the Jewish community by the Nazis and their collaborators. Representing this visually, without dehumanising the victims, transmitting the message of the perpetrator or desensitising the textbook user is not always effectively achieved by current textbooks, with some highly disturbing images currently shown. The second issue is the failure to represent diversity as ‘normal’ and part of British life as seen through the linkage of people of the Jewish faith in Britain to persecution and victimhood: Jews in Britain are very clearly positioned as outsiders and subject to violence and exclusion by the two life histories they are given by the textbooks. The first textbook ‘mention’ of an English-Jewish community only appears in connection with their violent persecution in the mid-medieval period, with the visual support for this including historic antiSemitic stereotyping and a modern artist’s drawings of the attacks on the Jews of York in the north of England. V. The forgotten and the ignored Outside of the main topics privileged for textbook inclusion, the lives of other groups are given almost no coverage, and thus significant sections of humanity are virtually invisible and are positioned as irrelevant. Peoples of Arab and ‘Middle Eastern’ origin appear as the rivals to ‘Christian interests’ in the medieval period and the Holy Lands, not quite counterbalanced by a small number of images related to the contribution of the Islamic cultures to world science and medicine, but then are almost absent throughout the rest of history. South Americans, Africans (except where linked to slavery) and Asians outside of India are given little coverage in text or images at all. The Chinese are ignored pre-nineteenth century, where they are visually positioned as indolent, drug addicted and practitioners of female infanticide. These ascribed weaknesses make them the easy victims of Japanese aggression in the small range of images in which they appear for twentieth century discourses, where their defeat and abuse helps to simultaneously visually tether the Japanese to militarism, war crime and atomic destruction in the nine per cent of images in which they appear. The absence–presence paradigm: contradictions about whether Britain is multiethnic A contradiction is presented by the absence of evidence that Britain is multiethnic in the historic visual sources, but the repeated use of commissioned artwork showing multiethnic groups of children in a few textbooks positions

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today’s Britain as multiethnic. In almost all textbooks the lack of explanation about population movement in text or image leaves it a mystery as to how this sudden appearance of the ‘ethnic other’ in late twentieth Britain century took place, and presents a paradigm of absence–presence. Fewer than two per cent of the original artworks show people of colour in Britain – i.e. establishing them as British ethnic minorities and reflecting a diverse society in Britain, even in the twentieth century textbooks. There is little in the visual narrative shown through the historical sources to help construct a life history of the British ethnic minority citizen over time, or with which a reader from an ethnic minority group in Britain might identify. However, a quarter of the textbook illustrations of people of colour in books relating to the period before 1900 are commissioned artworks showing ‘ethnic others’, often children, as commentators, narrators or ‘expert witnesses’. These ‘talking heads’ are an important signal of attempted inclusivity and role modelling, with 14 sets of drawings, and one group of photographs, demonstrating the device, every one of which includes people of colour. At 14.5 per cent, or 15 of 103, of the images of people of colour in British settings overall, this is a powerful signposting of author/publisher agency in representing modern Britain as a harmonious multiethnic society, where ethnicity does not impact on equality or life chances. Another device offering positive positioning and role model potential is the use of artwork to create ‘expert witnesses’. Interestingly, no Asian figures appear as ‘expert witnesses’ and few images representing the community appear elsewhere, despite the fact that Asian-Britons as a group are twice the size of the ‘black’ British ethnic population (four per cent Asian to two per cent Black/Black Caribbean overall), thus revealing an important omission in the visual narrative, and an exclusion of potential links to a significant number of life histories. Some conclusions Evidence of ‘good intentions’?

While there is evidence of deliberate agency by textbook producers to represent modern Britain as multiethnic via the ‘talking heads’ and to show positive and ‘normal’ life experiences, there is no evidence of how the images are used, or how textbook users react. Further probing of reader reactions and producer intentions would now be helpful. Absence of intentionality to marginalise

I can find no evidence to support the view that there is any deliberate omission of people of colour from the historical narrative, nor of overt racism or of deliberate positioning of particular groups in a negative way. However there

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does seem to be some insensitivity to the subconscious messages that may be being transmitted in some images and the lives of many groups are forgotten, ignored or marginalised. There is very strong tethering of ethnic groups to particular historical markers and signposts and a gallerying of some groups in very restricted narratives. There is also little to suggest diversity over time in Britain, although modern Britain is positioned as multiethnic in some textbooks via commissioned artwork. Ethnicity as a determinant of opinion and positioning

There is no significant evidence of authors tethering ethnic groups to particular viewpoints or opinions, i.e. representing a ‘black’ view of history, which is hopefully evidence of the absence of pigeon-holing particular communities and attributing fixed viewpoints to the entire group. However, there may be some subconscious linkage of minorities to particular historical issues or life histories, and careful thought is needed about whether this is helpful or divisive. It may be true that every community needs its heroes, and it is certainly true that dominant groups should not patronise minorities by telling them whom to revere or detest; societal values need to be negotiated rather than imposed. Deliberate agency to show peaceful co-existence and a multiethnic society appears, for example, in Clare’s (1997: 80–81) only use of ‘talking heads’, where 14 ethnically diverse figures debate the transatlantic slave trade, a particularly sensitive and potentially controversial topic presenting a number of pedagogic challenges (Amidu 2004, Smart 2005). This is clearly an intentionally diverse group, predominantly showing people of colour, and while eight per cent of modern Britain is from ethnic minorities, 12 of the 14 figures shown here are from minorities, perhaps positioning the topic as ‘black’ history rather than of wider concern, and thus perhaps being less inclusive than the author/illustrator intended. Of course such attempts to steer attitudes are never guaranteed success: there is no particular reason for most minorities to identify with the life experiences of other groups just because they are also minorities; this would be a denial of the unique experience of each group and individual. Picturing the future Current history textbooks in England largely marginalise the life histories of minorities and raise several issues including the need for continuing research; better initial and in-service teacher training and greater awareness of diversity on the part of authors and picture editors. Whilst textbooks remain unproblematised there is likely to be only slow and small change in the genre, and little that this field can do to feed into life history research. At present textbook research in the UK is a small and undervalued field, with no national

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institute for the study of school materials in the manner found elsewhere. Greater attention to a structured engagement with the textbook genre as an element of life history research would be beneficial, as would a closer focus on whose life stories are being revealed and whose excluded. Teacher professional development is key to securing change. My own discovery of, and sensitisation to, imperfections or gaps in the curriculum narrative does not necessarily imply epiphany and a reappraisal of professional practice for all teachers and educators. Most teachers of history in England are ‘white’, and are, or become, middle-class professionals whilst remaining unaware of the multiethnic nature of British history due to their schooling, degree studies, teacher training and subsequent experience. They teach a curriculum written by people of similar background, do not overly problematise what they see in the teaching materials available, and so reinforce the Anglocentric story of history by retransmitting a received narrative about particular lives and generalised experiences. Since most teacher trainers and textbook authors emerge from the ranks of teachers themselves the system is largely self-replicating. The education sector is aware of the need for anti-racist and socially cohesive teaching, but lacks a sophisticated understanding of how this might be achieved. Recent research, such as the Historical Association’s TEACH (Teaching Sensitive and Controversial Issues in History) Report, takes us in this direction, but further work is required to develop pedagogy and didactics. To bring about change, initial teacher training and continuing professional development should make provision to create better, broader subject knowledge development materials using recent high quality scholarship, and encourage teaching that moves from single narratives to complex weaves which include diversity over time, (QCA 1997) as well as more specific case studies of individual lives, but which avoid tokenism or ‘mentioning’ and reflect the historical record accurately. My personal and professional journey shows that it is possible to break away from received, unquestioned life history narratives and to begin to ‘give voice’ to the under-represented, excluded and ignored. While history teaching will always be a selection of some aspects of the past, and thus particular ethnic groups may continue to be ‘galleried’ in relation to particular narratives, it is possible to ensure other coverage tells a more balanced story, and that a wider narrative is achieved breaking away from defensive and prejudicial viewpoints and taking advantage of the latest scholarship to reveal changes in historiography. Most minorities will continue to be shown in ‘foreign settings’ because the curriculum is centred on national history but it is not essential that particular groups are only anchored to negative historical events or positioned as passive or neutralised by omission. History is a dialogue about people, and although every age gives some individuals iconic status, concepts of significance and role models change to reflect the mood of the time. The challenge for the history teacher will remain constant: the need

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to find the right content and pedagogy; the need to motivate and engage; to plan, resource, teach and promote learning effectively. The challenge for the life history researcher is to uncover the stories of the ignored, the forgotten and the marginalised, as well as those of others, and to help reflect the richness and diversity of lived experience. References Amidu, M. (2004) Report to the Understanding Slavery Initiative group (Phase I Research Report to a National and Regional Museums Consortium), London: Mariaandco consultancy. Available via the Understanding Slavery Initiative website http://www. understandingslavery.com (accessed 26 June 2009). Apple, M.W. (1993) Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age, London: Routledge. Broderick, D.M. (1973) Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction, New York: R.R. Bowker. Clare, J.D. (1997) Options in History: A United Kingdom 1500–1750, Cheltenham: Nelson. De Castell, S., Luke, A. and Luke, C. (eds) (1989) Language, Authority and Criticism: Readings on the School Textbook, London: Falmer Press. Gundara, J. (2000) Interculturalism, Education, Inclusion, London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Historical Association T.E.A.C.H. Report (Teaching Sensitive and Controversial Issues in History 3–19) London: Historical Association. Available online at http://www.history.org. uk/resources/resource_780.html. Keith, M. and Pile, S. (eds) (1993) Place and the Politics of Identity, London: Routledge. Levy, R. and Smart, D. (2002) Multicultural Britain: A Resource for Teachers. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes. MacCann, D. and Woodard, G. (1977) Cultural Conformity in Books for Children: Further Readings in Racism, London: Scarecrow. Mason, D. (2000) Race and Ethnicity in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pieterse, J.N. (1995) White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Popular Culture, Yale: Yale University Press. QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (for England)) (2007) National Curriculum Online: History KS3 Curriculum, http://curriculum.qca.org.uk/key-stages-3-and4/subjects/history/index.aspx (accessed 26 June 2009). Smart, D. (2005) Report to the Understanding Slavery Initiative group (Phase II Research Report to a National and Regional Museums Consortium. Available online at the Understanding Slavery website http://www.understandingslavery.com (accessed 26 June 2009). Smart, D. (2006) Invisible, Stereotypes or Citizens? An Examination of Visual Representations of People of Colour and Visible Minorities in Key Stage Three History Textbooks in England. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Bristol: University of the West of England.

Chapter 9

In our own words From actions to dialogue Nick Clough

Introduction This chapter will outline the role of life history/life story approaches to research and knowledge exchange within a community of learners comprising teacher educators, student teachers and children. My professional responsibility within this community includes developing programmes of citizenship education and programmes for personal, social and emotional development that support teachers and learners in reflecting on the consequences of their relationships and activities in the wider world. A specific focus is identified – the promotion of responsible engagement with local and global environments in the light of the climate changes that we are experiencing. A range of data is presented, taken from students’ written reflections about themselves as global citizens and from children’s reflections on the impact of the Royal Society of Arts ‘Arts and Ecology Project’ (2006) on their everyday lives. A framework for making sense of these personalised accounts is provided by my own reflexive responses presented as a series of autobiographical artefacts. These have been constructed in order to identify power relations and identity crises that lie at the roots of my own lifelong learning and participation in this field. In this way the effect and affect of powerful educational influences begin to emerge as personalised narrative strands that support understanding of a key question of our times: to what extent is sustainability a political or an educational issue? Within the context of this book the question could read: in what ways does dialogic exchange about our own lives create communities of learning and action for the planet that we inhabit? Experience today ‘I used to be a car tyre.’ So reads the sign on the zip-up bag that is on display in the ‘Green Café’ where we are sitting with cups of coffee. The upholstered seats are also labelled in an informative way. ‘There are 28 recycled plastic drinks bottles per square metre of this fabric.’ A displayed advertisement for a film The Age of Stupid issues a warning, ‘I defy anyone to come out and not

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to feel like they have got to make a difference.’ Even the lighting system that helps us to read these notices signals changing practices within this niche that we had visited in hope of a restful moment. The sign reads, ‘In an effort to reduce the impact of our business on the environment, we have fitted energy efficient lighting using compact fluorescent and LED bulbs. Total business lighting consumption has reduced from 4200 watts to 748 watts.’ As we seek a space in this café to reflect on the activities of our day, we are instead being informed and firmly guided to take up a real challenge of our time. We are being encouraged to participate in reducing the volume of heattrapping gases we create just through living the lives that we do. I have read elsewhere that every year, world wide, we generate a ‘mile high mountain, 12 miles in base circumference, of solidified carbon dioxide’ (Lovelock 2009: 70). Here in this café we are learning about futures that are possible and preferable. There is evidence that materials can be changed and reformed to avoid the generation of methane gases and that our use of energy can be radically reduced. The hope is expressed that we will review, re-imagine and re-articulate our relationship with the world. This is a demonstrably a seat of a particular and purposeful kind of lifelong learning. Do I show the same level of responsibility for the wider world in my role in teacher education as these considerate and conscientious café owners? How is my personal lifestyle measuring up? Forget about why I came to the café – how am I going to make an ethical journey back home from the café? Understanding ourselves with the wider world As worldwide plans to break through new economic pressures include an emphasis on the need for sustainable low carbon futures, my personal lifestyle and professional role as a teacher trainer begins to get tangled in unfamiliar ways with United Nations (UN) policy drives. Mediated messages from UN Conferences on Environment and Development, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Millennium Goals inform and remind me, frequently it seems, that the very environment that I love, enjoy, utilise and depend on economically is seriously threatened and that this is a matter of concern not only to me but to future generations. I am awkwardly caught within lines of responsibility. Those who will inhabit the earth after me include not only my own children but also the student teachers and children on whose behalf I work on a daily basis. The living contradictions that this community of learners experience as a result of anthropogenic climate change become a necessary focus for research and knowledge exchange. Life history and narrative approaches have power to illuminate ways in which our growing awareness of the effects of our daily actions is provoking internal and shared dialogues that may radicalise our lifestyles. Illustration of this point is found in these extracts from student teacher logs. As part of their preparation as teachers of citizenship and providers of

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personal, social and emotional development, they are responding to the question ‘How am I connected with the wider world?’ Almost everything I do or own is, in some way, connected to other parts of the world. For example, some of the fruit that I eat is imported from South America and the tea I drink from Asia. I own a car that burns fossil fuels and so contribute to global warming. I wear clothes and own items that have been manufactured in other parts of the world before being transported to the UK. This has generated work for people but has also resulted in lengthy transportation. I am connected globally in almost everything I do or own, yet on reflection, most of my connections appear to generate a negative impact on the globe, through the waste or products that result from my actions. When my housemates shout at me for leaving the lights on or say ‘You are not doing washing again! Think of the penguins and polar bears!’ it makes me stop and think about the amount of electricity just one house uses and that I should do more to be a better global citizen. I think it is crucial for children from a young age to ensure that they are aware of their global connections as they are the ones who will shape the future. I try to do my bit for the planet by recycling and car sharing, but I have doubts especially when I hear on the news about recycled objects ending up in different parts of the world … It is only when asked to stop and think about ‘my connections’ that I realise just how much impact one person has on the planet. (Anonymised responses to a directed task, shared on UWE Online for the module ‘Global Perspectives for Change and Development’ 2008, presented with permissions) These statements reflect an obvious growing awareness of personal and emotional connections with the wider world together with an emerging sense of professional responsibility. Although it may be argued that the creation of sustainable carbon free futures is the responsibility of governments, there is evidence in these statements that some beginning teachers are recognising that climate change is an educational issue and that lifelong learning can include ‘responsible lifestyle learning’. This places a new emphasis on specifications for ‘personal development’ that are emerging in curricular discourses. The compulsory school curriculum in England already includes more opportunity for child/young people-led, independent enquiries into matters of concern to themselves (QCA 2008) and the environment is identified by children and young people as such a concern (Hicks and Holden 2007). In this way the lifestyles of teachers in training and my own lifestyle as a teacher trainer fall under a new kind of scrutiny. As professionals we all need to develop capacity to reflect critically on our various impacts on the state of the planet and to develop coping strategies to manage the emotional states that this awareness induces. There are fewer places for me and my way of life to hide.

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Reflexivity from lifelong actions; my changing self within a changing world The life story research approach that I engage in here is aided by artefacts chosen to stimulate critical and reflexive responses to questions about my relationship with the world. I have noted that friends who have been on a trip or a day out like to look at and talk about photographs that they have collected. The detailed descriptive content of photo snaps support the development of conversations (internal and shared) that are open to a wider review process. In Figure 9.1 a small sample of photographs taken over a period of more than 50 years are used to initiate an internal interaction between what Bakhtin (1981) referred to as an earlier and later self. A form of enduring internal dialogised learning is facilitated as contradictions continue to emerge. ‘A dialogised word can never be zaverseno (completed). The resonance or oscillation of possible meanings within it is not only not resolved (nezaverseno), but must increase in complexity as it continues to live’ (Bakhtin 1981: 426). The presentation in Figure 9.1 of ‘Myself with the wider world’ is inevitably incomplete. There are photographs not presented here that are pressing to be included as I think of further life strands that could justifiably be woven into this recycled fabric. Notwithstanding this incompleteness, a convincing theme emerges from the sample that I have selected. Looking retrospectively, ways of seeing, thinking and valuing that seemed more certain to me in my previous states of mind have become confused and challenged as new understandings have their impact and disturb earlier cultural bases of my world view. These points of disturbance are where dialogic critical evaluation should start. As I consider ‘Myself with the wider world’ I have only recently appreciated that it is not just myself that has been changing. So has the relationship between gases, rocks and water in the biosphere that is my very habitat. The capacity of the planet to ‘self-regulate’ and maintain consistent temperatures was gradually accepted as ‘Gaia theory’ within the science community during the 1970s. This self-regulatory system is concisely summarised as follows: As the sun gets hotter, bacterial action in the soil is stimulated, which increases the rate of rock weathering. This in turn pumps more CO2 out of the atmosphere and thus cools the planet. According to Lovelock and Margulis, similar feedback cycles – interlinking plants and rocks, animals and atmospheric gases, micro-organisms and the oceans – regulate the Earth’s climate, the salinity of its oceans, and other important planetary conditions. (Capra 1996: 105) As has already been intimated, during the 54 years since 1955, the date of the first photograph (Figure 9.1: Life with the car), a solidified mass of carbon

An interview with Means published in Resurgence (Kumar 1981) reveals his anger at the greed and consumptive capacity of the Western world, as represented by the exploitation of natural resources by multinational companies on Indian reservation land. His arguments echo views found in Miller, J. and Miller, M. (1979) ‘The Politics of Energy vs the American Indian’ in the journal Akwesasne Notes. ‘At stake. Northern Cheyenne: 1.5 trillion tons of coal. Navaho: 4 Corners Power Plants will use 94 million tons of coal per year’. I was shocked to hear that the Akwesasne Notes printing works were burnt down. By 2002 it was already proposed that anthropogenic global warming could cause damage to the planet’s systems. However the text predominantly reflects themes related to social responsibility at the expense of ecological matters. There is a focus on the life of Mandela but not on the life of Gandhi or Lovelock. My previous publication ‘Emerging from the Tunnel’ (Clough 1998) emphasised that responsible citizens should understand the controversial nature of actions for sustainability.

At the Schumacher Lecture in 1981, I witness Russell Means (American Indian Movement) declare in poetic oratorical style that ‘Peace is not possible’ in a place where Western people’s contact with nature is so removed. His narrative account of his journey to Bristol illustrates how his feet had not touched mother earth since he New influences left his home. His words further stimulate my interest in minority rights issues.

Many years later my new shared publication about citizenship education includes a statement that effective citizens in the C21st will need to change their behaviours to save the environment (Clough and Holden 2002). A picture of Russell Means is still prominent on my bookshelf but at this stage my work is more rooted in social justice themes at community level.

Life with the car

Figure 9.1 Myself with the wider world.

2002

Promoting responsibility

1981

1955

First level of reflection I had begun to love wilderness environments. I had no thought of carbon footprints. This was an era of peace. promise and emerging prosperity in a post-war period. I have taken my own children on such journeys in the ’80s and ’90s and have thought that it is their right to have direct contact with wilderness. I drove long distances to take them there! Now I try to avoid car journeys but have not really sorted my transport needs from my transport wants.

Description

I had been taken to this place which I still remember to this day. I was happy to endure a very long day’s drive from London to a wild north Cornish coastline where I learned about shrimps and other small creatures that live in rock pools on the edge of the Atlantic ocean. It was very sad when my parents took us back to London.

