School Sites and the Haunting of History: Unmasking the Past in Field-Based Research

• In Event: Interrogating (Un)Masking in Qualitative Inquiry at the Intersections of Critical Geographies and Spatial Justice

Abstract

In field-based research, the practice of masking sites (and generally relegating contextual details about them to abstracted “site descriptions” in a paper’s methodology section) can, at times, produce a tacit inattention to historical specificity. It can overlook, in other words, the ways that observable activities in sites, like schools, are actively conditioned by their pasts. This paper centers this relation between ‘the then’ and ‘the now’ through an examination of two urban schools undergoing curricular reform: (1) a one-year case study of literacy curriculum in a New York City public elementary school returning to its century-old roots in “progressive education;” and (2) a three-year ethnography in a non-selective “innovation” high school in Philadelphia. Following Baldwin’s (1998) assertion that “history is literally present in all that we do,” and must, therefore, be confronted, this paper examines how histories are actively revived and revised in school sites, and how tracing such processes can have implications for ethical and equitable qualitative research. Pairing archival and field-based research, we show how these school sites were haunted by histories, and how the acts of selective remembering and forgetting that animated their everyday realities raise questions for qualitative research about how the past and present are coarticulated in field-based studies. In doing so, we outline several conceptual and pragmatic challenges for taking seriously site histories in qualitative research, and we consider the ethical stakes for researchers in reconciling such a stance with wider professional norms related to masking and anonymity.

Authors

• Daniel E. Ferguson, George Mason University

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University