Embodied Complexities of Insider-Outsider Tensions in a Comparative Education Study

• In Event: 44.052 - Decolonizing and Indigenous Cross-Cultural Research Methodologies

Abstract

This paper reflects on the methodological challenges inherent in the research processes in a comparative, qualitative study of early childhood teacher education (ECTE) programs in three distinct contexts: a university-based bachelor of education program located on five different urban or rural campuses in Namibia, a workplace-embedded program for immigrant/refugee early childhood educators in Canada, and a community-based program in an indigenous community in Colombia. The primary objective of the study was to examine the ways in which globalization and colonization have influenced the inclusion or exclusion of local, Indigenous knowledges and practices in ECTE programs. The study asked: what indigenous knowledges or perspectives are brought to ECTE, how these perspectives might be integrated meaningfully in ECTE programs, and to what extent these are evident in teacher educators’ practice? Ethnographic data were collected in close collaboration with local researchers and research assistants, community members, as well as ECTE students and instructors.

Challenging the traditional view, which dichotomizes insider/outsider positioning in research processes, we argue that the relationships and boundaries between insider and outsider are fluid and shifting, influenced by elements in the sociocultural-historical context. Insiders and outsiders are typically defined with respect to their degree of access to sites, participants, and information (Chawla-Duggan, 2007; Labaree, 2002). We aim to describe the varied and complex ways in which insider/outsider relationships were embodied in each of the three research contexts. The circulation and adoption of the North American dominant discourse of Early Childhood Education (ECE) in each site, coupled with the residual effects of colonization, complicates efforts to identify indigenous perspectives. For instance, in the Canadian site, the participants needed to reconciletheir (insider) indigenous understandings of, for example, adult-child relations, with (outsider/dominant) notions of play-based learning and ‘developmentally appropriate practice’ in the ECTE program. While researchers held privileged/insider access to the dominant discourse being taught, they were situated as outsiders to the participants’ own emic, cultural perspectives on childrearing. In the case of the Namibian participants, who came from several cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the dominant discourse of ECE continually ‘got in the way’ of drawing out data on their indigenous understandings of practice. The Canadian researchers not only needed to interpret their indigenous perspectives, but also the ways in which the dominant discourse had been re-interpreted in the local context. In Colombia, the challenge was reversed: the content of the ECTE program was largely dominated by the indigenous beliefs of the particular community. In that site Canadian researchers worked alongside non-indigenous researchers at a local university whose translations and interpretations of indigenous knowledges in this program were filtered through their own beliefs and assumptions formed in part through their work in other indigenous communities (see Stapleton, Murphy, & Kildea, 2015). It is imperative to reconceptualize insider/outsider relationships when working alongside international researchers and participants in order to achieve more collaborative, participatory, multi-vocal, and inclusive research processes (McNess, Arthur, and Crossley, 2015). This proposed paper explores how researchers might navigate the “spaces between” insider and outsider positioning (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009).

Authors

• Christine Massing, University of Regina

• Anna Kirova, University of Alberta

• Larry Prochner, University of Alberta