Photograph / Date / Theme

Earth sensing

Figure 9.1 (Continued)

2009

Promoting caring approaches

2008

2004

New networks

Photograph / Date / Theme

Soon after this I prepare an article for the Ngami Times (Maun, Botswana):

Frustrated at our decision not to work with the library project during local elections. Jane and I are walking/camping with a local guide in the Okavanga Delta, Botswana. There are no cars here. We have just heard a lion roar. Neither these animals nor the guide seem perturbed and I am learning to respect natural phenomena in a new way. But should we be here at all?

We are working with an environmental activist. Fred Miller, who is guiding a group of residential care workers to closely study worms adjacent to their place of work. They are intending to create a wormery with the young people in their care who have severe emotional and behavioural difficulties. They will use the compost that the worms create from their food waste for the purposes of planting.

Another unreliable rainy season in Zimbabwe threatens the maize crop and adds fuel to the claim that global warming has affected the agricultural capacity of some areas in southern Africa – raising the stakes in unresolved land issues. The farming/economic activities here have different ecological costs – resulting from fuel searches in the forests. I expand my networks as I participate as volunteer and researcher in a locally initiated community venture, the Zambuko Community Library.

Two years later I was struck by the game being played by children with their grandmother in rural Zimbabwe. They are using a blow-up globe that has just arrived along with boxes of books for the library that this community of subsistence farming families are building. There are hardly any cars here and Jane and I have arrived by bicycle from the capital, Harare.

It was surprising and exciting that the care workers engaged so readily in this investigation on the floor of the woodland. There was much talk and excitement about this and other earth sensing (Van Matre 1979) activities that we undertook together. Some of the care workers found that individuals in their care were responsive to these centring exercises. It was through sharing these ideas that discussions about facilitating the cared for as carers began to take root.

‘Perhaps human fascination for getting out and about in “nature” is what will raise our spiritual awareness and sensitise us to natural systems and more sustainable behaviours. Perhaps the process of human wilderness wandering will so disturb nature that even the wilderness will succumb to the status of another controlled and built environment.’

First level of reflection

Description

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dioxide has been created, the equivalent size of 54 mountains, each a mile high and each of a 12 mile base circumference. Our world has changed for ever and we will have to adapt, to more than climate change. Even in my lifetime the world has shrunk from one that was vast enough to make exploration an adventure and included many distant places where no one had ever trod. Now it has become an almost endless city embedded in an intensive but tame and predictable agriculture. Soon it may revert to a great wilderness again. (Lovelock 2009: 19) It is now widely accepted in the science community that these changes pose a serious threat to the capacity of the planetary systems to continue to be able to regulate the earth’s temperature within limits that can support current levels of biodiversity and the current levels of human population. A 2°C rise in temperature is seen as the limit that the earth’s self-regulating system can cope with. The newspapers of the day report that ‘Almost 9 out of 10 climate scientists do not believe that political efforts to restrict global warming to 2°C will succeed’ (Adam 2009). Reading this uncomfortable proposition I realise that I am in need of a new philosophy and I begin look for a coping strategy for myself and my community of learners. It is a new and fundamental crisis for our living and learning. We are seeing that our common hopes for the future are at risk and that as teachers our levels of responsibility are heightened. ‘One of the tasks of the progressive educator is to unveil opportunities for hope … no matter what the obstacles might be’ (Freire 1994: 9). This key factor was identified by Biko writing about identity struggles in another most uncomfortable situation. Within the context of South African apartheid he emphasised the need for hopeful struggle as a necessary sequel to awareness raising. He invoked Freire’s ‘conscientisation’ process to encourage people … to grapple realistically with their problems, to attempt to find solutions to their problems, to develop what we might call awareness, a physical awareness of their situation, to be able to analyse it and provide answers for themselves. The purpose behind it being really to provide some kind of hope. (Biko 1978: 114, my emphasis) The need for such personalised and hopeful journeying is also identified by Pike and Selby writing in the 1980s. Among four dimensions of learning about the wider world they pinpoint, ‘Process mindedness – understanding that learning and personal journeys are continuous and with no fixed destination’ (Pike and Selby 1988: 35).

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Reviewing my life journeying I recognise that some of the ways of seeing, thinking and valuing that I received from parenting and even imparted during my own parenting no longer have currency in face of the changing world that I inhabit. I am placed in a state referred to by Medina (2003) as one of ‘disidentification’. My continuing lifelong learning enables me to seek out new rays of hope from others with radically different views of self/world relationships. While doing this I retain necessary vestiges of my prior perceptual and valuing systems. ‘Disidentification messes up the relationships within and across families, inviting the re-articulation of the networks of similarities and differences that sustain familial identities’ (Medina 2003: 666–667). Within my own narrative account I can identify shifts towards new forms of ecological outlook and cultural action. These have partly resulted from a gradual change in emphasis in the way that media have identified and publicised environmental risks – ranging from fear of nuclear contamination and scarcity of resource in the 1970s (Richardson 1976) to more recent concerns about anthropogenic damage to the biosphere that is contributing to climate change (Heise 2009: 205). My own shifts in outlook have also partly derived from the influence of social movements and pedagogical networks that I have encountered. Such influences have supported me through various stages of ‘disidentification’ and have sustained my interest in developing innovatory pedagogical responses to challenges that are identified. Finding expression through new communities of learning My engagements with social movements and pedagogical networks have largely been outside of official political frameworks. To this extent my professional development has resulted from what Beck and Beck-Gernsheim have referred to as ‘self culture movements’ or ‘self-staging’ and even ‘seeing … life as a work of art’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 42). Self-culture movements and the processes of self-staging are predicated on direct and creative action within informal networks rather than formal political frameworks in which selves are represented by others. My own self-staging in this field has been enhanced through training and self-development in informal settings created within Local Authorities, Higher Education Institutions and Education Trusts with which I have been actively engaged. These professional affiliations supporting forms of ‘global education’ have served to legitimise innovative curricular approaches and interventions. Through them I have been able to sustain my concerns for ‘learner centred’ and ‘world centred’ education of kinds that Hicks (2003: 266) has identified as the joint legacies of humanistic psychology (Carl Rogers 1983), participatory development (Paulo Freire 1970) and peace education (Johan Galtung 1976).

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For some this work was being achieved when attacks from the political right, which subsequently found expression in the contemporary National Curriculum in England, posed a serious threat to education initiatives of this kind. Hicks (2003) identifies that this distancing of global education from the mainstream political sphere originated from the mid-1980s following targeted criticism that such forms of education (peace studies and world studies) were indoctrinatory, one-sided, pedagogically unsound and moreover lowered educational standards because they were not real curriculum subjects (Scruton 1985, Hillgate Group 1986). During this period non-governmental influences in England included Oxfam Education, Save the Children, local development education centres and such organisations as the Minority Rights Group. The latter developed a widely used pack ‘Profile on Prejudice’ (Van Der Gaag and Gerlach 1985) that was partly derived from the experience of Russell Means of the American Indian Movement and from reports in Akwesasne Notes as featured in Figure 9.1. It is ironic as I reflect on these materials that I used them to promote awareness of human/children’s rights and of diversity issues while downplaying the ecological and environmental concerns that with hindsight seem obvious and pressing. This was perhaps because I was working in inner urban schools where social themes and the need for solution-focused approaches were at the forefront of children’s experience in the classroom. The third entry in Figure 9.1, ‘Promoting responsibility’, indicates that my published work following the Rio Summit only turned to environmental concerns as I drew attention to the challenge that teachers face in supporting learning about controversial issues (Clough 1998: 64). In a section of a chapter headed ‘Children, cars and the future’ detailed reference is made to work undertaken with children in three primary classrooms. However my line of argument emphasised the teacher’s role in ensuring that discussion with children about the exercising of their participatory rights is informed by a broad spectrum of viewpoints. A case study is presented of a class that had engaged children in an enquiry about the protest campaign that was temporarily halting a road widening scheme less than two miles from their school. The children communicated some of the findings of their enquiry in a play called Fair Mile during which many perspectives of local people were shared. My summary statement reads, ‘The key question arising in this case study was how teachers can ensure that the children are well informed about all aspects of a local issue,’ (Clough 1998: 65). While I would not disagree with this principle today as I engage in teacher training activities, I would now draw in a different way on data that I presented. For example, one child in the play, acting the part of an owl living in Fair Mile, declared: I tell you things are going to change around here [waves a wing]. All this woody peacefulness and plenty will become a new human run, a roady thing through our homes. (Clough 1998: 73)

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Another child provided a summary as follows: Roads themselves are alright. They are not the real problem. It is the form of transport that we use, the way we power is seriously wrong. The world will get seriously damaged unless we find some new way of powering cars. (Clough 1998: 74) If human impact on the environment was a matter of concern to them 12 years ago, then I wonder what they feel now, given what is publicly recognised about the anthropogenic causes of climate change. With hindsight the evaluation should have focused more critically on the possibility that the children’s evocation of ecological value may have been negated within the then current policy drive for a citizenship curriculum in England that prioritised support for children’s political awareness and democratic engagement and teachers’ safe and unbiased handling of controversial issues (QCA 1998: 60). The juxtaposition of their expressions of ecological value alongside those of everyone created only limited opportunities for dialogic exchange and reflexivity. The evaluation question should focus less on the capacity of the children to recognise the ways that their views were balanced by other ways of looking at the world and more on the extent to which the educational experience enabled them to build on their newly acquired sensitivities about ecological issues. We could ask, ‘to what extent did the children’s enquiry stimulate an enduring and sustainable education process about themselves in the wider world? What kind of pedagogical response would have ensured that their original value statements became an integral part of their subsequent actions and inner dialogues?’ As for me, my subsequent engagement with groups who take independent direct action to find solutions to their problems has sensitised me in different ways and has opened me to new ways of seeing, thinking and valuing in education. As identified in the fourth image of Figure 9.1, ‘New Networks’, this included working and researching alongside a group of subsistence farmers in rural Zimbabwe who had decided to build their own ‘Zambuko Community Library’, a bridge into learning that was independent of the local schools where printed materials were very scarce (http://www.zambuko communitylibrary.org). Our repeated visits (1999 ongoing) to this community beyond the electricity and water grids have raised in my mind new possibilities of a low carbon lifestyle. The lifestyles within this particular community in Zimbabwe were formed not only by the material economic constraints of their physical situation but also by an enduring commitment to preserve meaningful relationships with the natural environment. Their very different life stories continue to be integrated within my own life learning experience. My two sons, Ben and Leo, are creating a film about a migrant’s return visit to the community after 15 years in England and have documented ways in which environmental and ecological dimensions are closely implicated with the social

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and spiritual processes of re-engaging with family and friends after so long away. Moreover the community library has now been identified as a site for work-related learning on a programme at the University of the West of England, Bristol, for care workers and teachers who are exploring the connected themes of ‘local/global partnerships, diversity, sustainability and innovation’. Thinking and valuing within these broad communities of learning My exposure, as a lifelong learner, to a network of diverse influences has led me to adopting a learning identity that can be dubbed as activity based, absorbent and dialogic. A review of my developing perspectives over the period of time represented in Figure 9.1 would suggest that my learning strengths have relied less on enduring certainties and more on sustained participation and reflection in a range of innovative activities that address social justice issues within my current frame of interest. These activities have generated internal dialogues through which I have begun to accommodate new world views – a form of ‘disidentification’ as has been discussed above. This flexible and integrative learning identity has run counter to many of the expectations within the teacher education community of which I am also a member. The latter has responded to assertive government requirements premised on a hierarchical compliance regime related to nationalised curricula and associated professional competences. These requirements prioritised subject specialist knowledge over critical understanding of complexities within this contested field of diversity and social justice (Osler and Morrison 2000). Figure 9.2 characterises two learning paradigms, the assertive and the integrative. The figure differentiates, after Capra (1996: 10) and Sterling (2001: 58), between hierarchic and networked power relations and portrays contrasting learning identities that can emerge. On the one hand an assertive and hierarchical paradigm encourages responses to identified targets and the adoption of compliance measures. Integrative and networked engagement, on the other hand, has potential to encourage a more personalised and holistic review sustained through the enacting of dialogic exchange in everyday encounters. In this way Figure 9.2 begins to map the formation of differential learning identities that are being explored in this chapter’s stories of ‘self with the wider world’. It identifies possible routes towards the kinds of critical and reflexive engagement that are a necessary part of sustainability education. I have always found it challenging to integrate assertive public policy drives within my developing and personalised life-learning framework. Of course it is a frequent occurrence that personal/professional aspirations are not encapsulated by policy drives which derive from different kinds of economic and cultural discourses. The living contradictions that arise from this tension have

In our own words

Paradigms of learning

Assertive

Learning within hierarchies

Response to targets, standards, quotas Training Analysis

Outcomes asserted by others

Reductionism Knowledge / skills transfer Compliance

Communication for actions

Integrative

Learning within networks

Developing new sensitivities from actions Self with wider world

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Enacting dialogues Synthesis Holism Personal capacity building Critical selfregulation / creativity

Differential learning identities

Sustained personal learning

Communication from actions

Figure 9.2 Paradigms of learning and differential learning identities.

often become a substantive focus in life story/action research in professional settings (Whitehead 1993). The question that emerges in this life history approach is the extent to which this tentative finding can be applied more generally. To what extent are current policy drives for education for citizenship and sustainable development compatible with the activities of those whose learning identities have developed from lifelong engagement within networked environmentally rooted communities. The Stern Review (2006) on ‘The Economics of Climate Change’ included the recommendation that fostering ‘a shared understanding of the nature of climate change, and its consequences, is critical in shaping behaviour. Governments can be a catalyst for dialogue through evidence, education, persuasion and discussion’. (Stern 2006: 21). In England official responses to this challenge can be exemplified through the eco-schools/sustainable schools policy drives which set universal targets for sustainable behaviours at institutional levels for 2020 (Sustainable Schools National Framework 2009). These measures may certainly reduce CO2 emissions from educational sites and encourage engagement in eco-processes. However the distinction drawn between ‘communication for learning’ and

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‘communication from learning’ in Figure 9.2 presents other possibilities for educationalists. Assertive interventions from eco-policy drives (communication for learning) may be complemented by an ongoing communication process that arises from such eco-activity – one that facilitates personal transformation towards creative and fulfilling participation. Such transformations may only be realised through a sustained and progressive learning process that includes: • • • • •

opportunity to re-sensitise to the natural world dialogic engagement the inclusion of a global perspective through engagement with active/ creative community organisations participatory enquiry approaches to support personalised and localised understanding of ecology opportunity to reflect critically on the complex relationship between our lifestyles and our physical situation.

In short this corresponds to a form of facilitated capacity building that is predicated on critical self-staging approaches through which courage, creativity and hopefulness can be found, to rearticulate the way we identify ourselves with the wider world and review the way that we behave within it. The argument that is proposed in this chapter is that life history and life story enquiry methods represent an effective way of discerning learning from integrative ecological approaches. There are many lives – professional and personal – to explore. My own life and teaching is portrayed here and I can report that the contradictions referenced in Figure 9.1 continue to resonate in my teaching. I continue to reference the journal Resurgence which makes accessible a range of world views and value systems, including Sarvodoya (the upliftment of all life), Swaraj (self-transformation through small-scale participation) and Swadeshi (local sustainable economies) (Kumar 2008: 13). Although it is difficult to relate such values to the content of official documents for Initial Teacher Education, for example the Standards for Qualified Teacher Status (TDA 2006), they do sit well with the values of the subsistence farmers that I encountered under the leadership of Dominic Mandere at the Zambuko Community Library in Zimbabwe as described above. As we face a most serious environmental global crisis, the application of such principles to our physical situation may act as a stimulus for a form of ‘critical consciousness brought about not through intellectual effort alone but through praxis, the authentic union of action and reflection’ (Freire 1970). Drawing conclusions: a case study of networked learning The process of ‘understanding ourselves and our lives with the wider world’ and our continuous dialogic engagement within education for sustainability

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can be illustrated by my experience as evaluator for the project initiated in 2006 by the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) and Creative Partnerships. The project worked with two schools in Bristol within the framework of the RSA’s ‘Arts and Ecology Project’ and provided an opportunity to explore outcomes from a radical networked educational programme focused on ecology and sustainability. These are described and evaluated in the project report held by the RSA (Clough 2006) and in a paper subsequently published in the RSA Journal (Munro with Clough 2007). Data that were gathered represent some of the dialogues that emerged from the actions of the project. They include statements by children, teachers and the artists reflecting their developing understanding of new actions and behaviours that they were adopting in their lives. One provocative action in the project involved the sending of solid artefacts through the post, unwrapped but with addresses clearly written on the object itself with an appropriate collection of blue stamps. Imi Mauf, a practising artist employed as a project leader in one of the schools, sent such artefacts to the children as they began to consider what such terms as ecology and sustainability mean – and before they actually met with her. At a simple level this unusual action of the artist stimulated dialogic engagement. The children asked ‘why is the artist sending materials like this?’ Subsequently the children sent solid objects through the post themselves – recycled water bottles, addressed with blue stamps, with messages inside to many people that they thought could answer the question that interested them, ‘What do you do to help the environment?’ They sent one to me as project evaluator! The bottle and message still sit on my desk. This act engaged me in a form of participatory evaluation that I had not expected. Internal dialogues had been stimulated. The exhibition of responses to the messages in the bottles mounted by the artist and children working in collaboration provided an innovative way to view and review the many possible actions that people can take in the name of sustainability. I am still asking myself – what is the enduring consequence of this project for my own behaviours? As evaluator I set myself the task of attempting to discern the capacity of the children (9–10 years) to give reasoned voice to the day to day dilemmas that arose from this sensitising to sustainability issues. They had taken photographs during the project and selected some of these to discuss with me during interviews about their learning. One child described how walking the dog without the car is in fact quite time-consuming and she has noted that her flip-flops may not be the right footwear for the life without the car culture that she is adopting. At least she is talking with her grandmother about it. ‘My Grandma thinks it is good.’ Another child described the case of his own household which lives in a high rise flat near the centre of the city. It does not have a ‘black bin’ for recycling. He commented that his family,

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which has relatively recently arrived from Somalia, is one which does not ‘waste much anyway’. He explained that he had decided not to talk with his mother about recycling: ‘I am scared of rejection. My mum might say “No.”’ Another child mused as follows: A piece of wood in a river does not matter because it rots. Trees keep falling into rivers. Fruit would rot away in a river. Plastic cartons would not rot away. When I am a thousand years old I could say I remember when that piece of plastic was thrown away. The honest commentaries provided by these children illustrate how ecological thinking can be sustained beyond the classroom, even though ecological behaviours are difficult to prioritise when other pressures are prevailing. They provide illustration of sustained internal and external communication for action. Data from interviews with the artist included a statement that is most significant for those who are developing pedagogical approaches that sustain dialogic engagement in the field of sustainability education: In this project I did not want to be negative about what we are doing to the world. I have never said if we do not do something we are all doomed. For example we use far too many plastic bags but we can make these canvas bags to use at school. It was something they could cope with emotionally. (Imi Mauf) Thus a basic principle, already referred to in the writings of Biko (1978) and Freire (1994), that sustaining education process involves the (re)kindling of hopefulness, is referenced in clear and applied format. And from that moment in time, I remember about sustainability every time I have forgotten my canvas bag. There is a telling piece of data from interviews with a parent of a child who had been involved in this project. A father describes an interaction with his daughter as follows: There is one thing. When the council delivered the recycling bins and left our house out, she said ‘We need to recycle or we are going to die in 50 years if we don’t stop producing all the pollution’ … I said ‘We will see.’ This talk of sustainability, it missed our generation. When it did start coming round it’s more like a counterculture coming from the side, from the left and right. It needs to be made part of their culture. Here is an example of parental contribution to sustaining dialogue and hopefulness (we hope) and also a comment on the need for forms of sustainability education that are integrative rather than just assertive.

I am noticing new learning for sustainability networks. The biology student living in the house is elected as the chairperson of the University Fair Trade Association, the local Climate Action Group has sent me the 8th Newsletter, the film The Age of Stupid had the world’s biggest ever simultaneous premiere showing, I am being offered a car share.

What are the implications for education for sustainability? Why has the Rose Review on the primary curriculum dropped the recommendation that humanities education be given the title ‘Human, social and environmental understanding’? It has now reverted to ‘Historical and geographical understanding’. Will education for sustainability be relegated to a side issue of safeguarding children? The sales person is using an economic rationale ‘It makes economic sense.You are saving money which will help you buy it.’ But what will this more ecological car mean for my lifestyle? I will have to carry less around with me. Why do I carry anything around with me? Why do people carry more than fits in a carrier bag? Should I have a car at all? What does 115g per 1km mean to our world? How many oak trees would …?

