Lives Through the Lens of a Vulture S Eye: Interpreting Learners Tales
Lives through the lens of a vulture’s eye: Interpreting learners’ tales
Richard Waller and Jonathan Simmons,
Faculty of Education, UWE Bristol, UK.
Revised version of a paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006
Abstract
This chapter discusses strategies for analysing biographical research data, raising issues about how narrative accounts can ‘illuminate the social context of individual lives’ (Sparkes, 2003:3).
The best biographical researchers understand the need to take into account wider social forces when considering individual’s ‘storied lives’ (Kehily, 1995). This technique of maintaining a focus on both social structure and individual experience has been compared to looking through the eye of a vulture (Whitty, 2002). The vulture’s lens can ‘zoom-in’ upon a tiny segment of its visual field, whilst simultaneously maintaining a coherent panoramic vista of the wider surrounding area.
Using data from a longitudinal study of 20 adults returning to education via a British Access to University course, we explore the shift from life story to life history (Goodson and Sikes, 2001). Repeated semi-structured interviews over a two year period with each participant followed their transition into the UK’s further then higher education systems.
We develop contextualised life histories of two mature students here, a 32 year old working class British Asian man and a white middle class woman aged 56. Through their contrasting narrative accounts we explore how social structures and individual agency inform accounts of their experience of returning to study later in life, andconsider the methodological implications of biographical research processes.
Introduction
This chapter attempts to answer the ‘so what?’ question levelled at much qualitative research. It examines how we can best understand the wider context of individual’s lives to make sense of their narrative accounts, and how such personal stories can themselves aid an understanding of the broader context of social enquiry. In doing this we seek, as Sparkes (2003:3) recently put it, to ‘illuminate the social context of individual lives while also allowing space for individual stories to be told’. Building upon this, we suggest to be best comprehended, accounts of social change require a narrative, and we use stories from two participants in a larger research study to contextualise broader events shaping their lives and those of others. The two, who are from very different structural positions in terms of social class, gender, ethnicity and age,are drawn from the wider study to explorethe methodological implications of biographical research. Our particular focus here is on how analysing individual mature students’ re-engagement with formal education allows us to explore the relationship between their agency – the individual’s negotiation of events and wider experiences– and the social, political and institutional backdrop to their lives.
Access to higher education
Access to higher education (HE) courses take place in the UK further education (FE) college setting,aimingto redress educational exclusion amongst low participating groups – primarily mature students from working-class and/or minority ethnic backgrounds(REF). They provide adults with no or few formal qualifications a route into university that would otherwise be denied to them (Parry 1996). Theyconventionally 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. There is an informal curriculum too, with the course aiming to raise the confidence level of students, and to develop transferable generic ‘soft’ skills including time management, handling work-related stress and effective group working (Peters,1997).Access to HE programmes have flourished since their inception in the mid-1970s (West, 1996), and attract increasing numbers of mature students from a range of backgrounds (Reay et al, 2002; Ross, 2003).
The research study
As part of a larger research project, semi-structured interviews were conducted five times with each student, around the end of term times, over a two year period. The interviews, which with the two respondents here each lasted on average about an hour,occurred on the college premises or in the respondent’s home. They were tape-recorded and subsequently transcribed, and the lead author of this chapter(RW) undertook them all. Similar questions were asked of each respondent for a given set of interviews, and whilst some themes such as whether they considered themselves a student were revisited, others only arose during one set of discussions. Informed consent was gained at the start of the project and again before each interview, and individuals were reminded they were free to withdraw from the study at any time.
The interviewees knew RW worked as an Access tutor at the college, and was involved in educational research at a local university. At times it felt appropriate to point out that, in common with most of them, he too was a mature student balancing academic studies with family responsibilities and part-time work commitments. This aided the development of rapport necessary to produce the richly detailed qualitative data sought. No participant knew him before the project commenced, and the only formal points of contact were the interviews from which extracts are selected.
Methodological theory
On the topic of generalisability, Silverman (2000) advises qualitative researchers againstpretendingtheir results are generalizable, his reasoning being essentially that our data are rarely from randomly chosen cases. We are more strident in suggesting that even if our sample is ‘random’ in construction, the results of qualitative enquiry are not necessarily applicable to ‘equivalent groups’. This term itself is also problematic – what would be an ‘equivalent group’ for this study? Moreover, even if you were able to construct a more clearly ‘representative’ sample for study, it would need to be so large as to preclude the kind of intensive analysis usually preferred in qualitative research (Mason, 1996), like comedian Steven Wright’s ‘life-sized map of America’[1]. In short, it would be beyond the scope of a study as modest as that from which this data is drawn. We might ask if no generalisation is possible, what utility biographical research can offer. It is to this question that we turn throughout the rest of the chapter.
