From Relating to (Re)Presenting: Challenges and Lessons Learned From an Ethnographic Study With Children

• In Event: Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Participatory Research With Children in Studies of Language and Literacy

Abstract

Purpose
This paper analyzes the processes and products of a study that examined the implementation of a “two-way” immersion (TWI) policy. In TWI programs, students from two language backgrounds study content material in both languages (e.g., English and Spanish), with the goal that all students will gain bilingualism and intercultural fluency by the end of elementary school. A central part of my study examined first- to third-graders’ “knowledge” (not just their "perspectives," see Mayall, 2000) of their districts’ new policy: How did children of immigrants understand TWI? How might children shape their parents’ understandings and choices regarding the new policy?

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws on “procedural ethics” and “ethics in practice” (Ellis, 2007; Guillemin & Gillam, 2004) and prior reflections by researchers of childhoods (Christensen, 2004) to analyze power and representation in the TWI study. Procedural ethics involves processes for gaining assent/consent and collecting data, or the “formal decisions” that are defined in IRB applications (Warin, 2011, p. 807). Meanwhile, “ethics-in-practice” includes the unanticipated moments when researchers must make ethical decisions, negotiate and compromise throughout a project (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). Few have considered ethics at the end of projects, especially how one represents children in publications (Nutbrown, 2010). Thus, I define an “ethics-post-practice” that questions: How do we name children in our work, and how do we publish a representative sample of data that children created?
Methods and Data
I re-examined the TWI study, an 18-month ethnography that resulted in case study portfolios of six Mexican immigrant families (Dorner, 2010, 2011, 2012). Data included field notes from monthly visits with families, 11 transcribed interviews, and over 20 artifacts created by the children. I questioned: Within activities designed following procedural ethics, who got to communicate what? How did the children and I relate to one another (ethics-in-practice)? Finally, how were children’s perspectives ultimately represented in the publications (ethics-post-practice)?
Results
As one attempt to shift power imbalances and underscore that I was a learner and not a teacher, I shifted space. Rather than meeting at schools, we met at families’ homes, the local park, etc., and completed activities that resonated with children’s own desires (Christensen & James, 2000): drawing, coloring, playing games, and simply hanging out. Children used the language of their choice.

Children communicated in ways that “made sense” to them, that were part of their everyday routines. Despite my attempts to shift power, however, oftentimes we related as “teacher” and “student” (when I asked them to do activities for me/the research), and only sometimes as a “family friend” or “aunt.” Finally, at the end of the study, children’s full range of perspectives were not represented. Publications reported mainly textual data from transcripts and field notes; none of the youths’ pictorial representations of schooling were used.
Scholarly significance
Educational research necessarily involves children, and often they are central participants. Too little research reflects upon the entire research enterprise; we must carefully consider representation issues throughout projects and ethically use the full range of perspectives children share.

Author

• Lisa M. Dorner, University of Missouri - Columbia