Question to the biology student living in the house: ‘What do you think of this ecology encyclopedia?’ ‘I love it. It will make a lovely present for him and you could make a birthday cake in the shape of the world, with the land masses green and the sea in blue.’

To James on his 12th birthday: ‘What do you think of this cake?’ James: ‘It is like the world.This cake is not stable. Nor is the world.The world is not stable.’ To James’ great-grandmother: ‘What does it feel like eating half the world?’ Mary: ‘It gives me a thrill. When you are my age you can do what you like.’

Thoughts for the day. We must change our car. This car does 38mpg if you are lucky. The one in the secondhand showroom has a diesel engine and does 66mpg. It is classified as having low emissions. Even as a secondhand car it only generates 115 grams of CO2 per kilometre.

First level of reflection In what ways am I engaging dialogically with my actions on a daily basis? There is not space enough here to write the full list of all the unstarted and unfinished pledges that I make myself. In the first instance I really am going to have to rationalise how I move around – and whether I have to move around so much …

Description

The message and the bottle (with the blue stamp) that the children sent stares me in the face. I remember that the child in the RSA Arts and Ecology project wrote her own message – explaining that what she did was to ‘feed her chickens the left overs.’

Figure 9.3 Ongoing dialogue with self and others.

My life with cars

The world as a cake

Ongoing dialogue with others

Ongoing dialogue with self

Photograph

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End note, but not end of life learning What can be learned from such life story exploration? For myself the dialogic process is ongoing and snippets from my latest life struggles with sustainability are included in Figure 9.3. There are discussions at home about birthday presents for children – an ecological encyclopaedia, a birthday cake in the form of the planet, jokes about very serious things: ‘It is like the world. This cake is not stable. Nor is the world – the world is not stable’ (James, 12 years). There is mention too of the purchase (at last) of a more ecological car and an enduring question about why I have learned to carry things round with me in the way that I do. There is a suggestion too that my evolving perspective/outlook may not be sustained in new curricula for schools and trainee teachers. At a surface level the life story approach adopted here has illustrated ways in which an educational theme of social justice is ever moving. At another level the juxtaposition of my own dialogic engagement with those of children within a single interwoven narrative has provided opportunity to consider the relative value of different kinds of learning identity that the education process has the power to support. It has provided opportunity for the development of tentative hypotheses – that we should begin to promote opportunity for a sustainable sustainability education that is networked in ways that reflect the webs of life of which as human beings we are a part and that create communities of learning and action for the planet that we inhabit. Notwithstanding its interwoven nature, this is a single life narrative and as such may achieve only what so many educational research ventures may achieve – a limited, partial glimpse of how educational ideas, in this case about sustainability, may become integrated into a person’s life. Tomorrow I will have become a different learning person. But today, as you read this, you will be able to note tentative findings that may stir your own deliberations about power relations that lie at the heart of any education process. References Adam, D. (2009) ‘World Will Not Meet 2°C Warning Target, Experts Agree’, The Guardian, 14 April 2009. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: University of Texas. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualisation, London: Sage. Biko, S. (1978) I Write What I Like, Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers. Capra, F. (1996) The Web of Life, London: HarperCollins. Clough, N. (1998) ‘Emerging from the Tunnel’, in C. Holden and N. Clough (eds), Children as Citizens: Education for Participation, London: Jessica Kingsley. Clough, N. (2006) Report on the RSA/Creative Partnerships, Arts and Ecology Project. Bristol, unpublished. Clough, N. and Holden, C. (2002) Education for Citizenship: Ideas into Action, London: Routledge.

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Freire, P. (1994) Pedagogy of Hope, London: Continuum. Freire, P. (1970) ‘Cultural Action for Freedomm Monograph Series No. 1’, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Galtung, J. (1976) ‘Peace Education: Problems and Conflicts’ in M. Haavelsrud (ed.), Education for Peace: Reflection and Action, Guildford: IPC Science and Technology Press. Heise, U. (2009) Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hicks, D. (2003) Thirty Years of Global Education: a Reminder of Key Principles and Precedents, Educational Review, 55(3): 265–275. Hicks, D. and Holden, C. (eds) (2007) Teaching the Global Dimension: Key Principles and Effective Practice, London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Hillgate Group (1986) Whose School? A Radical Manifesto, London: Hillgate Group. Kumar, S. (1981) ‘Survival of the American Indians: Russell Means’, Resurgence, no. 89. Kumar, S. (2008) ‘The Gandhian Trinity: A Template for Ecology, Peace and Social Justice’, Resurgence, no. 246. Lovelock, J. (2009) The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books. Medina, J. (2003) ‘Identity Trouble. Disidentification and the Problem of Difference’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 29(6): 657–682. Miller, M. and Miller, J. (1979) ‘The Politics of Energy vs the American Indian’, Akwesasne Notes, 11(2), Buffalo: State University of New York. Munro, F. with Clough, N. (2007) Treading Lightly, London: RSA Journal. Osler, A. and Morrison, M. (2000) Inspecting Schools for Race and Equality: Ofsted’s Strengths and Weaknesses, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Pike, G. and Selby, D. (1988) Global Teacher, Global Learner, London: Hodder & Stoughton. QCA (1998) Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools: Final Report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship, London: QCA. QCA (2008) ‘A Big Picture of the Curriculum’ http://www.qca.org.uk/libraryAssets/media/ Big_Picture_2008.pdf (accessed July 2009). Richardson, R. (1976) Learning for Change in World Society: Reflections, Activities and Resources, London: World Studies Project. Rogers, C. (1983) Freedom to Learn for the Eighties. Columbus, OH: Merrill. Scruton, R. (1985) World Studies: Education or Indoctrination? London: Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies. Stern, E (2006) ‘Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change; Executive Summary’ http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/4/3/ Executive_Summary.pdf (accessed July 2009). Sterling, S. (2001) Sustainable Education: Revisioning Learning and Change, Totnes: Green Books. Sustainable Schools National Framework http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/sustainableschools/ framework/framework_detail.cfm?id=6 (accessed July 2009). TDA (2006) http://www.tda.gov.uk/partners/ittstandards.aspx (accessed July 2009). Van Der Gaag, N. and Gerlach, L. (1985) Profile on Prejudice, London: MRG. Van Matre, S. (1979) Sunship Earth. An Earth Education Programme, USA: American Camping Association. Whitehead, J. (1993) The Growth of Educational Knowledge: Creating Your Own Living Educational Theories, Bournemouth: Hyde Publications.

Chapter 10

‘I lived down the road from you’ Exploring power and identity, then and now Jacky Brine

Introduction I spent my childhood and early adulthood in Bristol, and after a lengthy absence I returned to take up my current position at the University of the West of England and was asked to present a professorial inaugural lecture. The inaugural lecture is a formal celebration of the professor’s appointment to which colleagues, family and friends are invited; it can bring together their differing (perhaps even conflicting) worlds. The audience is both academic, with guests from across the field, and lay, and in these ways offers a different set of challenges to that of the standard academic lecture or conference presentation. For these reasons I turned away from my usual interest in the education policies of the European Union, and focused instead on the policy that structured my own schooling – the 1944 Education Act with its tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary education determined by an ‘intelligence’ test, the 11-plus, taken during the last year of primary school. This chapter is based on my initial and subsequent research into classed and gendered aspects of Bristol schooling through the mid-’50s to mid-’60s, the period and place of my primary and secondary education. In particular it is focused on the ‘bilateral’ school, developed by Bristol City Council, along with a few other local authorities, as one layer within Bristol’s state and private schooling hierarchy: independent fee-paying schools, state grammar schools, bilateral schools, secondary modern schools. The bilateral school included both grammar and secondary modern streams within the same site: side by side, but nevertheless separated by curricula, by the allocation of spaces, and by everyday practices and signifiers (Brine 2006a). In this way it (re)constructed classificatory practices that began in primary school and which were most explicitly consolidated through the examination practices at the end of primary and the end of secondary education (Brine 2006b). In my lecture (Brine 2001), I explained that my approach was (and still is) based on an understanding that society, as it is constructed, benefits some to the detriment of others. Thus, I view my biography, my actions, as elements

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of wider figurations, networks of dependencies, and in doing so I invoke Bauman’s desire: to see the social in the individual, the general in the particular, to show how individual biography intertwines with a shared history of a time, place and class; to ask questions that make evident things into puzzles, to defamiliarize the familiarity of biography. (Bauman 1990: 10; emphasis added) The tension between individual biography and the shared history of a time, place and class is at the core of this research, not only in the understanding of the practices and effects of the 1944 Act, but also, as I will show in this chapter, in its methodology. Linked to a tension between biography and history is that of agency and structure, a tension often posed as a question: how much are our lives ‘determined’ by structures (such as education) and to what extent can we ourselves ‘make things happen’; what ‘agency’ do we have, what are the means by which, as Anyon (1983) discussed, we may accommodate or resist these structures? To what extent can we move beyond that which may restrict our choices, and constrict our lives? These are some of the questions that underpin my research interest in education policy. As Stephen Ball (1994) has argued, the effects of policy are twofold. The first effect is on the structures and the processes of learning – the apparent intention of policy: to make things different. The second effect is on the individual – some will benefit from them and some will not. But most importantly the practices of education policy affect how we see ourselves, our sense of self, and our subjectivity. Walkerdine et al. (2001) describe this as the ‘self-formation of the subject’; ‘the regulative apparatuses of particular modes of government at different historical moments produce different kinds of subject, and power is implicated not in the possession of capital but in the actual self-formation of the subject’ (2001: 142). They point out that much sociological work on ‘the subject’ within the debate on structure and agency has been ‘limited by an unwillingness to work with the notion of unconscious processes’ (2001: 140). Raphael Reed (2002) also argues for an exploration of our unconscious as researchers, arguing that it gives increased layers to our understandings, to our perceptions of others and to our understanding of our selves, thereby ‘creating an internal dialogue of creation’ (2002: 90). The journey of this research started with an autobiographical account of my schooling (the biographical), from which I then turned to the policy itself, to contemporary and reflective accounts of the 1944 Education Act and an archival search of the Bristol Record Office (the social historical). In my lecture (2001) I reported my analysis of these data. Although this research had located my biography within the social historical, I began to wonder about the experiences of others, other people and other bilateral

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schools. How much was my experience my own, and how much was shared with others? I used the local media to call for people who had attended one of Bristol’s ten bilateral schools between 1956 and 1964. I received 20 responses which, by chance, included equal numbers of those passing the 11plus and failing, 13 women and seven men. With the exception of two men located on the working–lower-middle-class borders, we all shared a postwar, white working-class background. These interviews are those of a people who, unlike working-class children at grammar schools, have rarely been written about: David Hargreaves’ (1967) study of boys at a secondary modern school is one of the very few. Even more rarely have we written of ourselves: Gillian Plummer (2000) is one such. The life histories gathered from the 20 people in this study provide a fragment of oral history from a working-class community repeatedly hidden from history (Perks and Thomson 2006). Each person was asked if they would prefer to meet with me at the University or at another, preferably work-related or public, place. Many chose to come to my room at the University. Because of particular difficulties a couple were interviewed by telephone. I conducted all interviews and then transcribed according to a range of categories, either related to my own questions or to unanticipated themes emerging from the process itself. As each semi-structured interview, lasting up to 90 minutes or so, roamed fairly easily, this approach to transcription enabled me to group all of one respondent’s references, say for example to uniforms, together. And this in turn allowed me to analyse the entire project’s findings on uniforms, on the distinctions these constructed between grammar and modern, and between boys and girls (Brine 2006a). My first analysis of these interview data focused on the life histories of four of the women (Brine 2006a), who found themselves on differing sides of the grammar–modern divide and, as well as tracing their different life journeys, explored the everyday signifiers of difference constructed between themselves and those in the other stream, ‘each constantly in the gaze of the other, and each constructed against the other’ (2006a: 436). In the second analysis, drawing on the full study, I concentrated on the ‘everyday classificatory practices’ of this particular form of selective schooling (Brine 2006b). Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, disposition and classificatory practices, I argued that the secondary ‘bilateral’ school consolidated the classificatory practices begun in primary school, and that as well as key moments of selection and a highly differentiated curricula, classification relied on everyday practices and signifiers of difference. Rather than replicate these earlier accounts in this chapter, I will focus on a particular aspect of the methodology of the project; not so much on the general approaches of autobiography and life history narratives but on myself as subject within it, myself as a multilayered, possibly conflictual, and certainly continuously regenerating, subject within it. I attempt to go

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beyond the conscious researcher towards, as advocated by Walkerdine et al., the unconscious. So, rather than present a chronological, and hence possibly repetitive, narrative of the research, I will endeavour to place myself, as both researcher and research subject, within the frame, to problematise and get beneath the surface of the research, the apparent objectivity and absence of emotion in the two published accounts of it (2006a, 2006b). To explore questions of learning, identity and power, I will draw not only on some of the life histories of the people in this study, but on my own also – and the conflicts, tensions and delights that have been, and are, part of this. These are the shifting, multilayered boundaries of identity and power, of what was my working-class childhood, of what was my identity as a researcher and academic at the time of the interviews, and the continuing struggle as I so frequently slip and slide between them, to accommodate, and at times resist, both. Life history: then and now Whilst there are many aspects of both the interview data and their analysis that I could choose to focus on here, it may lead to a thin, possibly falsely chronological and over-simplistic/over-authored narrative. I wish instead to highlight the complexities and confusions of life history research when the researcher shares a great deal of that history and its legacy with those she is working with. This could imply that, at the time of the interview, we also shared the same place, a similar contemporary reality, but as I show below, this was not the case. In the 1980s, feminist explorations of the relationship between the researcher and the researched focused on what Maria Mies (1983) termed ‘conscious partiality’, a conscious identification of the researcher with the ‘subject’ of the research. Sandra Harding (1987) explored a similar concept which she named ‘shared critical plane’. The reasoning was that the shared gender of researcher and researched meant that they also shared a similar gendered experience of reality which facilitated and enabled a greater depth and quality of research. Such essentialist assumptions of equality between women within an interview situation ignored the power inherent in the role of researcher, and took little account of differences of ethnicity, class or educational privilege. Engaging with the power of the interview situation led to changes in analysis and representation: to mitigate against the appropriation of the ‘other’, the ‘researched’ (Opie 1992), and to texts of multiple voices. These more nuanced understandings of research relationships, particularly within the interview situation, continue to engage us, as for example in Michelle Fine’s (1994) work on the negotiations of power within the interview situation. Jean Duncombe and Julie Jessop’s (2002) work on rapport and friendship (faked or not) explores the boundaries that the researcher places on the intimacy engendered in the interview; boundaries that the ‘researched’

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was unaware of, when meeting by chance at a later date, presumed an ongoing friendship. A feminist pursuit of greater transparency within the research process led through the 1980s to the autobiographical within it (Stanley 1992; Swindells 1995). What I refer to as ‘the Bristol fifty-something’ project stemmed from a wish to explore my own learning journey, and there were many times when talking with these people, and when transcribing, analysing and representing their/my histories that I experienced painful, insightful and even humorous moments of class-slippage and confusion. One of these moments, expressed in the title of this chapter, was triggered by Liz, now a senior manager in further education. We met in her office. She suddenly broke off from her account, looked at me afresh and said, ‘Jacky Brine! Now I remember you. I lived just down the road from you, on King’s Walk, and you lived on Sparkly Walk.’ Suddenly, I was back there – we remembered our siblings, our other friends, how we played chase in the dark, scrambling over the fences of neighbours’ gardens. As we spoke I remembered the pebble-dashed uniformity of 1950s south Bristol council housing, the wind tunnels that funnelled down from the nearby Mendip Hills, the complete lack of anything to do, anywhere to go, other than playing in the street. I was the child inside the adult sitting there with her microphone, her tape recorder and her questions, yet strangely ‘back at home’ and ‘connected’ with Liz; our conversation went to a deeper, in some ways class-coded, shorthand, level. Sitting together, talking and remembering, it was as if Liz (and I) simultaneously inhabited parallel worlds, the child and the adult. The interviews which often started with a fairly factual account quickly became far more emotional, for myself as well as for the person who had agreed to talk to me. Walkerdine et al. (2001: 27) have written that ‘social class is the social and psychic practices through which ordinary people live, survive and cope’. Education, or more precisely the schooling process of the bilateral school, was a powerful, pernicious class practice that remains deep inside, no matter how ‘successful’ their/my post-school lives/life have been, either personally or occupationally. In the following account I focus on the emotions of anger, envy and empathy, which arose out of the schooling/interviewing experience. Anger

Liz and I both attended the same primary school, and then went on to the same secondary school, Failand Hill, but Liz passed the 11-plus and went into the grammar stream and I failed and went into the modern. We spoke about the rigidity of the streamed system, of the impossibility of moving from modern to grammar (Brine 2001; 2006b). The importance of time, place and class was central to the study: Liz started at Failand Hill two years after me. She recalled the school structure as two grammar streams (A and B), a ‘mixed

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grammar–modern’ stream (C) and two secondary modern streams (D and E) and one ‘remedial’ class (F). The construction of a ‘mixed grammar–modern’ stream made this ‘newer’ model significantly different from that of my year, which was A, B grammar, C–E secondary modern, and F ‘remedial’: there was no mixed grammar–modern stream, and no opportunity for the blurring of the curricula or examination boundaries – and no blurring of the very distinctive boundaries of ‘worthiness’. What struck me most forcibly was that this structure, remembered by Liz, must have operated at the same time as the very rigid categorising structure that prevented Sandra, Michael and myself, consistently at the top of the C-stream, from any ‘grammar’ curriculum or examination. Had I entered the school two years later, and then reached the C-stream, my life chances, and my young sense of self, would have been very different. I wrote in my research notebook of feelings of ‘anger, frustration, sadness’, and an internalised self-doubt of failure: ‘was it me, just not thought to be good enough? Nor my friend Sandra? Nor Michael?’ Liz stayed on into the sixth form and ‘got to know the headmaster very well’ and her recollection gave me a greater understanding of my own experience: His main aim was to compete with the grammar schools, at parents’ evenings and award ceremonies it was how many had gone to Oxford and Cambridge. A lot of it would have been him feeling that this would water down, by moving these children up. All his attention was on the grammar stream, no doubt about that, because he was wanting to prove that these schools were equal to grammar schools … He had this very old-fashioned view that he had to run it like a grammar school, and instead of which he forgot about the majority of his pupils basically. Even now I feel the anger that I expressed in my lecture, for while Liz got to know the headmaster well, for most of us he remained a very distant and frightening figure. More importantly, for me and many others, we were the ones he ‘forgot’. Anger was also a common emotion amongst others who failed this pivotal selective examination, a process of selection that began in the early years of primary school. John talked ‘with some burning anger’ about the streaming and the constant testing in his primary school. Diane remembered her final year of primary: Being told ‘right, you lot get on with your work, I’m sat here with the 11-plus group!’ In other words, ‘you’re the lot who aren’t going to pass the 11-plus, you sit there, this lot are going to.’ We did different sort of work, and they had the teacher’s attention, and we didn’t. I wrote in my research notebook that ‘whilst talking, and as they remember, I can catch glimpses of their childhood-self in their face. Very strange.’ The remembering

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appeared not only to affect body language, but it was as if I could see the child, the face of the child, the emotions – sometimes of pleasure and excitement but more often of pain, bewilderment and anger. Valerie failed the 11-plus and was one of the very few who was allowed to transfer from the secondary modern stream to the grammar (Brine 2006a). She left school at 18 and although encouraged to go to university chose instead to train to become a primary teacher at teacher training college. Reflecting back on the 11-plus and the system of rigid streaming she said: I can’t possibly, can’t possibly say it’s good because it could have changed my life. I couldn’t praise it. I just couldn’t, couldn’t, I just couldn’t praise it. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I’m the last person. John, who also failed the 11-plus, completed an engineering apprenticeship and later trained to be a secondary teacher, said ‘streaming is absolutely crazy. The 11-plus doesn’t make any sense’, and Diane, another ex-11-plus failure who became a primary teacher said ‘I thought it was dreadful, dreadful.’ It was not only those who failed the 11-plus who felt this way. Jane, who passed the exam and went into the grammar stream of Denby Dell, said: I don’t like the idea of a bilateral. I think it was very difficult there. In my year there were four classes of secondary modern and two of grammar and it was very different if you were in the grammar … I don’t think it was a good thing at all. I always wanted to be one of the secondary modern. I didn’t like school at all, I wanted to leave, I felt quite restricted. Brenda, who also passed the exam, thought that: Kids were going into secondary modern because they failed the 11-plus and it wasn’t because they weren’t clever enough to go in the grammar, they might have had a bad day, a headache, period pain, or were too nervous – because a lot of parents put pressure on them, offered bikes and all sorts of things, holidays down Butlin’s. And if you didn’t pass that was final, and you were put into secondary and that’s where you stayed for four or five years. Most of the thousand in my school would’ve been modern. Working-class expressions of anger are often viewed as uncontrolled, uncalled for, demanding, unreasonable, even aggressive, and hence frequently ignored. Liz, Valerie, John, Brenda, and myself have all, in educational and occupational terms, succeeded – yet the anger and the sense of injustice remains, we carry it with us. Walkerdine et al. state: ‘the routes by which anger can be expressed depend on where the individual is located in the discursive positioning of the subject, and therefore the power and effectiveness of their response’ (2001: 129): our adult articulations of anger may differ from