However, rather than the construction of a ‘representative’ sample, from whom generalisations can be made, the logic here is of ‘an intelligent choice of case’. As Becker (1998:52) suggests
every research site is a case of some general category, and so knowledge about it gives knowledge about a generalised phenomenon. We can pretend that it is just like all other cases, or at least is like them in all relevant ways, but only if we ignore all its local, peculiar characteristics (our emphasis).
The site for our study was chosen for particular reasons; it allowed ready access, which in turn led to richer and more valuable data than would have otherwise been gathered. It had the additional advantage of RW’s ‘insider’ knowledge, providing the ‘thicker description’ (Geertz, 1973) necessary for the reader to be able to take their own meanings from this account.
The problems of social research and the data generated
Even a cursory examination of the research methods literature demonstrates there is no widely accepted approach to social enquiry in terms of the value of the data expected and the ethical dilemmas posed. This is unsurprising given the range of competing ontological and epistemological positions or foundations upon which research is ultimately built. From the supposedly ‘value-free’ positivistic approach, the issue is largely a tactical one of ‘interview method’ (Duncombe and Marsden, 1996). The nub of the problem for positivists is to develop techniques affording access to the ‘truths’ of the research ‘object’, and to report them in a ‘bias-free’ and comprehensible manner, with the researcher merely an impartial conduit for the revelation and dissemination of that (unproblematic) ‘truth’.
As discussed above, our own position is inherently antagonistic to this approach. Our aim is to understand the biographical narrative being developed, negotiated and (re)constructed before its presentation to us. The account is not understood as being offered unproblematically, nor is it accepted accordingly as it might be by a positivist researcher. Rather, it is produced through interactions before, during and, to a lesser extent, after the interview process, as discussed elsewhere in this chapter. One leading author on qualitative research referred to this underlying dilemma as the ‘crisis of representation’ (Denzin, 1997). Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte highlighted this conundrum in another area of social activity. By the seemingly nonsensical act of writing ‘This is not a pipe’ beneath a clear picture of one in The Treachery of Images[2], Magritte highlighted how a representation of an object must not itself be confused with the object itself, nor considered something tangible and real. The same principles apply to an account of someone’s life here or in other studies.
In terms of social enquiry, Clough (2002) applied a similar analysis to Magritte when suggesting that ‘the map is not the terrain’ (emphasis added). In short, the data taken from an interview with a research participant is not the story of their life, but an interpretation of one account of selected aspects of it. However, even this relatively complex philosophical conundrum is not the end of possible confusion or potential misconstruing. As Goodson and Sikes (2001:17) highlighted, when moving from one ‘interpretive layer’ - that is between research ‘subject’ and researcher - to two, with the reader of the resultant text added to the existing pairing, the risk of ‘contamination’ of meaning is increased by ‘the colonizing dangers of contextual commentary’, something we need to consider when representing an account of our research. This notion is perhaps understood more clearly in diagrammatical form:
X1 X2 X3
Interviewee Interviewer Reader
A mis-representation or breakdown in understanding can potentially occur at either of these points, separated as they are by ‘interpretive layers’. Again, when we consider epistemological concerns that social actor themselves may not have perfect understanding or recall of a given situation, that they inevitably choose to highlight some memories above others, and that the researcher perhaps failed to communicate their understanding clearly to the reader, the situation becomes more problematic still. Whilst we have some sympathy with this position it does draw upon a positivistic notion of the (singular) ‘truth’ being ‘out there’ somewhere, albeit at risk from ‘contaminating factors’ such as misinterpretation. We consider any ‘truth’ to be contingent, negotiable and open to different interpretations.
Telling people’s stories
For studies employing predominantly qualitative methodologies, the issue of what can justifiably be claimed from the data – the outcomes of ‘biographical research’ (Roberts, 2003) – is crucial. The experiences of the mature students in our study are not unique, but stand within the wider social context, and must be represented accordingly. However, there is not just one unambiguously ‘correct’ interpretation of the stories and lives introduced, which it is our responsibility to reveal. Consequentlywe are caught between presenting a highly theorised account of them, perhaps ‘rendering the complexity of the lives of (our) subjects less and less visible’ (Hodkinson et al., 1996:158), and simply letting the accounts ‘speak for themselves’, permitting the reader to construct their own understandings and meanings (Barone, 1995). This latter approach, in extremis, would lead to the obvious ‘so what?’ question referred to in the introduction to this chapter, and this account is not simply about telling life stories, but understandingand explainingthem. We have a responsibility to be analytical, not merely descriptive. Consequently we have sought an accommodation between the two extremes of this continuum and must therefore propose a framework for understanding social reasons behind and effects of such changes upon the individuals concerned.
Exploring mature learners’ lives: Two student tales
As suggested in our introduction, the two participants highlighted in this chapter come from very different structural locations in terms of class, gender, age and ethnicity. They were selected to illustrate how employing the vulture’s eye can aid an interpretation of very different lives and contexts. Our aim in this section is to offer a summary of the storied lives selected for particularly close examination. Wherever possible we have tried to use their own words to tell their stories. These individual life histories focus upon ideas of self and identity, the negotiation of risks, changing personal relationships, and often a developing awareness of social issues including the wider context of education (see Waller, 2005). The selected themes came from analysis of the data, being prominent in the accounts of the cohort as a whole, and additionally chime with our experiences from teaching on a range of adult education courses. They provide a basis for the analysis, understanding and contextualisation of mature student experience.
