Written into this linear process are a set of assumptions about the kind of methods and media that “count” for scholarly research (writing) and which kinds of writing (academic writing versus memo-ing or coding) should be made public. It’s as though there’s a great big funnel, and media of all kinds flow into the cup—images, audio, reflective writing, etc.—but only some modes are fine enough to pass through the cylindrical tube below, while the rest are discarded or pressed into the contours of academic text.
Following the examples of recent turns in qualitative research including blurred genres, narrative research, and arts-based educational research, my work takes a different path, moving in iterative loops and curves. I transcribed the texts from a series of the participants’ annotated drawings, audio-recorded the transcribed texts, layered and remixed them (as a form of arts-based analysis), transcribed this new text using video to record the transcription, and finally wrote up the methods and analysis here (presented along with audio, video, and image). My process flips the traditional flow of research media from audio-visual, to transcribed text, to analytical text. And by presenting some part of each phase and medium, challenges the implied hierarchies that mark some media and ways of working as data/ in-process and others as scholarly/ final product.
The assemblage references and challenges research processes in other ways too. The repeated phrases in the audio piece (eyes, high-fives) and the iterative and repetitive process of writing, recording, listening, and writing in multiple ongoing loops brings the work of “immersing oneself in the data,” to life. This is another often hidden element of qualitative research—the process of close reading, over and over again, of looking at images for long stretches, day after day. Sometimes, in the absence of a note or memo, there’s nothing to show for these hours upon hours, no trace of all that looking and wondering, noticing and not-yet-knowing what to “make of it.”
The assemblage takes up, twists, and makes visible my own methodological process as a tool of researcher reflexivity. As Luttrell (2010, p.4) suggests, “reflexivity is about much more than researcher self-conscious awareness. It is about making the research process and decision making visible at multiple levels: personal, methodological, theoretical, epistemological, ethical, and political.” So, in addition to making my own perspectives and positionality clear, I work—through the texts and sounds and shapes of this assemblage—to make my process accessible, to bring readers/viewers/listeners into my decision making, into the feel of materials, the theoretical orientations, and to highlight the parts of research work that aren’t always seen. Finally, these multimodal and often invisible elements of research, speak conceptually with the teachers’ texts as records of their own invisible labor. Their practice maps, insist on marking the everyday work—joining the labor of hauling school supplies with lesson planning with worrying about kids in tough circumstances. Their portrayals complicate thin public tropes about teachers and teacher work, instead painting a picture of teacher practice as thick and multifaceted—physical, emotional, intellectual, mundane and enmeshed with care.
[i] I transcribed about 60% of my 35+ hours of audio-recorded workshop and interview data.