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our younger expressions of it, or our apparently passive acceptance of it, but the sense of frustration and powerlessness remain. Envy

Although I have written previously about the gendered curriculum, particularly for those in the secondary modern streams, I turn now to four women who passed the 11-plus but did not go on to teacher training college; these women highlight the class-gendered aspirations (limitations) of the time; another area in which I wish to explore my own response – both then and now. Several women who passed the 11-plus left school at 16: Jane went to work in the offices of the large tobacco company, WD and HO Wills – this was considered to be a very good job. She stayed in middle-ranking administration. Jenny also started work in the offices of Wills, and later became an assistant librarian. Brenda started work as a punch-card operator in a local firm, and has continued to do similar – now computer based – work. Elle is yet another who started work at Wills and is now an administrator. Of these women, Barbara, Brenda and Elle commented on their enjoyment of cookery and sewing, Domestic Science and Needlework, how envious they were of the secondary modern girls who had so much more of this, who had the ‘school flat’ to entertain their parents. John Newsom (1948), highly influential at the time, wrote that the intention was to ‘educate’ girls for their ‘future vocation of home-making, the nurture of children … and how to grow into women’. This was primarily aimed at those of us in the secondary modern streams, and in my lecture I pointed to the frustration at such dominance within the curriculum: there was within the same stream less time given to girls than boys for maths and science – and that itself was painfully little. It was difficult, yet interesting, for me to realise that there were indeed aspects of my schooling that were envied by those in the grammar stream. Along with our more practical curriculum, there was a comparative laxity about how we wore our uniform (Brine 2006a), and the lack of the school’s expectation for us – either academically, or in general day-by-day behaviour. My emotions during the interviews and in transcribing these particular interviewees, was that of envy. In my notebook, under the heading ‘impact on me’ I wrote: 11+ ‘successes’ who have stayed as secretaries, or who wish they’d had more domestic science and needlework – if only I’d had their chance! There are several comments to make on this classed and gendered statement which emerges from the depths of my own experience and ambitions. First, in dismissive shorthand I grouped all those who entered and continued to work in ‘offices’ as ‘secretaries’. Jane, Jenny and Elle all started work in the offices of WD and HO Wills. This was prestigious work, albeit highly gendered: it was

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common knowledge that ‘you had to be good to get in there’. My frustrated dismissal came from my own youthful desire that ‘I never want to work in an office’ – yet the first ten years of my working life was spent doing just that and whilst the early years were as dull and boring as I thought they might be, as I gained promotion, challenging the gendered stereotypes of the day, that steadily changed until it became one of the most challenging, and exciting, jobs of my life. Second, none of these women were or are secretaries; with the exception of Brenda they are administrators, the people who make the institutions or companies work effectively, and who, other than those in the most senior positions, are often invisible, unacknowledged, undervalued and underpaid. Third, my dismissal of the grammar girls’ desire for more domestic science and needlework is, at one level, a dismissal, a commonplace devaluing of gendered ‘female’ skills. Their comments touched my childhood self-frustration that this was all we could do: the dominance of these ‘domestic’ subjects within our timetable, and the obvious displacement of other subjects. The problem was not so much that these were our compulsory subjects, it was the subjects we did not do – such as physics, chemistry, French, literature: My deepest memory is that of the resentment I felt, when walking into a class just vacated by a grammar stream. I would wonder at the work on the board, what it meant, what it was about, why we couldn’t do that as well … I remember many lessons spent chatting with Sandra, or daydreaming, gazing out of the window at the Dundry hills. Blanked out, lost – what I would now recognise as a form of passive resistance to the boredom of the curriculum. (Brine 2001: 16) Envy is defined as regarding with discontent another’s advantage; to wish oneself on their level. Walkerdine et al. (2001), when writing of the envy of ‘the successful’, do so with the focus on those who are envied – primarily by their less successful parents. They suggest that the feelings of ‘the envied’ are ‘turned inwards and transformed into an acceptable emotion: guilt’, an emotion which they found meandered through the successful working-class young women’s stories ‘like a river with many tributaries’ (2001: 161). And, I suggest that similarly, for those of us who envied them, this emotion too was turned inwards, and transformed into unworthiness, worthlessness and despondency: classed-gendered structures of feeling beyond those of economic location (Williams 1965). Empathy

I now turn from the emotion of envy to that of empathy, identification with and deep understanding of another. Whilst I related strongly to the tales of many of these people, I had noted in my research journal that ‘I really

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empathise with John and Diane’, and returning to the transcripts I realise that the points of strongest empathy are on those very specific instances that mirrored my own: with Diane these were of her school, and with John these were of his post-school learning/earning life. Diane, a primary school teacher, failed the 11-plus, and was, as myself, ‘placed in the lowest class you could possibly be, after me there was only the special needs. I knew I was at the bottom of the heap.’ She described her child-self as ‘quiet and shy’ and reflecting back, thought she ‘must have been very wrongly assessed’. Diane also ‘had friends in both sections [grammar and modern]. I think I was probably unusual with this.’ This too was a point of transference, of time slippage: for me, sports-defined boundary-blurring was one of the defining experiences of my school life. John, who failed his 11-plus, like me, left school at 16 with a handful of UEIs – a local school leaving exam for secondary modern children who stayed on past the initial school leaving age of 15. The UEI, the Union of Educational Institutions, was the local council’s response to the 1944 Act’s requirement that they provide an exam that was not an imitation of the General Certificate of Education (GCE). The national Certificate for Secondary Education (CSE) was sat for the first time in 1965. With his UEIs John gained an engineering apprenticeship, and it was here, in a very different habitus, that he gained both in knowledge and self-confidence: It was the coherence and the relatedness of theory and practice. It was all this theory related to what I saw every day. Increased my self-confidence. When I was an apprentice I used to go to the central library and sit there and work at the books, and just work at the books, practise and repeat. A huge lift in my capability. I was apprentice of the year one year. Nearing the end of his apprenticeship, hanging out with a bunch of six-formers, girls, I suddenly realised that these bright young girls were no brighter than I was. This realisation and the advice of a cousin already at university, led him, now armed with his A-level equivalents, to train as a secondary teacher, and later still, to achieve his ambition to become a graduate. My empathy with John was not only based on his secondary schooling and his UEIs, but on the change in habitus offered by his post-school learning, the subsequent change in disposition and learner identity (Brine 2006b). It was my working life and the workplace learning offered by it, that similarly led me to think that I was ‘not so thick after all’. Such self-realisation is, for some, enough for them to make change; however, for others, the knowledge of what choices are available, the processes by which they can happen, and the encouragement to do so, are themselves ‘classed’ – that is, they are

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less available to those of the working classes. John’s cousin provided this for him; a work colleague told me that I could go back to education – first ‘night school’ and then FE college. These tales show the significance of the pivotal moment, the chance comment, and the epiphany of new choice. For myself as researcher, this deep empathy with another’s tale is a subjective recognition of the pain, and sometimes the pleasure, of the other – but of course one does not need to share experiences in order to empathise with another. However, more than empathy, I also identify with the other and in doing so the boundaries between self and other become blurred, and this identification with their story validates my own – validates my earlier self. I am not alone. The insidious internalisation of failure, of dismissal, is recognised and brought into the open. Our individual biographies, our internalisations and our actions can be seen in two ways. First, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, as elements of wider figurations where, as Bauman (1990) argued, our individual biography intertwines with a shared history of time, place and class. Second, our internalisations, our unconscious, our selves as psycho-social subjects, where the outer force (of the social) meets with our inner force, our un/conscious, our sense of self: ‘a meeting point of inner and outer forces, something constructed and yet constructing, a power-using subject which is also subject to power’ (Frosh 2003:1564). Representation The research process is about data collection, data analysis and finally, representation. In this chapter I have reflexively positioned myself within the research, and the complexity of self suggested above remains within the many layered process of representation. Patti Lather has remarked that ‘telling stories always involves misrepresentation’ (1991: 113), and this account is probably no exception – of Diane, John and the others, and of myself. What I write today may differ in many regards from what I might write next year, and of course differ significantly from what they would write, either individually or collectively. Similarly, the interviews took place on a certain day, at a certain time, and we took to it our feelings of that day – as well as our memories of our childhood. Those I spoke with represented themselves in particular ways, choosing the stories they told, and withholding others. To say this is not the same as saying these stories or this representation of them lacks truth or is otherwise not valid. Together they present a narrative, a tentative account of the process of this research, and of my self, the researcher and the school child, within it. Researcher as subject The focus of this chapter has not been on the substantive findings of the research, but on the interplay of autobiography with the life histories of

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others; a focus on the research journey, on the relations between the people involved, at the time of the interview, in the past, at the times of analysis and now, as I write this account. Even chronologically, research is not linear, but messy, more like a tangled ball of wool than a straightforward trajectory. In the first offering, the inaugural lecture of 2001, the focus was autobiographical and in direct relation to the Act and to academic understandings of that policy. In Tales of the 50-somethings (Brine 2006a), I focused on the stories of Diane, Alison, Jane and Sue, and I wrote: They were educated into knowing their place relative to others. Education was, and arguably remains, a ‘system of inscription’ (Skeggs 2004) in which children of the working classes are essentialised with ascribed values, such as innate low intelligence, and a discourse constructed that allows policymakers, educational administrators and practitioners to engage in practices that lead to the under-education of many children, the results of which are then used as evidence for further selective practices. (Brine 2006a: 444) Yet, whilst education policies and practices are most certainly of their time and place, and hence experiences and subjectivities of school are indeed shaped by them, they are not completely determining for we are not totally passive to the construction of others, but also engage in the construction of our selves: to variable amounts and in different forms, moving, resisting, developing new self-identities and, for some of those I spoke with, living in different social and economic realities. Yet, for many, the majority, the selective schooling policies of the time were debilitating and damaging, and their pernicious effects on our individual sense of self, were present in the interviews. The everyday practices of school life, the enactment of the policy, our sense of self, are very important. In today’s school, behind the façade of disaffection, the realities of ‘acting up’, the daily expressions of sullenness, rudeness and violent behaviour and speech, are the grandchildren of those in my study: the generational disaffected, lowparticipant young people of south Bristol. In ‘The Everyday Classificatory Practices of Selective Schooling’ (Brine 2006b), I argued first that the bilateral school was not an early example of the comprehensive system but the very opposite, for the vast majority of children were as fixedly streamed as if they were in separate schools. Second, the everyday practices of selective schooling led to the under-education of many workingclass children. The lack of educational success was then used as ‘evidence’ to prove that working-class children had low innate intelligence and therefore needed selective, different, less academic, more vocational schooling. (Brine 2006b: 52)

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Neither my first autobiographical account (Brine 2001), nor this further reflection on it, attempt to romanticise or glamorise, pathologise or victimise the working classes. Nor do they attempt a story of individual meritocracy. The point is not that my life panned out in a way that led to my return to education, but that for the vast majority of working-class people our days of compulsory schooling are our one major involvement in formal education, and, despite rhetoric, excuses, blame and numerous changes in policy and practice, the continued failure to critically educate and to creatively stimulate is both morally and politically indefensible. Within these two publications (2006a, 2006b), I was visible only tangentially, beneath the surface of the text. This chapter represents yet another way of exploring the 1944 Education Act within Bristol, and of considering its immediate and lasting effects upon the children of the time. I tried to place myself, as researcher and as research subject, within the frame, to problematise and get beneath the surface of the earlier published accounts, their apparent objectivity and absence of emotion, to delve into my own unconscious. In locating my researcher self, I find I have also relocated the child that still lurks beneath, and I am more visible than I thought I would be. Such visibility is dual-edged: the negative is that this visibility, exposure, of my early and contemporary self is rather uncomfortable. The class-shift journey, as repeatedly described in the collection of life histories edited by Mahony and Zmroczek (1997), is one of adopting a disguise, ever fearful of the hand on the shoulder challenging one’s right to be. To put this aside is an act of wilful exposure, one that, as Richardson (2001) has written, is not without its perils, for as she says, ‘how different it feels when it is you and your world that you are writing about; how humbling and demanding’ (2001: 38). Yet, on the other hand, there is, I believe, a definite positive to this, an attempted rupturing of that protective membrane behind which I/we, the researcher/writer, generally sit. I continue to slip and slide between these gendered-classed identities, accommodating and resisting, gazing always from one to the other, and like many of those in my study, never quite fully balanced in either. References Anyon, J. (1983) ‘Intersections of Gender and Class: Accommodation and Resistance by Working-Class and Affluent Females to Contradictory Sex-Role Ideologies’, in Walker, S. and Barton, L. (eds) Gender, Class and Education, New York: Falmer. Ball, S.J. (1994) Education Reform: a Critical and Post-Structural Approach, Buckingham: Open University Press. Bauman, Z. (1990) Thinking Sociologically, London: Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brine, J. (2001) ‘Wading through the Practices of Policy’, Inaugural Lecture, Bristol: University of the West of England.

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Brine, J. (2006a) ‘Tales of the 50-somethings: Selective Schooling, Gender and Social Class’, Gender and Education, 18: 431–446. Brine, J. (2006b) ‘The Everyday Classificatory Practices of Selective Schooling: a Fifty-Year Retrospective’, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 16: 37–56. Duncombe, J. and Jessop, J. (2002) ‘“Doing Rapport” and the Ethics of “Faking Friendship”’, in Mauthner, M., Birch, M., Jessop, J. and Miller, T. (eds) Ethics in Qualitative Research, London: Sage. Fine, M. (1994) ‘Dis-stance and other stances: negotiations of power inside feminist research’, in Gitlin, A. (ed) Power and Method: Political Activism and Educational Research, London: Routledge. Frosh, S. (2003) ‘Psychosocial Studies and Psychology: Is a Critical Approach Emerging?’ Human Relations, 56: 1545–1567. Harding, S. (1987) Feminism and Methodology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hargreaves, D. (1967) Social Relations in a Secondary School, London: Routledge. Lather, P. (1991) Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern, London: Routledge. Mahony, P. and Zmroczek, C. (1997) Class Matters: ‘Working-Class’ Women’s Perspectives on Social Class, London: Taylor & Francis. Mies, M. (1983) ‘Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research’, in Bowles, G. and DuelliKlein, R. (eds) Theories of Women’s Studies, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Newsom, J. (1948) The Education of Girls, London: Faber and Faber. Opie, A. (1992) ‘Qualitative Research, Appropriation of the ‘Other’ and Empowerment’, Feminist Review, 40: 52–69. Perks, R. and Thomson, A. (eds) (2006) The Oral History Reader (2nd edn), London: Routledge. Plummer, G. (2000) Failing Working-Class Girls, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Raphael Reed, L. (2002) ‘Re-Searching, Re-Finding, Re-Making: Exploring the Unconscious as a Pedagogic and Research Practice’, in Francis, B. and Skelton, C. (eds) Investigating Gender: Contemporary Perspectives in Education, Buckingham: Open University Press. Richardson, L. (2001) ‘Getting Personal: Writing-Stories’, Qualitative Studies in Education, 14: 33–38. Skeggs, B. (2004) Class, Self, Culture, London: Sage. Stanley, L. (1992) The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Swindells, J. (ed.) (1995) The Uses of Autobiography, London: Taylor & Francis. Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H. and Melody, J. (2001) Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class, London: Palgrave. Williams, R. (1965) The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Chapter 11

This do in remembrance of me Narrative uncertainty and the frothing of contentious identity James Haywood Rolling, Jr

Introduction This chapter explores the critical and narrative reinterpretation of life story that foments an overflow of incomplete, alternative, and rogue personal and public identities. The de/re/constructive agitation of certainty and the familiar through a practice that periodically reinterprets personal narrative has the potential for stirring up even those certitudes longest congealed, and the power to contest prevailing orthodoxies of social rectitude, politics, and research. Theoretical suppositions are viewed through a filigree of remembrances surrounding a photograph of my confirmation as a member of an Episcopal church in Brooklyn, New York, at the age of 12. And what I am supposing is that the rewriting of personal narrative is an un-naming ritual, a contentious act that resupposes the power of storylines and social expectations to define one’s life. Rites of cleansing, Father, forgive me … This is a remembrance of the power of three fathers. This is a father–son story. When I was 12 years old, I was confirmed. In the following photograph from my family album, it is clear that I am kneeling before one of the holy fathers, this one a representative of the power of the Episcopal Church in the United States. But what needs to be made clearer is that I am kneeling before three fathers within the frame of this image. Kneeling is a symbol of my supplication, my acknowledgement that I was vulnerable both to the will and the hubris of all my fathers – those within the frame of the photograph, those outside the frame, those whose influence is at first invisible who have either sought to frame me in their image or in their social imagination. This is a re/member/ance into the power of three fathers; through this writing I engage in the ritual of becoming a member once again with past stations of ‘I/belong.’ Re/membering is what stories are for, ‘for joining the past to the future’ (O’Brien 1990/1998: 38). This photograph was taken capturing a moment long past as I kneeled before one of my fathers, an

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affirmation of my nascent belief in Christ, a belief so powerful as to compel me through the traditional rite of passage to full membership in St Mark’s Church in the middle of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. That same ritual was offered to me as the passageway toward membership into the eternal Church of my invisible Father, who was always near but just beyond my view in a future Heaven. Yet, this is a remembrance of the power of three fathers, a re/membering of the power of three relationships, and the intersection of several more; I am also kneeling in front of my own flesh-and-blood father, looming with his usual persistence in the background of all my supplications and desires. In re/membering, past is joined with future, past patriarchs with plausible father figures, and with my own fatherhood as yet unfulfilled. This writing is

Figure 11.1 O Father, Where Art Thou?