The method of data analysis chosen is a time consuming but worthwhile approach. It involved listening to the tape-recorded interviews several times, re-reading the abridged notes of interview and field notes before summarising the accounts for clarity and coherence[3]. Key themes and experiences were identified within the personal narratives, and highlighted in the vignettes below. Using the vulture’s eye approach we present the findings in ‘close-up’ first, zooming-in with our focus, and avoid overly interpreting the accounts at this stage, making only passing reference to their wider context. Instead we aim here to remain as close to the ‘personal’ version from the participants as possible, seeking to highlight details of particular relevance from each person’s narrative account. We then address the vulture’s panoramic vista – the wider social context in a more theorised summary after the life story. This is the process of turning an individual life story into a theorised and contextualised life history (Goodson and Sikes, 2001), something biographical researchers must intackle in addressing the ‘so what?’ question.
The telling of these accounts required a feeling of safety, security and trust for the research participant, and that they would not be misrepresented. Meanwhile, understanding the learners’ tales requires, as West (1996) proposes, an ‘imaginative empathy’ rather than the ‘cool detachment’ positivist researchers strive for. As discussed above the two accounts do not produce stories, endings or generalisations applicable to whole populations of mature students, but ‘a rich seam of narrative to work and connect with the lives of others’ (West, 1996:32). Rather than offering generalisable conclusions the function of biographical research is to ‘flesh-out’ the lived experiences behind hard statistics and resulting from social and legislative changes, and making societal structures behind inequality visible (Reay et al., 2002) wherever possible.
Akhtar – focussing in on biographical details
Akhtar is a 32 year old man who describes his cultural heritage as ‘Eurasian’. He has a ‘white Scottish’ mother and a Pakistani father, and considers his socio economic background as ‘solidly working class’ – his father had been a bus driver and his mother worked in a ‘corner shop’. Akhtar had grown up in an ethnically diverse inner-city community, and attended the local school.
Although he did not always enjoy the experience – he described it in three words as ‘structured, oppressive and selective’ – Akhtar had demonstrated considerable academic promise at school, suggesting he was ‘always top of my class until my parents split up’ in his early teens. He had won scholarships to two local fee-paying private schools, but chose not to take them up, as ‘none of my friends were going to either school’. He reflected upon his schooling with a clear sense of regret over a wasted opportunity (see Waller, 2004):
I enjoyed school, but never applied myself, and was never made to apply myself[4]…I'm angry with my teachers in a way, looking back on it. I knew I had the ability, but I wasn't able to take responsibility for myself, and they never made me either...they let me get away with so much because I was so good at rugby. As long as I was at school for rugby, they didn’t care.
Akhtar, 1st interview, December 2001
Akhtar’s schooling was disrupted by his family moving to Scotland where his mother’s wider family still lived. He was socially isolated there and experienced racially motivated bullying:
I had gone to one school for my first and second years, but then we moved to Scotland for a few years before returning to [home city]. I don’t suppose that helped my education, moving about, and I hated it in Scotland. I was bullied for two years. I was the only ethnic minority (sic) in the whole school. I was something to ‘stare at’, and that put me off.
Akhtar, 1st interview, December 2001
Since joining the course Akhtar remained in regular contact with many childhood friends living locally, and ex-colleagues from work. He prided himself on being able ‘to mix with people from all walks of life’ and on maintaining a diverse range of friends and relationships:
If I go out with other friends that aren’t interested in the same sort of things that I am now, we’ll talk about other things. We’ve got a big enough friendship that there are enough things that we can talk about…Last Friday I went out with the guys that I used to work with, and I had one of the best days that I’d had in a long time, getting back to ‘base level’, just being, not ‘myself’ but just being ‘an idiot’, and doing what I normally used to do. And that was quite good to do for the day, but I woke up thinking ‘oh my god, I’ve still got to finish my independent study…with a hangover!’.
Akhtar, 3rd interview, June 2002
As a younger man Akhtar had taken a very different approach to life. Although we had developed a good relationship over the course of the repeated interviews, he only hinted at a ‘shady past’ as a ‘football hooligan’ in our fifth and last meeting, and was, unusually for him, slightly less candid about the facts:
As a younger man, I had quite a reputation as a fighter, things like that, and I hate that now. And I hate that I had that reputation. I’d spend lots of money on clothes just because they had a certain label. I wouldn’t do that anymore, I just don’t do it, all the violence that goes with it, football, that StoneIsland rubbish[5]. But it worked for me at the time. Football always gave me a sense of belonging, but I don’t need that anymore. I think I’ve changed more than most people from the Access course, and I think that it’s all for the better[6].