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a rite of passage into the uncertainty of now, into my inheritance of abandonment and wild faith, and the power both to contend with and to surrender to the kingdoms erected by our randy forefathers. Facts are fraught with sustaining fictions, just as fictions are founded upon commonly held facts. Nevertheless, narrative inquiry does not inaugurate viable inquiry unless it first seeks to proliferate new tellings, not to redeem the ‘facts,’ but to articulate ‘the significance and meaning of one’s experiences’ (Bochner 2001: 153). Thus, this chapter is comprised of three layers of narrative tangled into one retelling. The first is a hidden narrative, the start of an inquiry that asks what stories are unseen? In this hidden narrative, I will unthread a story of my flesh-and-blood father after whom I was named and who, though a namesake himself, would not share my grasp after new fathers and for a life shed of the yoke of sharing a distant father’s name. I will tell a story ‘to invoke the felt life’ (Lieblich 2006: 66). The second story is a vicarious narrative, the start of an inquiry that asks what other stories might function in place of my own experience? In this vicarious narrative, I will braid in stories of intersecting lives, lives under the shelter of other fathers, fictional fathers, desired fathers, foster fathers, stories modeling ‘the potential space that our own and others’ stories provide’ (Day Sclater 2003: 623). Braided, matted, Gordian knotty narratives, narratives capturing air within their plaits, air and the space for new autobiography to be hacked free, unfolded, folded in. The third and final story is an alternative narrative, the start of an inquiry that asks what stories have now become possible through this storytelling? What stories are destroyed? In this alternative narrative, I will tell the story of a new imperative for narrative practice and life history research in my own confluence of practices, the story of its affinity with my other arts-based research practices, a story that offers a way past old paradigms and patriarchies and toward the messy extrusion of present meanings into future possibilities (Rosenwald 1992). I remember these three fathers in order to supplant their power as distant and unthreaded signifiers. I am not my fathers’ progeny; I am not the one conclusion, the Neo. Rather, I am the reinterpretation of all my forefathers, the embodiment of all their egregious possibilities, turned upside down, inside out, ripped along my seams and full of well-placed malfunctions in my wardrobe. Acts of bricolage This is a father–son story. I tell this story now because I am getting old and there isn’t a lot of time left to get the stories stitched right. By ‘right,’ I do not mean ‘correct,’ as if stories were ends unto themselves, as if there were not always a little fiction in the memory of the fact. By right, I mean suited toward their use as tools in the excavation of an understanding of

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autobiography, purpose, and portent that are plausible for this particular writing event. By this writing event, I mean to suggest that there have been prior writings and there will be future writings, all of which are all diaphanously arrayed, the silken residuals of a reflexive practice, written one upon another within the small polysemic space of this body of knowledge, this scribed body, this illustrated man. If I wrote this research one year from now, even drawing upon the same data sources it would necessarily tell a different story, no less valid, no less mine. This father–son story is an unravelling of the patriarchies that have been knitted into my life. This father–son story is a bricolage of other stories, most of which I have never actually heard of, stories that get in the way of one another – competing stories. Joe L. Kincheloe says that the structure of patriarchies ‘are nonlinear, contextually specific, and irregular in their manifestation’ (Kincheloe 2005: 331). This narrative is as irregular as the power exerted by the three fathers in that photograph, one flesh-and-blood, one cloaked in a kente robe, one invisible. My flesh-and-blood father’s rule was absolute within the walls of 1260 Lincoln Place until his patriarchy was dissolved with his decline and fall on the kitchen floor. The patriarchy of the holy Episcopal father is contested, his holiness in doubt because at the end of the daylight slanting through stained-glass panes, he is just as flesh-and-blood as my flesh-and-blood father. My invisible Father is sovereign over the one patriarchal relationship in which I am at rest, a relationship as intangible as the emotions wrought by this writing and thus just as real; no son should have to go through life without a father worthy of his trust. A trust that is holy. As a bricoleur, I gather up such irregularities and mend them into stories, ‘out of respect for the complexity of the lived world’ (Kincheloe 2005: 324). Stories infiltrating one another, creating leaks, rips and seepages of bodily humors – the blood, bile and phlegm that make our stories human, creating the trail of tears that make stories true, even those that are fiction. In its embrace of complexity, the bricolage constructs a far more active role for humans both in shaping reality and in creating the research processes and narratives that represent it. (Kincheloe 2005: 325) But in the tangle of competing stories, stories are also completed for a time, their leakiness plugged up. Because every story in itself is a bricolage of the human experience, I will not be surprised if you recognise part of your own story here, even if it is not a father–son story as this one is. Storytelling has been a tool for research and reflection as old as those cultures that depended solely on their oral traditions to transmit knowledge and the meanings they gathered to be significant (Stokrocki 1994). Stories generate narratives that we cling to and live by (McAdams 1993; Novitz 2001). The narratives generated by stories told and retold become frameworks shaping worldviews,

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conventions of thought, and common cultural understandings. Because of the human trait to ‘comprehend time in terms of stories’ (McAdams 1993: 27), and thus cling to familiar narratives that are embedded in life history, once narratives are entrenched they tend to endure until supplanted by new narratives that bring conventional thinking into conflict with ‘the mutinous text of interpretation’ (Mitchell 1981: 83). This book chapter is a work of narrative research and a chapter in my ongoing life narrative, the kind of research that is concerned with the phenomena of shaping stories, the image–schematic structures born of abstract reasoning that allow us to conceive of particularly salient tracts of time and memorable events metonymically – that is to say, as the parables in which we cradle our subjectivities (Turner 1996), and through which we identify our own shadows on the pavement. This chapter is an exercise in the efficacy of narrative inquiry models in everyday life and educational practice. The narrative turn during the postmodern era has allowed those of us who think of such things in the first place to rethink research and pedagogical practices. What might a 21st-century classroom look like if the centrality of life history narrative is embraced? Curriculum theorist William F. Pinar writes of the importance of ‘selfreflexivity within the processes of education’ (Pinar 2004: 35), arguing that the reconceptualisation of curriculum begins with the subjective lessons of autobiographical experience. Similar to the telling of a life, the constitution of knowledge in a contemporary and poststructural society is necessarily complicated by a messy plurality of plausible starting points and ending points. Still, the ‘researcher-as-bricoleur’ is careful not to abstract so much from lived experience as to lose sight of contextual fields of play (Kincheloe 2005: 324, 328). In a bricolage, the context of each prior and contributing story is a part of the embroidery of the latest retelling, in print right here. Narrative forms of inquiry, like other arts-based research practices, are practice-based research (Irwin and Springgay 2008; Macleod and Holdridge 2006). Questions are addressed and new ones arise in the doing of the writing. Theory derived from committed arts praxis is constituted in part as it is physically materialised or saliently represented and reiterated through studio arts, literary practice or performance media. It is through methodologically engaged materials, emotionally wrought performances, and/or aesthetically evolved symbols that ‘a way of experiencing … a particular cast of mind [is brought] out into the world of objects, where men [and women] can look at it’ (Geertz 1983: 99). While scientific ways of knowing involve the gathering of empirical data, testing hypotheses through specified methods, and validated representations of the human experience in the natural world, arts-based ways of knowing are no less empirical, no less dependent on methodologies, no less valid, no less representative of the human experience in the worlds we live in. The arts and sciences are twin peaks in human cognition and neither should be privileged

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in research practices. If the sciences seek an ordered universe made up of atomistic, discrete, and observed parts and events, the arts aim to rearrange the known order from time to time as a test of what is possible and as a catalyst for change. Even an unchanging God knows that everything must change. This father–son story is a retelling of a story that continues to change me, the way I do research, the methodologies I have made along the way. Father, forgive? This is a father–son story-in-progress, a hidden narrative revealed. At this point in the story, this critical and creative self-accounting, too much has remained hidden for too long. To start with, I am actually James Haywood Rolling, III. This revelation was confirmed as I went through my father’s hidden things in an attempt to cobble together the source material for the eulogy I would write for him several years ago. My flesh-and-blood father never allowed me close enough to do the kinds of things sons want to do for their fathers. So I decided I would do the eulogy, the last thing sons do. Amongst his papers, my late father wrote of his family lineage from his grandmother Eva H., as legally required for a property settlement about six months after her death on January 11, 1983. In an effort to re/member, to join the past to the future, he wrote: Eva Haywood [Rolling] had one other son, James Haywood Rolling. He and his wife, Eva [B.] (Hart) Rolling had one child, me, James H. Rolling Jr. My father, James senior died when I was very young and my mother passed away in 1965. I reside at 1260 Lincoln Place, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11213. (James Haywood Rolling, Jr, personal communication, July 13, 1983) James Haywood Rolling, Jr, now passed, is thus joined to James Haywood Rolling, Jr, his future and the author of this particular chapter in my own life history narrative. Funny, how things work. I have recently been told that etiquette allows that since I am the last and there is no longer a living James Haywood Rolling senior to me, I can drop the Junior appellation; I can officially rename myself James Haywood Rolling, III (Kip Jones, personal communication, March 7, 2006). I may formally change one day, but I have already renamed myself and have done so collaboratively through this writing. Perhaps I have merely confused the reader. Nevertheless, collaboration is the theme of this autoethnographic infiltration – collaboration intended to undercut all expectations. None of this ended up in the eulogy, but it informs me nonetheless. It is unclear to me to this day what my flesh-and-blood father expected of his

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firstborn son, but it was always made clear to me that I did not meet his expectations. And yet, strangely, he often told me, ‘I know you better than you know yourself’. Leaving me to wonder, did he fall short of his own expectations for himself long before I fell short of his for me? On second thought, maybe he only lectured me once on his sovereignty over my personal story. If so, once was more than enough to sever my self-confidence from its flesh-and-blood anchor. For when my father told me this, he lost all credibility in the eyes of his 12-year-old son. I had so many secrets at the time, secrets I had told no one because I was a keeper of secrets, not a teller, I knew that no one truly knew me. To this day, even as a 45-year-old, I am still figuring myself out. Self-confidence is an odd trait, arising not from certain and prognosticated destiny, but from uncertainty and the agency to rewrite one’s story as one sees fit at any given time and as the need arises. Self-confidence arises from the power to contend with other people’s expectations – even the expectations of fathers who are supposed to know best how to help you grow but really don’t have a clue. So every time I replay my father’s certainty over my story, even though my father is dead now, he still loses a little more of his credibility. And I am once again adrift and terribly lost in search of seagulls circling figures of fathers on the nearest visible horizon. I have been asked what drives me to achieve, to take on so many responsibilities. As of this writing, I am not so much driven to achieve as I am driven to rewrite. I don’t want anyone ever to be as sure that they know me as my father was that day as he cornered me, intimidating me at the top of the hallway staircase with the size of his body and his unpredictability. I don’t ever want to be that powerless and small and measurable. But there is still more story to unhide. To rewrite. Sons like to do things for their fathers, things that say, ‘I belong.’ One of the more important things my father never allowed me close enough to do was to forgive him. Families forgive one another all the time. But my forgiveness was always kept at a stiff arm’s length along with my love and admiration so that I could never quite say that I belonged, no matter what my birth certificate says. Arm’s length doesn’t get you close enough to forgive, a peculiar exercise of humanity requiring awkward embraces, embraces forever held. So I could not understand how I belonged to this man when I confronted him that evening with my mother and sister all in the same living room, all sitting on the sofa right across from my father’s wall unit, the evening that my father never even admitted that he had done all the things my sister said he had done to her in the bathroom, in her bedroom, behind all the closed doors, behind all those years, all the things that my sister finally spilled out to me, words that took too many years to hear, those things I had to bring to the altar of the church, to have my mother hear my sister say in the sanctuary. But there in front of my father’s wall unit, my sister’s memory might be wrong he said, wrong about all those unspoken liberties taken with her body for all

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those years. We were not given the opportunity to forgive his sins on the one evening when it was our right to judge him. Instead, that night he warned my sister not to raise her voice at him; it wasn’t appropriate for a little girl to yell at her father. And although my mother has never forgiven herself for not seeing the signs, many years later she finally did leave 1260 Lincoln Place without my father. Leaving my father in his house. After a lifetime, there was no one left that was within arm’s reach in that house. What does unforgiveness look like? For a while it seemed that unforgiveness looked a lot like hate. I very much wanted my father to give me an excuse to kill him. Let him touch my sister again, I thought and rethought. Although a fantasy, as a teenager and a young adult, I nurtured that story, massaging it over and over for far too long, for an unhealthy period of time. Until I became indifferent and accepted his abandonment and decided that not feeling was much better for me than rehearsing my hatreds of self and father, gouging the story of fathers and sons into my flesh with my own fingernail. What does indifference feel like? For me, poems tend to convey the felt part of the story best. My Father’s wall unit (written in September 2002, a couple of months after the funeral) My father’s living room is unlived in anymore, the house about to be quietly sold. My father wanted it so, I think. I found his mother’s death certificate in a neat pile on the front edge of the upper right hand shelf over the bar of his funky late 1970s faux wood laminate wall unit. The pile of aged letters was just in front of the out-of-date set of World Book encyclopedias and just inside of the glass doors with the magnetic latch. The certificate was stacked along with carefully kept photos of his mother who died of cancer in 1965 when people only whispered about such things when they thought the children weren’t paying attention. And the certificate was carefully kept with two blue envelopes now stained with 40 years of time, written by the hand of Eva B. while still of sound mind and bed-ridden body. Written lovingly to her only son to guide the distribution of her earthly possessions here at 1260 Lincoln Place, which we are about to sell.

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My father wanted to sell, I am certain. He signed the papers himself, without consultation. A week after his signature, his body betrayed him. We used those encyclopedias a lot, my father’s encyclopedias all four children under parents who made us do our homework before we went outside to play amongst echoes on a narrow street, echoes against red orange brick buildings, through the tall chain link schoolyard fence, under the white turrets of Public School 167. We used my father’s encyclopedias inside my father’s living room on the wide oval coffee table beneath my father’s wall unit. Encyclopedias to help us with our homework. And when we were done, he made us put them all back. Into his wall unit. But now the couch is dented where he slept each night, uncomfortable in beds, the upholstery oily with years of seepage from skin and scalp, the carpet embedded with a snowfall of dry dead skin. His shoes and slippers, odorous and misshapen are collected in a black garbage bag in the middle of the matted rust-colored carpet. My father preferred to walk alone walking to chess wars where no mercy was shown known only as ‘Nemesis’ to the men he mentored for 15 years, men my family met for the first time at the wake. In the end, my father walked to the recreation center where he could no longer run the paddleball courts and he walked to the V.A. hospital where he disagreed with Nurse Riley on the care of his diabetic foot the ulcer growing my father’s peculiar cancer merciless at his heel dogging him as he walked in his orthopedic boot or shuffled precariously in unlaced, oversized sneakers. Sometime during his last week at 1260 Lincoln Place as his sugar went screaming to a final count of 628 on the meter his body cried out for help, but my father did not call for the hospital, did not call his children, did not call his wife or his neighbors, he did not call until his voice was too weak to hear even as he hallucinated that he could call through the walls.

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Perhaps he wanted it so, his word always being the last. In his final three weeks at St. Mary’s hospital, he never recovered his speech, he never recovered his breath, his flesh was eaten dead by an acquired necrosis in that hell of a place we no longer speak of. Filling the open bar of my father’s wall unit there are white boxes instead of liquor bottles, gauze pads, plastic prescription bottles and topical solutions; but the insulin syringes are hardly used. As I exit the living room, turning into the darkened hallway, past the cracked green ceramic lamp with the broken switch, the lamp we can finally throw away I also know I am leaving the scene of an accident that waited. Waited. That’s one story about my father, a story-still-in-process, a messy construct in a poetic form, one less pretty than the story that was eulogized for the benefit of those who came to mourn him (Rolling 2004a). My mother and my sister now own apartments in the same building, protecting one another. This poem is a Derridean renegotiation of memory, moving me closer to ‘the impossible possible’ (Derrida 2005: 22), the suspension both of reason and the unexplained that gives place to the rigors of rewriting. That which has already been reasoned is safe and certain. That which is unexplained is raw material for the rewriting, but still may never finally be explained. But a story is never just one story, it is the multiplicity of possible ways to remember the parts of the story that lay burrowed, hibernating in the past; it is the multiplicity of alternative endings and possible futures to that one story; it is also the multiplicity of stories that might otherwise have been, vicarious stories that show us what other experiences are presently possible. Father, Father, where art thou? This is a father–son story-in-waiting, a vicarious narrative explored. At this point in the story I have begun to wander, as the best narratives do, to locate the impossible possibles, those sites within the bricolage that point toward a home. Growing up I found it impossible to call my father Dad, our relationship so clipped, I clipped off the d sound at the end of the word, extended the a sound and called him Daa. I could not pretend the intimacy of a whole Dad when that’s not what I had. It was a subtle disconnect, a stammer, a phonemic symptom of a near lifelong distrust, a surreptitious and repetitive rebellion, evidence of loss offered to anyone who was really listening. As a toddler I don’t remember calling him Daddy either although I probably did, but that claim fits the arc of the narrative so it’s worth mentioning here.

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It seems I was born homeless, trying to find my place within some benign patriarchy, a father–son story, some Brady Bunch episode. I am the eldest of four kids who grew up in Brooklyn, New York City; but where one was born and raised is not necessarily a home. And the neighborhood I was raised in reflects none of the architecture of Mike Brady. My father’s parentage is African American, his father dead of tuberculosis shortly after his birth; I’ve been told he had vestiges of a family lineage in Oklahoma and Kansas, but we never visited them and they never visited us and they are still just talk to me. My mother’s parentage is Caribbean, from Nevis, a tiny roundish island permanently settled by the British in 1628 and held as a colony until 1983, the lesser-developed sister to the island of St. Kitts; however my first visit to the Caribbean was when I was about 12 years old around the time I was confirmed and that photograph was taken, me kneeling before fathers. Growing up in 1260 Lincoln Place without a home I was used to the unexpected flash of his hard hand to my belly or head when I had committed some unknowable offence to his unwavering common sense. I was no stranger to being doubled over in pain; I was accustomed to being struck dizzy. One day he became aware that I had developed an automatic response, a duck of the head, a bob, a weave, a twist of the body when his hand moved unexpectedly within my peripheral sight – even if he was just reaching for a cup from the dish rack. He stopped striking me so often, which had the strangely adverse effect of diminishing our physical contact in the home (Rolling 2008: 927). Now I am instead struck by the likelihood that my father, an only child, knew no father–son stories. And I re/member the story he mentioned only once or twice of how the cop who took up with his mother Eva B. got a kick out of hitting him for years. This is a vicarious narrative because I wonder what my father felt like being the one getting hit. Jonathan Wyatt (2005; 2008), a writing buddy of mine, also writes about the loss of his father, about how loss is no longer loss because his dead father has been revived through the writing of stories, recitations, gentle resuscitations, stories in his latest body of writing not typed but written out by hand, a staccato performance re/connecting father and son. A stuttering A stammering A searching for words Words that break, That go beyond what is written, That look for angles and lines of flight (Wyatt 2008: 955) This too is a vicarious narrative because I wonder what it feels like to have so many words of connection, so many lines that bind anchored in bodies of writing. To wish one’s father body was revived.

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Lace Marie Brogden, another writing buddy of mine, also wrote a vicarious narrative, a direct riff off of my first two narratives of loss in (Q)qualitative (I)inquiry, reassembling her dead father as a bricolage, a narrative that had me wondering how it must have felt to seem ‘the queen of the world when I was with my dad’ (Brogden 2006: 917), to be courted and celebrated and have a home rather than just a house to live in. Faith by what I do This is a practice-based story, a father–son story-in-action, an alternative narrative helping my unbelief in the love of fathers for their firstborn sons. This is a work of research, a work of art, a work of identity, for as every son of the F/father knows, faith without works is dead. I began a practice of writing father–son stories since 2002 (Rolling 2004a; 2004b; 2008). My father stopped searching for F/fathers. A year or two before Daa died, he told me he was proud of me, but I had already lost my faith. In my search for F/fathers, my faith was rewarded with the discovery of a ram caught in a thicket of competing stories, Graeme Sullivan (2005), sacrificing himself on the makeshift altar of Telemachus, a mentor rather than a father, an artist and an arts-based researcher, but really all of these in equal part and just the same. Like the young Telemachus in Homer’s Odyssey, I was starting out on a journey. I sought healing. Graeme was willing to accompany me on parts of this journey, fully aware of the difficulties I would face, yet willing to show me ample evidence that he trusted I would not only survive, but thrive in the wide open fields of play. Dr. Sullivan trusted me to do his good name proud. James, the owner of 1260 Lincoln Place, who refused to put his wife’s name on the deed throughout the life and death of their marriage, did keep a mistress, the art studio in his house. James, an art director forced into retirement and feeling lonely in the house all by himself, did give me a portrait he had painted of me as his little boy even though I was a grown man with college degrees and long married at the time. This was around the time he told me he was proud of me. I think he had long ago lost his faith in father–son stories and this was his act of repentance. But I was only his firstborn son; only F/fathers can forgive sins. Not true. I did forgive my father once, but not for all. Just for me. But Daa never forgave me for the sin of not loving him anyway. James, the New Testament book, says that Abraham’s faith in his F/father was credited as righteousness, because he loved his firstborn son Isaac so much more than I believed was possible but loved his F/father more and was willing to gently cut Isaac’s throat and wait patiently at the altar for his son’s resurrection. For tying his boy with cords, full of a binding faith, Abraham was signified to all as the F/father of faith. James, the author of this writing, has little alternative but to keep writing stories, to keep threading new cords; while my father’s body still lays buried,

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my faith that I might one day father a firstborn son and give my boy a reason to trust me is still breathing. Narrative uncertainty Narrative inquiry is defined as ‘a collaborative method of telling stories, reflecting on stories, and (re)writing stories’ (Leavy 2009: 27). Because the best stories always contain something borrowed and something new, the best storytellers understand that the fabric of stories is diversely woven and that the oral tradition is a collaborative medium where reinterpretation is king and each kingdom is a result of the surrender of a prior interpretation to its inevitable overthrow. Reinterpretation generates uncertainty, uncertainty a prerequisite for approaching the unscriptedness of impossible possibles. Narrative forms of research inquiry emerge from what has been called the narrative turn in contemporary life (Day Sclater 2003). Tradition, of course, has it that research should have more to do with the ‘objective’ discoveries, and the dispassionate building of theory, and less to do with ‘subjective’ engagements and the vicissitudes of creativity … we must now look on traditional empirical research with new eyes that see the significance of stories at all stages in the research process … we are forced to think anew about what research is … (Day Sclater 2003: 622) In narrative-research-as-arts-based-research, ‘researchers narrate the story and often identify themes or categories that emerge from the story’ (Ollerenshaw and Creswell 2002: 332). Arts-based research methodologies are characteristically emergent, imagined, and derivative from an artist/researcher’s practice or arts praxis inquiry models; they are capable of yielding outcomes taking researchers in directions the sciences can not go. In the praxis of arts-based methodologies, the ‘method of discovery’ is the discovery (Richardson 1997: 88); they yield innovations in accord with Lather’s representation of research as praxis, ‘the dialectical tension, the interactive, reciprocal shaping of theory and practice’ (Lather 1986: 258). Emerging from such praxis, there is ‘no such thing as “getting it right”; only “getting it” differently contoured and nuanced’ (Richardson 1997: 91). The results are contentious, a bricolage of stories vying for our awareness as we look for ourselves in the rescripting. Contention as a pedagogical and research strategy may be just what is necessary to yield the unruly and pioneering innovations in thinking we desire as a result of our educational practices. In art educator Charles R. Garoian’s consideration of performance art as transgressive pedagogy, he defines ‘a threshold, a border, a neutral zone

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between ideas, cultures, or territories that one must cross to get from one side to the other’ (Garoian 1999: 40), a rethinking of the contemporary schooling paradigm as a contentious place where our prescriptions of persons and stories of social categories may be demarcated and held in tension through acts of rewriting, conflicting with one another to be named and unnamed. Garoian (1999) is essentially describing a pedagogical site capable of empowering students to exit expectations and intersect critical lines of possibility, intersections generating points of origin for new narratives to come into conflict with dominant meta-narratives. Researchers-as-bricoleurs are able to reconstitute educational knowledge content primarily because each liturgy, each retelling of the story, each embellishing object or identity or event juxtaposes with – and subtly shifts – the meanings taken from previous content across the curriculum and the existential continuum. The growth of new identity constructs within a contentious storying paradigm necessitates a continuing realignment of life events and life possibilities, bricolaged reinterpretations and dialogical exchanges, the learner uninhibited to freely associate and to nucleate new narrative meaning. References Bochner, A. P. (2001) Narrative’s Virtues, Qualitative Inquiry, 7(2), 131–157. Brogden, L. M. (2006) Not Quite Acceptable: Re:reading My Father in Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Inquiry, 12(5), 908–925. Day Sclater, S. (2003) The Arts and Narrative Research – Art as Inquiry: An Epilogue, Qualitative Inquiry, 9(4), 621–624. Derrida, J. (2005) The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow) [P. Kamuf, trans.]. In M. A. Peters and P. P. Trifonas (eds), Deconstructing Derrida: Tasks for the New Humanities (pp 11–24), New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Garoian, C. R. (1999) Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics, New York: State University of New York Press. Geertz, C. (1983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York: Basic Books. Irwin, R. L. and Springgay, S. (2008). A/r/tography as Practice-based Research. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor and R. Siegesmund (eds) Arts-based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice, New York: Routledge, 103–124. Kincheloe, J. L. (2005) On to the Next Level: Continuing the Conceptualization of the Bricolage, Qualitative Inquiry, 11(3), 323–350. Lather, P. (1986) Research as Praxis, Harvard Educational Review, 56(3), 257–277. Leavy, P. (2009) Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practices, New York: Guilford Press. Lieblich, A. (2006) Vicissitudes: A Study, a Book, a Play: Lessons from the Work of a Narrative Scholar, Qualitative Inquiry, 12(1), 60–80. Macleod, K., and Holdridge, L. (eds) (2006) Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research, London and New York: Routledge.

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McAdams, D. P. (1993) The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, New York: The Guilford Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1981) On Narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Novitz, D. (2001) Art, Narrative, and Human Nature. In L. P. Hinchman and S. K. Hinchman (eds), Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, Albany: State University of New York Press, 143–160. O’Brien, T. (1990/1998) The Things They Carried, New York: Broadway Books. Ollerenshaw, J. A., and Creswell, J. W. (2002) Narrative Research: A Comparison of Two Restorying Data Analysis Approaches, Qualitative Inquiry, 8(3), 329–347. Pinar, W. F. (2004) What is Curriculum Theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Richardson, L. (1997) Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Rolling, J. H. (2004a) Messing Around with Identity Constructs: Pursuing a Poststructuralist and Poetic Aesthetic, Qualitative Inquiry, 10(4), 548–557. Rolling, J. H. (2004b) Searching Self-image: Identities to be Self-evident, Qualitative Inquiry, 10(6), 869–884. Rolling, J. H. (2008) Secular Blasphemy: Utter(ed) Transgressions Against Names and Fathers in the Postmodern Era, Qualitative Inquiry, 14(6), 926–948. Rosenwald, G. C. (1992) Conclusion: Reflections on Narrative Self-understanding. In G. C. Rosenwald and R. L. Ochberg (eds), Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-understanding, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 265–289. Stokrocki, M. (1994) A School Day in the Life of a Young Navajo Girl: A Case Study in Ethnographic Storytelling, Art Education, 47(4), 61–69. Sullivan, G. (2005) Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, Thousand Oak, CA: Sage Publications. Turner, M. (1996) The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, New York: Oxford University Press. Wyatt, J. (2005) A Gentle Going? An Autoethnographic Short Story, Qualitative Inquiry, 11(5), 724–732. Wyatt, J. (2008) No Longer Loss: Autoethnographic Stammering, Qualitative Inquiry, 14(6), 955–968.

Chapter 12

Life history and narrative research revisited Penelope Harnett

Introduction In this last chapter I would like to reflect on the process of editing this book on life histories and narratives and my own understanding of learning, identity and power. As the stories have unfolded there has been a constant dialogue between myself as a reader of the chapters and past and present experiences in my own life. Reading the book, I realised that the connections which I was making with the chapters could not neatly be categorised within the field of educational research and I returned to texts which I read many years ago when I studied history as an undergraduate and postgraduate student and then to other texts which I was familiar with as a professional educator of primary school teachers. Literature which I had read also entered the web of connections which I was beginning to weave and places which I had visited acquired alternative interpretations. The chapter thus contains a heterogeneous selection of texts and sources. Various layers of understanding and different perspectives began to emerge as I read particular chapters. A closer analysis of my ability to switch codes of thinking and language dependent on contexts followed and I began to understand more fully the power of analogy – the contrast of the unfamiliar with the familiar in developing meaning and understanding. Other people’s storyings were contributing to the storyings of my own life. The chapter which follows is a narrative of some of the understandings developed during the year in which this book was written. It is not written chronologically – ‘I understood this at the beginning and two months later I realised …’ Rather it is a snapshot in a moment of time, explaining some of connections which I have made during this year with different ways of thinking across different subject disciplines, different texts and places visited. Some thoughts are more developed than others, so it is a work in progress – designed to support the title of the book, Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research and to encourage other readers to explore their own learning for themselves as they shape and reshape their understandings through their engagement with the texts.

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Writing this chapter has been an enjoyable experience. It has given me the freedom to express ideas which I would not necessarily feel able to do as an academic in education writing for specific journal audiences – citing particular fields of literature and employing appropriate genres and language to develop the discussion. Such writing can be constraining since there is no place for the sudden connection which pops up in the mind, with something read or experienced, which has no roots in the literature of the field, or ways in which the field is constructed. In earlier centuries a breadth of knowledge spanning a range of knowledge fields was celebrated. There is a curious tension in the twenty-first century, however, between the specificity and specialisation which permit in-depth analyses of narrow and clearly bounded fields, and interdisciplinary enquiries which aim for more holistic understandings of the world. The chapter begins with discussion of life history and narrative research within a broader historical context and wider time frame. Ways in which life stories have contributed towards the formation of social and national identities and how they may serve as a function for both remembrance of the past and hopes for the future are considered. Using stories from the past reminds us of the diversity of societies and of those experiences of individuals whose lives are recorded. The interrelationship of time, space and social contexts is discussed and the influence which these contexts have on lived experiences and identity formation explored. Attention is drawn to ways in which authors have represented individual lives in their chapters and the sensitivities which need to be taken account of. The richness and depth of understanding emanating from life history research is thus exemplified. I conclude with a story which facilitated my own learning, but also reminded me of how issues concerning power and identity are present and influence outcomes in even the most everyday social interactions. The wider context – storying and explanations about the world The book’s title is evidence of a commitment to the value of life history and narrative research and it is worthwhile to place this commitment within a wider context. Narrative is valued across a range of subject domains. From the very beginning of time it has been a feature of humankind to explain the present through recourse to the past. Stories have been used to explain the natural world and also people’s presence within it. Creation stories from different cultures sought to explain how the world was created – its landscapes, flora and fauna. Such stories have been represented in different ways – through words, through pictures, through sounds. Similarities in these stories across different cultures in different parts of the world, together with other myths describing natural phenomena, demonstrate the commonality of

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humans’ curiosity to explain their world and to pass on their explanations to succeeding generations. Stories providing explanations of the social world too are prevalent in all cultures. Important values and attitudes were handed down as stories of individuals, of great deeds and events were told and retold through successive generations in myths and legends and sagas. Storytellers had a clear function within their communities: they rooted people with their past; they were the memory makers of their communities – celebrating and recording the past, providing explanations of the present and searching out meanings for the future. The power of stories to create a sense of common identity, identification with common endeavours has been harnessed by leaders and those in power over the centuries. Hobsbawn and Ranger (1983) identify how ‘invented traditions’ have given legitimacy to political acts and to customs and cultural practices. Nation-states adopt stories of key individuals and events to develop a sense of national identity – to establish national identifiers distinguishing what separates peoples from different states apart from each other. So the stories of the founding fathers, the wagon trains going west, are important in the American dream; in England, fighting against the Spanish Armada to preserve Protestantism in the sixteenth century and British resolve to continue fighting in 1940 after the evacuation from Dunkirk have become national myths – part of a shared history developing a sense of national identity described by Anderson (1991) as ‘imagined communities’. These national stories were created from the stories of individual lives; they were not only to explain the past, but through the choice of individuals to include, they provided versions of commendable behaviours and moral exemplars to influence the lives of future citizens. Challenges in prioritising and selection The choice of stories to form a national pantheon creates dilemmas; which stories should be foregrounded and shared? Which stories should be neglected and forgotten? In post-1989 Europe, the emergence of new stories about the past reflects the political changes occurring in European countries, particularly those in Eastern Europe. In Latvia for example, the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia attempts to reconcile the different stories and experiences of people living in Latvia for the 51 years in which it was an occupied state (1940–1991). Its aim is to put the record straight and to provide a version of the past to counterbalance histories which have sought to ‘deny, falsify or distort the history of Latvia …’ (Nollendorfs 2005: 11). Within the museum, the focus on the stories of individuals recounted through their testimonies, artefacts, diaries and documents enables visitors to experience some of the dislocation of those years; the manner in which political structures controlled lives and ways in which individuals sought to make their own sense

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of what was happening around them. Recounting these individual stories makes us pause for reflection – stop in our tracks and contemplate a fuller version of the past to counterbalance the assertion made by one of Bennett’s characters in his play The History Boys that, ‘history is just one bloody thing after another’ (Bennett 2004). Stories of individual lives are also important as acts of remembrance ensuring that certain events and episodes of the past do not fade into obscurity. Names of men and women inscribed on war memorials across the world are testimony that their lives will not be forgotten, nor the cause for which they died. As I walk around the Pinkas synagogue in Prague one spring day, I note the names and dates of birth and death of nearly 80,000 people who died in the Holocaust inscribed on the walls. List upon list upon list on each wall; the individual name sharing the wall with thousands of other names of men, women and children, whose lives were painfully cut short. For those who survived, their stories are told both for remembrance and for hopes that in the future such atrocities will not occur anywhere again. The stories above are the stories of ordinary people living out their lives within wider political and social contexts. Such an approach provides the data for Thompson’s (1968) book on The Making of the English Working Class. In attempting to ‘rescue the stocking weaver from obscurity’, Thompson seeks out the voices of ordinary people living in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; he notes what they said and wrote and also sets their stories within broader contexts by examining the artefacts and documents which surrounded them in their daily lives. Thus life stories are created not solely through the words of people living in the past, but also through their imagined voices as scholars interpret the sources of information which provide evidence about these people’s lives and the contexts in which they were living. A reality of the past is created, but as historians such as White (1978) would argue, this past could be no more than an imaginary fiction since the past which is written about is no longer perceivable. Thompson’s book is important since it marks a growing recognition of alternative histories and different ways of interpreting the past. It follows traditions from the earlier work of the Annales school of historians, trying to understand a period of time holistically in all its complexities together with the mentalities of people living at the time. Historical research and writing have expanded since Thompson wrote his book; studies in gender, childhood, class, race and other groups of people are all now within the accepted canon of historical study. In this respect Thompson’s book has become an historiographical artefact – set at the time of writing in the 1960s, it represents new advances in historical scholarship and ways in which historians viewed their world. It also reminds us of the provisional nature of stories and how different stories achieve different significance at different periods of time. Remembering how ‘reality’ is created and how it changes over time is significant in reading chapters in Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through

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Life History and Narrative Research. Stories within the book relate to lives lived within the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, yet they are recounted with the present – the closing decade of the twenty-first century – in mind. The historian David Lowenthal observes, ‘the past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today’s predilections’ (1985: 16) and reminds us that ‘present needs’ seem ‘to reshape past remains’ (1985: 17). In his chapter on images Dean Smart questions why so few history textbooks used in English schools include pictures of people of colour on their pages or indeed refer to people of colour in their texts. Maybe the more challenging question is – why are we interested now that these images are absent from current textbooks which children use? Is this a reflection of contemporary society’s greater interest in human rights and social inclusion? Similar conclusions might be drawn from Elizabeth Newman’s interest in Ed, a gay, male and working-class primary school teacher, or Christine Halse’s story of Sue negotiating her identity as a teacher of a new anti-racist curriculum. Individual lives and identities constructed within different sites and contexts The above discussion considers how historians and museum curators use the stories of individual lives to investigate and represent the diversity of lives lived in the past. It also reminds us of the influence of history and traditions on contemporary lives which is illustrated in several of the preceding chapters. History provides one context for identity construction – but other sites are also influential including different locations and spaces available for social interaction. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre, Edward Soja, the distinguished political planner and urban geographer, argues that we are, ‘first and always historical – social – spatial beings actively participating individually and collectively in the construction/production – the ‘becoming’ – of histories, geographies, societies’ (1996: 5). These three dimensions influence our lived experiences and also how we conceive and perceive these experiences; real and imagined experiences are intertwined. In terms of life histories, his analysis provides a useful framework for both the construction and the interpretation of experience illustrated in Figure 12.1. Such an approach to understanding human experiences is well known in the field of humanities education. A Schools Council Project in England in the 1970s was actually entitled ‘Time, Place and Society’ and identified key concepts linked with such areas which are now well established in the field of humanities and citizenship education (Blyth et al. 1976). Where you happen to have been born in the world has a tremendous consequence for the life you might want to lead and the opportunities open to you. The occupation of places and spaces in many parts of the world is fiercely contested, involving political judgements and issues of human rights. Inhabiting a particular

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Historicality

Individual’s life and identity

Spatiality

Sociality (Adapted from Soja 1996)

Figure 12.1 Influences on lived and imagined experiences.

space effects how you appreciate other places and your own freedom for action. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela writes movingly of his years living in a cell six feet wide, where his head and feet touched the sides when he lay down. It overlooked a courtyard and had a small window at eye level. Mandela acknowledges it was the hardship of living in this space which influenced his political views and his belief that imprisonment robbed, ‘both the oppressed and oppressor alike’ of ‘their humanity’ (1994: 617). Chapters within the book illumine the interplay of social, historical and spatial contexts on constructing, living and perceiving individual lives. Places are significant in the life histories which are narrated. They incorporate a range of spaces – the home (including specific rooms within the home), workplaces, educational institutions, the café, countries and continents are all present in different chapters. We can see how the occupation of particular spaces and places caused discomfort for some individuals reflecting on their lives and constrained ways in which they were able to act. In some narratives there is a sense of isolation between the narrator and those who shared the same spaces. Some spaces isolated individuals from other more welcoming places or prevented interaction with others inhabiting elsewhere. On the other hand, for some individuals the places they occupied were enabling, providing them with freedoms to act without restraints. Authors of chapters within the book also reflect on the spaces which they have occupied and still occupy as they consider how their life histories have influenced their

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research. And for some authors, specific places act as touchstones for further reflections and insights, connection and reconnecting with their pasts. So places and spaces also have a time dimension – acting both on the past and the present and also the future in some accounts where preferable places are acknowledged. Reflecting about the relationship between places and society I recall, ‘ No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind …’ So writes John Donne in 1623 in his well-known meditation, which utilises these geographical metaphors to illumine individuals’ interconnections and interdependencies within the social world (Donne 2003: 108). Engagement with the social world extends across a range of different communities – some close to home and others further afield. The developmental psychologist Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) work on ecological systems provides a useful framework for differentiating between the range of environments which are explored within the book. In different chapters, authors move their narratives of individual lives back and forth through different layers of situated engagements in the microsytem (family and friends) and mesosystem (schools, local communities, workplaces) to broader areas of indirect engagement represented in the exosystem and macrosystem. Like Russian dolls, these different layers nest within each other and are contingent upon each other. One of the features of narrative research is to unravel how these different systems influence social relationships and individual agency. Individuals as agents of their own lives People are products of times in which they are living; lives moulded by policies, structures, prevailing beliefs and attitudes. Bruner describes this as entering a story which has already begun: It is as if we walk on stage into a play whose enactment is already in progress – a play whose somewhat open plot determines what parts we may play and toward what denouements we may be heading. Others on stage already have a sense of what the play is about. Enough of a sense to make negotiations with the newcomer possible. (1990:34) Within the life histories recorded in the book, some of the plots are very painful – incidents of discrimination, of unequal treatment and lack of opportunities are features in several chapters. The stories tell of how these experiences have impacted on individuals’ sense of self and identity and how these self-beliefs constrain their actions. Other individuals within the book, however, have exercised more agency within their own lives and questioned

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social and cultural conventions, successfully counteracting those which constrained them. We see these individuals making different lives from those which were expected, challenging the maintenance of the status quo and acceptance of tradition. Reflection on the trajectory of individual lives may have powerful consequences for probable and possible futures. As Nick Clough acknowledges, the creation of an environmentally sustainable world is dependent on the sense of responsibility engendered by individual citizens as they live their lives in an increasingly interdependent world. Accounts of past inequalities encourage reappraisal of those which remain or which may be hidden from public view. Despite the abolition of the 11-plus which segregated Jacky Brine from an academic education in English grammar schools in the 1950s, expectations for achievement and the lower attainment of many children from workingclass backgrounds still remains. Discrimination on the grounds of race, gender and sexual orientation is illegal, yet the stories told by individuals in chapters by Shekar Bheenuck, Christine Halse, Richard Waller and Elizabeth Newman reveal the subtle ways in which discrimination continues creating inequalities in opportunities and unfairness. Representing individual lives The chapters in this book confront us with aspects of individual lives which the authors have found significant. Brief autobiographies introduce the chapters and authors have also intertwined the stories of their lives within their writing. As readers therefore, we know something of the background of these writers – where they are coming from – and absorb their perspectives as we engage with their texts. We can follow the authors’ interpretations should we wish, but as readers ourselves we might also reformulate our own interpretations based on our own experiences and assumptions. All the authors are academics working in higher education; would other readers with different backgrounds and experiences necessarily interpret these life stories in the same way? The temptation is to look back on our lives and to attribute significance to particular events, the significance of which might not have been apparent at the time and may only be seen as important at the time of writing. So for example, the historian David Cannadine (2001) describes his imperial childhood in an appendix to his book, Ornamentalism. How the British saw their Empire. One wonders, if the book had been entitled differently, whether he would have viewed his childhood in different terms – childhood in post-war Britain, for example. One might take a counterfactual perspective too; for example if Barrack Obama had not been successfully elected as President of the US would the particular events occurring in his life have acquired the same significance as if he had remained a practising attorney or senator in the US Senate?

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Autobiographies and biographies are written backwards from a destination already determined. As Bruner comments, ‘there is something curious about autobiography. It is an account given by the narrator in the here and now about a protagonist bearing his name who existed in the then and there’ (1990: 121). Similarly, in researching life histories there is a temptation to ascribe meanings to previous events to explain present lives. Life histories once written down gain permanence and identities of their own and it is useful to remember the ways in which the life history was narrated; how the respondents were encouraged to voice their views; the stimulus to encourage them to talk and their interactions with the interviewer. Narratives describe events and they also act as validations for events. The respondents might have chosen to tell a variety of stories; but they chose to tell the one which has finally been recorded. This might have been for any number of reasons. We can only say with certitude that at the point of time they told their story, the respondents saw their past in such a way. The stories give us a tenuous grasp on realities. But it is a slippery reality which may change as personal circumstances change, as storytellers grow older. Our work in this area is facilitated by our language which enables us to manage these different perspectives. Use of different tenses enables us to move between the past, the present and the future – to know which time period we are referring to and how it relates to previous and subsequent events. Culture frames our language, shaping our interactions with others and the meanings which we want to convey. Jane Andrews provides some interesting insights in this area when researching the experiences of Saqib and his mother Farah through a Punjabi interpreter. Dependent on culture, language also restricts us and may influence ways in which we interpret our lives. It may be, ‘a prison-house or black hole from which neither consciousness nor behaviour can escape’ (Slotkin 2005: 228). This becomes more in evidence when different cultures are contrasted; Everett’s (2008) account of living with the Piraha in the Amazon jungle struggles to explain a language and culture which focuses on the immediacy of experience. Consequently the Piraha do not talk about a distant past or future; their thoughts are anchored in the present and require recourse to eyewitnesses’ testimonies of a probable past that can stretch no further back than living memory. So culture shaping our language enables us to move beyond and through different periods of time. But language also provides a device for engaging listeners on different levels within the narrative. Certain genres and forms of language encourage more emotional and creative responses; an appeal to listeners’ feelings, opening up imaginary worlds. Questions posed by some authors remind readers of the provisionality of knowledge and its social construction through enquiries; the actual words and phrases used by interviewees provide authenticity to the stories which are told and specialist vocabulary is employed to define complex concepts and to establish shared ontological understandings with the reader.

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Other ways of representing individual lives are explored within the book; pictures and artefacts are used as starting points for stimulating discussion and sometimes, as we see in Nick Clough’s and James Rolling’s chapters, they are seen as records of lived lives. But whilst these pictures provide a visual record, they do not provide evidence in their own right: language – both written and spoken – accompanying the pictures steers the readers towards particular interpretations and understandings. Conversely, Dean Smart notes the challenges occurring when pictures are less anchored in language and individuals’ differing interpretations as they ‘read’ them in their textbooks. There is sensitivity in revealing people’s lives; we are in a privileged position to look at them, to analyse and critique. Narrative searches out meaning from lived experiences and as Bruner argues it becomes a ‘cookie cutter imposing a shape’ on people’s understanding of the past (2002: 6–7). Narratives however are always ‘half someone else’s’ (Wertsch 2008: 122) and questions ultimately may be asked concerning who owns and constructs the narrative. This issue is addressed by many authors within the book; in Chapter 2, Pat Sykes draws our attention to the dilemmas which this poses and the ethical challenges which are created. Private lives are no longer secret when they are represented in the public domain; privacy cannot be regained. Instead new ways of living with private worlds have to be renegotiated as secrets are disclosed. Whilst such sensitivity is important in researching lives in the contemporary world, I am now finding that this sensitivity is creeping into my consciousness in other contexts – the publication of private papers which provide different stories to those projected by individuals in their public lives; the ways in which museums use objects to develop interpretations of other peoples’ lives and a growing unease as I stare at an Egyptian mummy, removed from his (not its) tomb and still wrapped up in his (not its) bandages under the glare of electric spotlights alongside a few notes of explanation. Concluding remarks The title of this book begins with the word exploring. As editors, Ann-Marie Bathmaker and I have seen this as an exploration to be undertaken together; our views and stories are here to be shared within this volume. No answers or resolution are provided, but we hope that we have encouraged you to engage with these stories; to elaborate on them in your own mind – to be able to say, ‘that reminds me of …’ and from there to develop further understandings of the social world for yourself. We look to the past to provide guidance for the future – and we hope that this book has provided you with some further insights on how this might be developed and achieved. The richness of data provided by life history and narrative research is amply demonstrated within this book’s chapters. If we view educational research as first and foremost an endeavour to develop a greater understanding of the

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social world, then these stories play a significant role. They permit us to probe beneath the surface; to question accepted interpretations and to ensure that different perspectives taking account of social diversity are represented. Layers of understanding are developed and it is in this way that life history and narrative research may permit a more complex analysis of issues relating to power and identity which are featured throughout the book. As an end note I’d like to conclude with a story from my own past. It was a wet and wintry night and I was being driven to the airport. Words are insufficient to conjure the sharpness of the cold, the feel of the darkness in the night and the warm smell of curry in the car. I can still sense all this – but it is something which it is difficult to share. I began talking to the taxi driver who had been born in Pakistan. Pleasantries passed and then learning I was a university lecturer, a discussion on education ensued. The taxi driver described education in Pakistan and concluded that education there was better than in the UK: the teachers were stricter and children undertook more tests. Didn’t I think that tests were important? Because I had little knowledge of education in Pakistan I was reluctant to be drawn into comparisons – although did have some views on testing in English schools. I tried to be non-committal, but this caused the taxi driver to recount his own life story. ‘I’m not just a taxi driver from Pakistan. I am an educated person – I was always top of my class. My father was a head teacher,’ he explained. ‘I know what I am talking about,’ he implied. There are elements from this story which provide some insights into the question – are life stories really important? For this person his life story was important – it strengthened his sense of agency and the interaction which he was able to conduct with people whom he met. His life story created his identity, governed his thoughts and interactions and ways in which he wanted his views to be acknowledged by people he encountered. We are selective in which parts of our past we wish to tell. For the taxi driver, elements of his education were important to reinforce the views which he was presenting on education. His life history gave legitimacy to his views. The conversation provided him with the opportunity to articulate his views – they were not necessarily reshaped, but through the encounter possibly consolidated in his mind. And for my part, I felt uncomfortable. Did my position as a university lecturer privilege my views on education – give them added weight? I did not have to say out aloud, ‘I am educated person’, that was accepted at the beginning and provided the parameters of the encounter. A brief encounter on a stormy winter’s night, which encapsulates the interconnections between life stories, power and identity. Life stories, whether revealed publicly or safeguarded in private, do influence our identity and through identity, the process of identification permeates unnoticed ‘our ways of thinking and talking and making sense of the social world’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 16). We hope that the stories within this book have influenced your own thinking on ways in which this permeation may occur.

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References Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bennett, A. (2004) The History Boys, London: Faber and Faber. Blyth, W.A.L., Cooper, K.R., Derricott, R., Elliott, G., Sumner, H. and Waplington, A. (1976) Place, Time and Society 8–13: Curriculum Planning in History, Geography and Social Science, Glasgow: Collins. Brubaker, R. and Cooper, F. (2000) ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society, 29(1) (Feb 2000): 1–47. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J.S. (1990) Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J.S. (2002) Making Stories; Law, Literature, Life, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Cannadine, D. (2001) Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire, London: Penguin. Donne, J. (2003) Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Everett, D. (2008) Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, London: Profile. Hobsbawn, E. and Ranger, T. (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mandela, N. (1994) The Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, London: Little, Brown and Company. Nollendorfs, V. (2005) 1940–1991 Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, Riga: Museum of Occupation. Slotkin, R. (2005) ‘Fiction for the Purposes of History’, Rethinking History, 9(2/3): 221–236. Soja, E. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Thompson, E.P. (1968) The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Wertsch, J.V. (2008) ‘The Narrative Organisation of Collective Memory’, ETHOS – The Journal for the Society of Psychological Anthropology, 36(1): 120–135. White, H. (1978) Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins Press.

Recommended reading

We asked each author to recommend a book that had inspired or influenced their thinking in relation to narrative and life history research. The following suggestions reflect the diversity of sources that make narrative inquiry so rich. We hope not only that one or some of our recommendations might appeal to you, but that they will encourage you to read widely and eclectically. Wright Mills, C. (1970 [1959]) The Sociological Imagination, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Recommended by Ann-Marie Bathmaker The Sociological Imagination was written a decade after the second world war. C. Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and for him, the significance of this period, which he describes as the ending of the ‘Modern Age’ (p184), is that ‘our basic definitions of society and of self are being overtaken by new realities’ (p184). He argues that the ideals of the Enlightenment – reason and freedom, and rationality as the basis for increased freedom–are in crisis, and that it is the restatement and clarification of these problems that should be the underlying focus of sociological work. Why recommend this book in relation to narrative and life history research? Mills argues that the focus of a sociological imagination should be the intersection of biography, history and society. The reason I find this book particularly useful in relation to narrative inquiry, is that he emphasises the relationship between biography and society, between ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’ (p14). It is the work of the ‘sociological imagination’ to be able to trace the links between them, and to understand history in terms of its meaning for individual lives. The Appendix, entitled ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, is well worth reading in its own right. Here Mills talks about how he goes about the ‘craft’ of doing sociological work. This personal and fascinating account includes the following comment: Now I do not like to do empirical work, if I can possibly avoid it. If one has no staff, it is a great deal of trouble; if one does employ a staff, then the staff is often even more trouble. (p225)

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Not exactly the comment a narrative or life history researcher would make. The comment sticks in my mind for what it hints at about C. Wright Mills the man. It is the sort of comment that provides sudden insights when reading or listening to people’s narratives. His point in making this quite provocative comment is, at the same time, an important one. Collecting data needs to relate to the issues and concerns we seek to explore. For narrative and life history researchers it is a reminder that narrative inquiry is not just about collecting stories, but involves making sense of those stories in productive and ethical ways. Plummer, K. (1995) Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, London: Routledge. Recommended by Pat Sikes I resisted and then put off providing a ‘recommended book’ for as long as I could. I’m one of those irritating lecturers who don’t give reading lists if at all possible, believing that they can have a limiting, if not reductionist, effect on what students read. Also, I’m always very conscious of how personal and subjective any recommendations can be. Then I was reluctant to have to make a choice when there are so many wonderful books out there. I, for instance, am a major fan of Laurel Richardson and could happily recommend any of her books. Similarly I think Carolyn Ellis’ work is extremely interesting and well worth exploring. Readers should, therefore, look to my list of references for these authors. Unfortunately the editors of this book wouldn’t accept my arguments for not selecting one text and so I have plumped for Ken Plummer’s Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds. Why? Well, for a start, this book is very relevant to my own sex-related work but more especially I think it makes an excellent case for stories and narrative as sociological methodology and method given that stories are fundamental to social life. The book is also written in an extremely engaging style – it’s one of those rare texts which does you good in an enjoyable way. I wish I’d written it. Marr, D. (1991) Patrick White: A Life, London: Jonathan Cape. Recommended by Chris Halse I discovered David Marr’s biography of Patrick White, Australia’s Nobel prizewinning writer, a decade after it was published and when I was rewriting my PhD as a biography – sans theory and academic-speak – for a commercial publisher. I grew up reading Patrick White’s novels – they were a mandatory component of the English curriculum at school. They were difficult novels full of complex language, complicated characters and powerful, adult themes of land, country, relationships and identity. Patrick White’s life (1912–1990) had all the essential ingredients for a powerful narrative. He was a sickly, asthmatic child who was sent to boarding schools in Australia and England, worked as a jackeroo in the Australian

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bush, earned a degree from Cambridge, and whose life partner was Manoly Lascaris, a Greek army officer White met in the Middle East during World War Two. The death of White’s father and an inheritance of £10,000 gave White the financial freedom to spend his life writing, but he was a complex, cantankerous and intensely private character. He enlisted a friend to collect his Nobel prize and shied from all publicity, yet actively opposed literary censorship and Australia’s participation in the Vietnam war. I picked up Marr’s biography at a timely moment in my life when I was looking for insights into what makes an engaging and powerful life history. Reading Marr’s life of White taught me how to write life history: how to weave academic analysis into a life history narrative (Marr does this when he discusses the subject matter and themes of White’s writing) and the value and importance of moving beyond the mere events of a life to capture the embodied experience and sensory atmosphere of a life – the smells, sounds, touch and feelings that contextualise and shape lives, and that talk to readers’ sensual experience of written life history. Nias, J. (1989) Primary Teachers Talking, London: Routledge. Recommended by Elizabeth Newman I first read Primary Teachers Talking when I was a deputy head trying to manage change within my own school amid a ‘clash of cultures’, and although written over 20 years ago this book still offers considerable insight into primary school culture. Nias’s book is a detailed study of the personal and professional experience of primary teachers in England and Wales. Largely through interview narrative but also some documentary sources she tracks 99 teachers in their first decade of work and again ten years later and draws on their narratives to describe what it is to feel like a teacher. Nias discusses the importance attached to the ways in which primary teachers see themselves and the main dimensions of that self-image and identity. Seeking to explain job satisfaction she draws on the extended/restricted model of professionality among teachers, identified by Hoyle (1975) and based on Hertzberg’s two factor motivation–hygiene theory (1968). From the latter, she develops the notion of satisfiers and dis-satisfiers as important in the working context. She uses both as a means of explaining primary teachers’ responses to the experience of being a primary teacher (p86). At a time when the ‘identity’ of the teacher was emerging as an important issue Nias explores the notion of the situational self which varies with context and substantial self and is highly resistant to change. She shows that to ‘feel like a teacher’ is to learn to live with dilemma, contradiction and paradox and – at its best – to experience in their resolution the creative satisfactions of the artist.

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Hertzberg, F. (1968) Work and the Nature of Man. London: Saples Press. Hoyle, E. (1975) ‘Professionality, Professionalism and control in teaching’. In V. Houghton et al., Management in Education: The management of organisations and individuals. London: Ward Lock Educational in Association with the Open University Press. Bertaux, D. (ed.) (1981) Biography and Society: The life history approach in the social sciences, London: Sage. Recommended by Richard Waller This edited book, with its 17 chapters, is a classic. Unfortunately it is difficult to get hold of being out of print, but academic libraries can usually provide it, and the occasional secondhand copy comes to light. It was published for the International Sociological Association by Sage, and was one of 24 in the ISA’s collection at that time. It refers to studies from the early twentieth century with, for example, Znaniecki’s studies of Polish peasants, whilst bringing the methodological approach up to date (in 1981!). Bertaux’s introduction starts with the challenging question ‘what can be done with life stories?’, and the volume goes on to show us their value, that is in demonstrating the social context of individual stories. Bertaux’s own chapter also starts well too, with the line ‘Once I was a positivist’ – an echo of my own academic background (I did science ‘A’ Levels) before my ‘conversion’ to the merits of humanistic, qualitative approaches to social enquiry. Bertaux’s own conversion to life history methodologies came when undertaking a project examining the lives of workers in the French bakery trade. Bertaux seems to have intended to have an open-ended sample size at the outset of his enquiries, to stop when he had ‘enough information’. He suggests he learnt a great deal from the first few life stories, and by 15 accounts had ‘begun to understand the pattern of sociostructural relations which makes up the life of the bakery worker’ (my emphasis). By the twenty-fifth story he ‘knew he had it’, and he stopped at 30 as ‘there was no point in going any further’, since he ‘already knew what he wanted to know’ (p37). Bertaux’s description of diminishing marginal returns from the personal narratives of bakery workers is understandable, but of less application to some studies, including my doctoral research as reported in this book, since the sociostructural relations making up the lives of contemporary mature students are less proscribed than those of French bakery workers in the 1950s. Plummer, K. (2001) Documents of Life 2. An invitation to a critical humanism, London: Sage. Recommended by Shekar Bheenuck There is no single measure for judging the quality or usefulness of a book. This is a deeply personal decision. An extensive range of literature exists on ‘narratives’ and ‘life history’; choosing one key text from these is a daunting task. In

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selecting Ken Plummer’s Documents of Life 2. An invitation to a critical humanism, I am making a personal claim about its usefulness, and this needs to be justified. Plummer’s book, a revised and updated version of his earlier work, Documents of Life, provides a rigorous and enduring testament to the usefulness and value of life stories as a research method. The book demystifies and clarifies the complexities concerning what constitutes life stories. It provides useful chapters on life story research methods and espouses their usefulness for researching lives of ‘subjugated’ individuals and communities. In reviewing the lives of overseas nurses working in the UK I made a conscious decision to locate these stories within a postcolonial paradigm. In this context he is supportive of postcolonial theory’s interrogation of the experiences of those who are marginalised and of giving ‘voice’ to those whose accounts need to be heard without being ‘distorted through western “translators” or researchers’ (p182). There are many similarities between my experiences and those of the nurses whose life stories I explore. Our experiences have been shaped by the colonial encounter and it is the similarities, in terms of both shared origin and experiences, that provide the synergy required to produce what Plummer refers to as the production of ‘open and democratic texts’ (p182). Plummer articulates well the responsibility of the researcher to the subject and warns of the pitfalls and assumptions that can distort and misrepresent an individual’s or group’s stories. More importantly, he reminds the reader that life story is about justice, representation, equality and change. As such, life story, he points out, has the potential of becoming a ‘tool kit and manual for moral guidance’ (p42). Plummer adds that ‘No life story can really be told or read with innocence these days’ (p42). This, for me, is the key message of the book. Brice Heath, S. (1983) Ways with Words – Language, life and work in communities and classrooms, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Recommended by Jane Andrews Maps, transcripts, photographs and hymns all populate this rich study of children and families living and learning in two communities in the southeastern United States. The focus on learning in settings other than classrooms is one of the inspirations for my choice of this work and the details of the communities studied provide ample evidence for the idea that there may be, in the words of Gregory (1997), ‘one child, many worlds’. While Heath’s work is positioned as ethnography, this text contains accounts of community members’ lives which provide the essential backdrop against which her analyses of language use in differing contexts by members of diverse communities are presented. The stories of community members allow us as readers to engage fully with the visual and textual sources which Heath as ethnographer has gathered to illustrate language in use in diverse settings. Gregory, E. (1997) One Child, Many Worlds, London: David Fulton.

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Apple, M. and Christian-Smith, L. K. (eds) (1991) The Politics of the Textbook, New York and London: Routledge. Recommended by Dean Smart Teachers trust textbooks. After the voice of the teacher the textbook is the dominant tool of classroom learning and teaching, used overwhelmingly to structure pupils’ experience and development. Teachers use textbooks in most lessons; they refer to them to develop their own subject knowledge; they rely on them to guide them as to how long to spend on a topic and use them to decide what emphasis to place on content, skills, and concepts. As Michael Apple and Linda Christian-Smith show, this trust is not without risks or difficulties. The authors of this book argue that textbooks are not simple, neutral curriculum tools, but are very problematic: their content and tasks shape what is taught and learnt and represent the values of dominant groups. They distil and privilege particular information, giving it the status of essential or desirable ‘knowledge’. Pedagogic approaches are highly influenced by the way that textbooks present information or set tasks. Their semi-canonical style of presentation skills gives special status to their content, and their production represents a power struggle, and often the victory of dominant and majority groups, belief systems and cultural values. Apple and Christian-Smith explore how social justice is often denied in the process of textbook production, distribution and use and explore how the construction of knowledge, identity and voice in the curriculum privilege the powerful at the expense of the disempowered. This resonates with my own exploration of whose stories are told by the curriculum and who is excluded from textbook narratives, whose life histories become part of the mainstream narrative of the past, and who is neglected, marginalised or ignored. Freire, P. (1970) Cultural Action for Freedom, Cambridge MA: Harvard Educational Review. Recommended by Nick Clough This seminal text was first published in 1970 at a time when I was first considering entering the teaching profession. Paulo Freire’s central message has resonated across the decades of my work as a teacher – that the human species has the capacity to transcend what has been given and what is determined. The theme of ‘Self with the World’ is coined in this early work of Freire. Human beings are described as ‘beings of relation’ though their characteristic skills of ‘reflection, intentionality, temporality and transcendence’. He describes humans as: Open beings who are able to achieve the complex operation of simultaneously transforming the world by their action and grasping and expressing the world’s reality in their creative language. (p28)

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Life history approaches provide opportunity to test this proposition through researching the extent to which people’s reflections and communication about their actions can indeed create new horizons for the problematisation and practice of freedom. The text is invoked within the arguments presented in the chapter ‘In Our Own Words: from actions to dialogue’ which begins to explore how ideas about sustainable futures may find expression in everyday actions and dialogues. Our emerging awareness of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change has potential to place us within a transitional moment of the kind described by Freire as one of ‘critical consciousness – brought about not through intellectual effort alone but through praxis, the authentic union of action and reflection’ (p48). The theme ‘Myself with the Wider World’ is identified as a centrepiece for discussions about the creation of learning identities that can sustain dialogic engagement with challenging questions about sustainability. Williams, R. (1965) The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H. and Melody, J. (2001) Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial explorations of gender and class, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Recommended by Jacky Brine I have struggled to choose between these two books, both referenced within my chapter. Attempting to write about each I’ve realised the significance of the links between them, that despite almost 40 years between their publications, their interest is in ‘class’ defined not by economics, nor by government or marketing definitions and classifications, but by the ‘feelings’, the experience of ‘class’ within. I first read Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution in 1976 as I struggled to find my/a place as a ‘non-traditional mature student’ on a polytechnic humanities degree course. Williams, through his focus on class, culture and change, helped me to make some sense of my own feelings of what I know now to be class–culture displacement. Williams was a key writer in shifting analyses of class away from simply economic definers and into the cultural and the emotional. In the development of his idea of structures of feeling, he argues that ‘it is only in our own time and place that we can expect to know, in any substantial way, the general organisation. We can learn a great deal of the life of other places and times, but certain elements … will always be irrecoverable’ (p63). The first point to make from this is that even though our apparent class position may change, we can never backfill in a different ‘knowing’, and neither can we erase what we do ‘know’. The second refers to the obvious limitations of life history research; there will always be irrecoverable elements within the narratives we construct. This is not a problem as such, simply an observation. Williams goes on to say that ‘the most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying any past period, is this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place

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and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and feeling’ (p63). This, for me, is the challenge; the attempt to understand and portray the quality of life of working-class children within a specific educational time and place. As shown in my chapter, a key interest in my ‘Bristol’ research is that of the impact (or not) of compulsory education upon post-school learning and earning lives. The focus on education is clearly linked to understandings of class and gender. It was out of this interest that, roughly 30 years after reading Williams, I turned to Growing Up Girl by Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey and June Melody. Drawing on theories of psychoanalytically informed post-structuralism, they too focus on class – and gender. They focus on the importance of the unconscious, on the psychic inscriptions of class. They argue that in our work on understanding the connections between the individual and society we need to work with and explore the unconscious processes that are involved, and to recognise that ‘class still insists upon its presence even in the midst of its remaking’ (p4). This helped me to further understand why it is that, despite moving economically or occupationally, we carry with us the classed/gendered unconscious and physical inscriptors of our class roots. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of Play: Constructing an academic life, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Recommended by James Haywood Rolling, Jr My early experiments in research methodology generated research narratives akin to what sociologist Laurel Richardson describes as ‘a collective story,’ that which gives voice to those marginalized or silenced as constructed in the prevailing narrative of sociocultural identity, in this case, the Western story of progress (p32). Richardson further describes her writing of collective stories as the act of displaying ‘an individual’s story by narrativizing the experiences of the social category to which the individual belongs, rather than [her] telling the particular individual’s story [alone] or by simply retelling the cultural story’ (p32). While artistic outcomes may not be entirely quantifiable and may perhaps even incorporate a good deal of fiction, they are quite the stuff that we need to know, the stuff that matters. Arts practices aim to tell our collective story – the human story. We have always understood this; it is why we paint ourselves in visual narratives, sing ourselves in lyric and verse, dramatise ourselves in the round, glorify ourselves in marble and stone, write ourselves into histories and her-stories, dance ourselves into states of oblivion, dream ourselves through the night. Arts practices are a form of research. I freely admit that I wrote poetry and fiction long before I ever thought to try my hand at research writing. I will also confess the same admission as Richardson:

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… I have yawned my way through numerous supposedly exemplary qualitative studies. Countless numbers of texts have I abandoned halfread, half-scanned. I’ll order a new book with great anticipation – the topic is one I’m interested in, the author is someone I want to read – only to find the text boring. (p87) Laurel Richardson also describes the ‘poetic representation of lives’ as that which ‘reveals the process of self-construction, the reflexive basis of selfknowledge, the inconsistencies and contradictions of a life spoken as a meaningful whole’ by a poem that has the simultaneous quality of acting as a whole to make sense of its parts, while it as a whole can be experienced through its parts or subtexts (p143). Thompson, E.P. (1968) The Making of the English Working Class, Aylesbury: Pelican. Recommended by Penelope Harnett My choice of a classic history text, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, stems from my own background in studying history. As a child I was always fascinated by the past and wanted to go back and live in different periods of time. Whatever era I imagined living in, I saw myself as wealthy, powerful and in control of my own and others’ lives. The history which I learned at school reinforced these images with its concentration on political histories; the deeds of politicians, policy makers and the powerful. My realisation that history embraced a wider field emerged as I studied history at university. Developing an understanding of the French Revolution required analysis of both local and national records and I became increasingly interested in the role of the Parisian crowds in the decisive events of the 1790s. From Albert Soboul’s (1958) work I learned of the individuals within these crowds, their anxieties and ambitions and the different means which they employed to achieve their goals. The realisation of the importance of such ‘history from below’ has influenced my work as a teacher concerned to ensure all learners have opportunities to achieve and has resulted in my interest in life history and narrative research. In The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson describes ‘a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences’ (p11) who establish particular patterns of relationships and ideas. He speaks of rescuing ‘the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’ (p13). In hearing these people’s voices throughout the book, he refutes notions of passivity and argues that these people were active agents in taking control of their own lives and in developing a shared consciousness together of their lived relationships with other members of society at that time.

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These themes emerging from Thompson’s study of people’s lives 150–200 years ago are embodied within contemporary life history and narrative research. I have selected this book since comparison with the past can provide a sharper focus for our studies of the present and contribute further to our understanding of the social world. Soboul, A. (1958) The Sans Culottes, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to diagrams/illustrations Abbas, T. 92 Abouchaar, A. 94 Access to Higher Education (HE) 6, 55–68; background 58–9; Fiona’s life history 55, 59–61, 63–4, 67–8; Maria’s life history 55, 62–3, 64–6, 67, 68; research study methodology 59 Adams, T. 15 agency 165–6; and structure 1, 6, 56, 66–7, 131 alternative narratives 146, 155–6 American Indian Movement 120 analogy, power of 159 Anderson, B. 161 Andrews, J. 7, 84–95, 167 anger 263–65 Annales school 162 Anthias, F. 79 Anyon, J. 131 Apple, M. and Christian-Smith, L.K. The Politics of the Textbook 176 apprenticeship 270 Asia: relations with Australia 27–8 Australia: anti-Chinese discrimination 27–8; relations with Asia 27–8 authorial honesty: and ethical research 18, 19 autoethnography 13, 15, 20, 36 auto/biographical process: writing as 12–13 autobiographies 13, 55–8, 140–1, 166, 167 Avis, J. 64 Bakhtin, M. 115 Ball, S. 131 Bathmaker, A.-M. 1–9, 168

Bauman, Z. 13, 39, 131, 140 Beck, U. 61, 119 Beck-Gernsheim, E. 119 becoming: and gay male primary teacher 39–51; process of 25; see also un/becoming Beishon, S. 76 belonging: interrogating through life history 70–81 Bennett, A. The History Boys 162 Benton, C.J. 46 Bergin, J. 18 Berlant, L. 1 Bertaux, D. 67; Biography and Society 174 betrayal stories 11 Bhabha, H. 79 Bheenuck, S. 7, 70–81, 166 Bhopal, K. 81 Biesta, G. 4 Biko, S. 118, 126 bilateral schools (Bristol) 8, 130–42; feelings of anger 134–7; feelings of empathy 138–40; feelings of envy 137–8; study methodology 132 biographical research 6, 66, 67 biography: tension between history and 8, 131 black community: marginalisation of in textbooks 106 Blunkett, D. 92 Blyth, W.A.L. 163 Bourdieu, P. 67, 132 Bowl, M. Non-traditional Entrants to Higher Education 66 Bradby, H. 87–8 Brice Heath, S. 3; Ways with Words 175 bricolage 146–9, 157; approach to ethics and 14

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Brine, J. 8, 130–42, 166; The Everyday Classificatory Practices of Selective Schooling 141; Tales of the 50-somethings 141 Bristol City Council 130 British Empire: textbook narratives 106 Britzman, D. 32, 35 Brogden, L.M. 155 Bronfenbrenner, U. 165 Brubaker, R. 167 Bruner, J. 17, 84, 165, 167, 168 Burn, E. 45 Cannadine, D. Ornamentalism 166 carbon dioxide emissions 113, 118 Casey, K. 5 Cavanagh, S. 20 celebrities 11 Chase, S.E. 1, 4 China: relations with Australia 27–8 Chinese: ignoring of in textbooks 107 Cinderella’s slipper syndrome 18 Clandinin, D. 40 class: as a dynamic concept 56; identity 260–1, 271 climate change 112–14, 119, 121, 123 Clough, N. 8, 112–28, 166, 168 Cole, B. 13 colonialism 71, 79, 103, 106 colonisation 73 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) 72 confidentiality: external and internal 16–17 Connelly, F. 40 conscious partiality 133 consequentialist concerns: and ethics 14 Cooper, F. 167 creation stories 160 Creative Partnerships 125 critical incident 31 Crozier, G. 86 CSE (Certificate for Secondary Education) 139 cultural hybridity 79 cultural imperialism 78 culture: shaping of language 167 Day Sclater, S. 156 Denzin, N. 5, 15, 31 deontological concerns: and ethics 14 Desforges, C. 94 Dhunpath, R. 84, 93 dialogic: critical evaluation 115; engagement 112, 121, 122, 124–5, 126, 128, 157

difference: dealing with in primary teaching 39–51 discrimination 165, 166; anti-Chinese 28; faced by overseas nurses 75–6; racial 31, 34, 78, 80; reverse 34 disidentification 119, 122 Donne, J. 165 Duncombe, J. 133 Ecclestone, K. 1 Ed (teacher) 6, 39–51, 163 education: changing identities through reengagement with 55–68; as a transformative experience 63–6 Education Act (1944) 130, 142 education policy, effect of 131 educational experiences: intergenerational impact of 57–8 Edwards, R. 87 eleven plus 130–42 Elliott, J. 85 Ellis, C. Fisher Folk 11, 16, 20 empathy 138–40 environment: promotion of responsible engagement with local and global 112–28 envy 137–8 Epstein, D. 39, 42, 46 Equiano, O. 106 ethical review committees 14 ethics 5, 11–21, 67; and authorial honesty 18, 19; bricolage approach to 14; confidentiality and protection of identity 16–17; fictional strategies in writing up research 18–19; and people whose lives are the focus 14–17; re-presenting of lives respectfully 16; and re-presenting narrative accounts of lives as research 17–19; and respondent validation 16, 21; writing as auto/biographical process 12–13 ethnic diversity 98–9 ethnic minorities 7, 41, 98–9; representation of in textbooks 96–11; see also textbooks, school Everett, D. 167 experience: construction and interpretation of 163–4, 164 explicit racism: and Studies of Asia 33–4 Ferrarotti, F. 67 Fine, M. 13, 133

Index Fiona 55, 59–61, 63–4, 67–8 Foster, T. 51 Foucault, M. 32 Frosh, S. 272 Frankham, J. 42, 86 Freire, P. 126; Cultural Action for Freedom 176–7 funds of knowledge concept 92, 94 Gaia theory 115 Garoain, C.R. 156–7 gay male primary teacher 6, 39–51; background of 41–5; balancing identities 48–9; first year of teaching for 45–7; struggle for professional autonomy 47–8 global warming 118 Goodson, I. 2, 4 Greenberg, J. 92 Gregory, E. 92 Gribble, Reverend E. 26 Gundara, J. 100 Halse, C. 6, 25–37, 55, 163, 166 Harding, S. 133 Hargreaves, D. 132 Harnett, P. 8–9, 159–69 Heaphey, B. 43 Heath, S.B. 1, 87, 94 Henry, C. 33 Hicks, D. 119, 120 hidden narratives 146, 149–51 Historical Association: TEACH Report 110 history 163; tension between biography and 8, 131 history curriculum: Anglo-centric emphasis 101–2 history teachers 110 Hobsbawn, E. 161 Hodkinson, H. 2 Hodkinson, P. 2 Holliday, A. 87 Holocaust 162 HSKE (Home–School Knowledge Exchange) project 84–95; approach to communicating across linguistic boundaries 89–90; background 85; goal of 92; incorporation of collaborative inquiry 94; and out-of-school lives 92–3; reflection on using narrative methods 93–5; Saqib and Farah’s learning stories 87–93

183

Huberman, M. 44 hybrid identity 79 identity 2, 3–4, 35; formation of social and national identities through 160–1; hybrid 79; interrogating through life history 70–81; male primary teachers 41; and place 98; and power 130–42; professional 39–40, 98–99, 122–24; protection of 16–17; sexual 42–4, 46; reasons for significance of 3; remaking and realignment of in teacher professional development 31; researcher 86–7, 131–2, 141–2; tensions between subjective and objective components of 56 ‘identity bruising’ 51 imagined communities 161 immigration 99 implicit racism: and Studies of Asia 33–4 individual lives: ways of representing 166–8 individualisation 61 individuals: as agents of their own lives 165–6 informed consent 67 Initial Teacher Training 40, 41 Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) 14 interpreters 1, 7, 84, 86, 87–8, 90–2, 95, 167 intercultural intruder: interviewers as 7, 87 Jarman, D. 42 Jessop, J. 133 Jews: and textbook narratives 106–7 Keith, M. 97–8 Kincheloe, J.L. 147 King, J. 50 language 167–8; shaping of by culture 167; significance of 16 Larson, C.L. 80, 81 Lather, P. 18, 140 Latvia: Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 161–2 Lawler, S. 56 learning 2; paradigms of 122, 123; history 109–11 learning in and out of school 84–95; Saqib’s story 87–90; sustainable development 112–14, 120–2, 125–8 Lieblich, A. 3

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life history: and discerning learning from integrative ecological learning 124; distinction between life story and 2; exploring lived experiences through 71; interrogating identity and belonging through 70–81; of minorities within majority narratives 96–111; and reflexivity 115–19; and teacher professional development 25–37; underutilisation of as research method 26 life as lived 2, 3, 4, 16, 17 Lincoln, Y. 2, 15 ‘little science’ 5 lived experiences: exploring through life history 71 longitudinal research methods 65 Lovelock, J. 118 Lowenthal, D. 163 Lucey, H. see Walkerdine McCarthey, S.J. 3 Maclure, M. 39 Maguire, M. 39 Mahony, P. 142 male primary teachers 40–1, 50–1; gay see gay male primary teacher; ‘mothering of’ 46; as ‘other’ 41; stereotypes of 41; under-representation of 40 Mandela, N. 164 Maria 55, 62–3, 64–6, 67, 68 Marr, D. Patrick White: A Life 172–3 Marxism 4 Mason, J. 80, 98, 100 Means, R. 120 Measor, L. 15 Medford, K. 18 Medina, J. 119 Melody, J. see Walkerdine Mies, M. 133 migrants 73, 79, 80; assimilation of 76, 78; Australia and Chinese 27–8; discrimination against 77; negotiating identities 79 minorities see ethnic minorities Minority Rights Group 120 Moje, E.B. 3 Moll, L. 92, 94 multiculturalism 100 multilingual storying 90–2 Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 161–2 ‘Myself with the wider world’ 115, 116–17 myths 106, 160, 161

Nagel, C.R. 78 narradigmatic approach 84–95 narrative inquiry: definition 156 narrative privilege: notion of 15 narrative turn 148, 156 narrative(s): definition 85; function of 2–3; life histories of minorities within majority 96–111; and restoring of individual agency 3–4; and story 146; use of in social science research 94; value of 160 nation-states: adoption of stories 161 National Health Service (NHS) 7, 72 Newman, E. 6, 39–51, 163, 166 Newsom, J. 137 Nias, J. Primary Teachers Talking 173–4 nurses, overseas 7, 70–81; adopting different names 78–9; background of study participants 70–1, 72–3; building a nursing career 75–6; difficulties faced 80; discrimination against 75–6; early experiences and training 73–5; factors for working overseas 72–3; ‘fitting in’ and life outside hospitals 76–8; negotiating identities 78–9; recruitment of by NHS 72; using life history as research method 71 Obama, B. 166 Opie, A. 259 oral tradition 147, 156 overseas nurses see nurses, overseas Papastergiadis, N. 79 parental involvement: and children’s learning 94–5 patriarchies 146, 147, 154 Perks, R. 256 personal troubles: linking to public issues 1, 4, 67 Pieterse, J.N. 102 Pike, G. 118 Pile, S. 97–8 Pinar, W.F. 148 Pinkas synagogue (Prague) 162 Piper, H. 17, 18 Piraha 167 places: and identity 98, 260–1; relationship with society 165; significance of 163–5 Plummer, G. 132 Plummer, K. 3–4, 42, 43; Documents of Life 2 174–5; Telling Sexual Stories 17, 172

Index policy 274; and practices 274–5 power 2–3, 5, 14, 16, 32, 35; conflicting agenda of teacher and researcher: and discrimination 74–76; and identity 130–42; and professional autonomy 46–7; and remembrance 144–5 Pring, R. 20 process mindedness 118 professional development of teachers see teacher professional development pseudonyms 16 public concerns: and private troubles 1, 4, 67 racial discrimination 31, 34, 78, 80 racism: explicit 33–4; implicit 34; silent 34–5 Ranger, T. 161 ‘rape research’ 18 reality TV 3 Reay, D. 61 Redwood, S. 18 Reed Raphael, L. 131 relational ethics 14 remembrance: power and relationships 144–5; stories as acts of 162 representation 140; 272–3 representativity 67 researcher(s): as subject 273–4; position as ‘outsider’ or ’insider’ 80–1; relationship with the researched 7, 133–4; repercussions of when writing about other people’s lives 19–20; roles and identities 85–7 researchers-as-bricoleurs 147, 148, 157 respondent validation 16, 21 reverse discrimination 34 Richardson, L. 11, 12, 16, 18–19, 142; Fields of Play 178–9 Riessman, K. 3, 9, 50, 84 Rolling, J. 8, 144–57, 168 Rowe, J. 51 Royal Society of Arts (RSA): ‘Arts and Ecology Project’ 112, 125 Sabar, N. 45 Said, E.W. 73 Saqib 7, 84, 87–95, 167 Sartre, J.-P. 67 school textbooks see textbooks, school schooling: classed and gendered aspects of Bristol 130–42

185

Schools Council Project 163 Selby, D. 118 self culture movements 119 self-reflexivity 148 self-staging 119, 124 Shah, S. 87 shared critical plane 133 Sikes, P. 2, 5, 11–21, 31, 168 silent racism: and Studies of Asia 33–4 Skeggs, B. 273 Skelton, C. 51 slavery: and textbook narratives 106 Smart, D. 7, 96–111, 163, 168 Soboul, A. 179–80 sociological imagination 5 Soja, E.163 South Africa: apartheid 118 Sparkes, A. 18, 58, 67 Squire, C. 84, 88, 94 Stanley, L. 12–13 Stern Review (2006) 123 Stiver, C. 13 stories 81, 156, 160; as acts of remembrance 162; development of greater insight into own lives by narrating 71, 81; formation of social and national identities through 42, 160–1; misrepresentation involved in telling 140; prioritising and selection of to form national pantheon 161–3; providing explanations about the world 160–1; role of research in interpreting 4 story-eliciting questions 88 storying: multilingual 90–2 storytellers/storytelling 84, 146, 147, 156, 161, 167 structure: and agency 1, 6, 56, 66–7, 131, 274 Studies of Asia 27, 28, 30–2; anti-racist agenda 31; discourses of opposition 32–5; explicit racism experienced 33–4; goals of 31; and implicit racism 34; and silent racism 34–5; social justice agenda 31 Sue (teacher) 6, 25–37, 163 Sullivan, G. 155 sustainability 112–28, 166 Swindells, J. 260 Tabberer, R. 41 Tator, C. 33 Teacher Development Agency (TDA) 40–1, 51

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teacher professional development 25–37, 110; remaking and realignment of identity 31; see also Studies Asia Teacher Training Agency (TTA) 40–1 Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) 84 Temple, B. 87 textbooks: school 97–111, 163; absence of intentionality to marginalise 108–9; Anglo/Euro-centric emphasis 101–2, 103; attempt to represent Britain as multiethnic in 107–8; British Empire narratives 106; collectivisation and generalisation of 104–5; ethnicity as a determinant of opinion and positioning 109; forgotten and the ignored 107; images of ‘ethnic others’ in 102–3, 103; marginalisation of ‘black’ community 106; marginalisation of life histories of minorities 109; representation of ethnic minorities 99, 100; representation of Jews 106–7; slavery narratives 106; and status relationships 103–4; tethering of ‘ethnic others’ to particular events 104, 109; thematic areas to which images of visible ‘ethnic others’ are linked 105–7, 105 therapeutic turn 1 Thomson, A. 256 Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class 162, 179–80 Tierney, W. 80 Tolich, M. 16–17

Trepagnier, B. 34 turning points 31, 44 un/becoming 6, 25–37 vicarious narrative 146, 153–5 virtue ethics 14 Vogle, S.P. 46 Walkerdine, V. 131, 134, 136, 138; Growing Up Girl 177–8 Waller, R. 6, 55–68, 166 Waters, D. 51 Wertsch, J.V. 168 Westwood, R. 18 White Australia Policy 28 White, H. 162 Whitty, G. 66 Whyte, W.F. Street Corner Society 11, 16 Williams, R. 269; The Long Revolution 177–8 women: difficulties in balancing study and family commitments 61 Woods, P. 15 Wright Mills, C. 1, 4–5, 67; The Sociological Imagination 171–2 Wyatt, J. 154 Yee, W.C. 89, 95 Young, I.M. 78 Zimbabwe 121, 124 Zmroczek, C. 142