Maggie MacLure

Arguing for Your Self: identity as an organising principle in teachers’ jobs and lives

Abstract Biography and life history are currently enjoying a revival in educational research and development. This article considers the implications of adopting a ‘biographical attitude’ to research and policy issues, and explores the notion of identity as an organising principle in teachers’ jobs and lives. Identity, it is suggested, can be seen as a kind of argument—a resource that people use to explain, justify and make sense of themselves in relation to others, and to the world at large. While identity is a site of permanent struggle for everyone, teachers may be undergoing a particularly acute crisis of identity, as the old models and exemplars of teacherhood disintegrate under contemporary social and economic pressures. The article is based upon an empirical study of 69 primary and secondary teachers.

Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology

The article imagines a materially informed post-qualitative research. Focusing upon issues of language and representation, under the influence of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, it argues for research practices capable of engaging the materiality of language itself. It proposes the development of non- or post-representational research practices, drawing on contemporary materialist work that rejects the static, hierarchical logic of representation, and practices such as interpretation and analysis as conventionally understood. The article explores the ontological and the practical implications of this state of affairs, via a re-reading of a fragment of what would have been called data. Offering relief from the ressentiment and piety that have characterised qualitative methodologists’ engagements with scientific method, the ‘post’ could therefore be read as signalling the demise of qualitative research. Or at least, as inaugurating a qualitative research that would be unrepresentable to itself.

‘Clarity bordering on stupidity’: where’s the quality in systematic review?

The article presents a critique of the discourse of ‘systematic review’ in education, as developed and promoted by the EPPI‐Centre at the University of London. Based on a close reading of the exhortatory and instructional literature and 30 published reviews, it argues that the approach degrades the status of reading and writing as scholarly activities, tends to result in reviews with limited capacity to inform policy or practice, and constitutes a threat to quality and critique in scholarship and research. The claims that are made for the transparency, accountability and trustworthiness of systematic review do not therefore, it is argued, stand up to scrutiny. The article concludes that systematic review is animated, not just by dissatisfaction with the uncertainties of educational research (a dissatisfaction that it shares with the ‘evidence‐informed movement’ with which it is associated), but by a fear of language itself.

The bone in the throat: some uncertain thoughts on baroque method

The paper conjures some possibilities for a baroque method in qualitative educational research. It draws on work across a range of disciplines that has detected a recurrence of the baroque in the philosophical and literary texts of modernity. A baroque method would resist clarity, mastery and the single point of view, be radically uncertain about scale, boundaries and coherence, and favour movement and tension over structure and composure. It would open up strange spaces for difference, wonder and otherness to emerge. The paper uses baroque exemplars such as trompe l’oeil painting and the cabinet of curiosities to pose methodological questions about analysis, representation and meaning. The obstructive potential of the baroque might, it is argued, help post‐foundational research resist the bureaucratic reason that animates education policy and research. As the ‘bone in the throat’ of closure‐seeking systems, the baroque offers a hopeful figure for a productively irritating method.

The Offence of Theory.

Theory frequently offends. The paper argues that this is its strength: the value of theory lies in its power to get in the way. Theory is needed to block the reproduction of banality, and thereby, hopefully, open new possibilities for thinking and doing. However, I also note that theory has become somewhat disengaged from its objects, diminishing its power of productive interference. I argue for ‘exemplary’ practices, in which theory proliferates from examples. Caught in the minutiae of the example, yet also open to unexpected connections, theory might develop more productive ways of offending. Or to put it differently, of producing wonder.

Qualitative Inquiry Where Are the Ruins

The article interrogates the notion of “the ruins” and its cognates (rupture, loss, failure, etc.) as productively destructive figures for postfoundational methodology and wonders how much damage has actually been done. Hoping for ruins, have scholars merely produced a picturesque gloss on the same old Enlightenment edifice? The author finds some promise in Deleuze’s notion of the stutter, using this to look at what happens when the body surfaces in language. The author suggests that attention to the bodily entanglements of language, which qualitative method generally prefers to forget, can be put to work to perform a particular form of productive ruin commended by Deleuze—namely, the ruin of representation.

The Wonder of Data

The article considers the productive capacity for wonder that resides and radiates in data, or rather in the entangled relation of data-and-researcher. Wonder is not necessarily a safe, comforting, or uncomplicatedly positive affect. It shades into curiosity, horror, fascination, disgust, and monstrosity. But the price paid for the ruin caused—to epistemic certainty or the comforts of a well-wrought coding scheme—is, after Massumi (2002, p. 19), the privilege of a headache. Not the answer to a question, but the astute crafting of a problem and a challenge: what next?

Animating classroom ethnography: overcoming video‐fear

This article addresses the use of video in classroom research. Influenced by the work of Deleuze on cinema, it challenges the mundane realism that continues to regulate video method, and its role in perpetuating what Deleuze calls the ‘everyday banality’ that produces and conceals the ‘intolerable’. In failing to interfere with the everyday banality of the normal child, research colludes with the production of exclusion, disadvantage and a stunted set of possible futures for children. Written by four ethnographers of early childhood who have themselves (mis)used video cameras in classrooms, the article describes an experimental video film that attempts to intervene in the repetitious production of the banal. The film takes the form of an assemblage that deploys montage, cutting, disconnections of sound, vision and script, and the jolt of the irrational cut. In particular, it tries to mobilise the barely formed, dimly glimpsed sensations that comprise ‘affect’ in its Deleuzian sense.

Becoming a problem: behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom

How does it happen that some children acquire a reputation as a ‘problem’ in school? The article discusses some findings of a qualitative study involving children in the Reception year (ages 4–5). The research focused on problematic behaviour as this emerged within, and was shaped by, the culture of the classroom. A key question for the research was: what makes it difficult for some children to be, and to be recognised as, good students? Using an analytic framework derived from discourse and conversation analysis, we identify some critical factors in the production of reputation, including: the ‘discursive framing’ of behaviour; the public nature of classroom discipline; the linking of behaviour, learning and emotions; the interactional complexities of being (seen to be) good, and the demands on children of passing as the ‘proper child’ required by prevailing discourses of normal development, as coded in UK early years curriculum policy and pedagogy.

Telling Transitions: Boundary Work in Narratives of Becoming an Action Researcher.

Abstract The paper explores the handling of ‘boundary phenomena’ within modernist and post-modernist research perspectives, via a reading of the autobiographical narratives of 10 people who have been influential in developing and promoting teacher action research. These stories of transitions -- from teacher, to action researcher, to academic -- address boundary issues that are rehearsed within action research itself: between theory and practice, school and academy, insider and outsider. The paper examines attempts to solve boundary problems occurring at a key transition point in these stories -- the leaving of teaching. While modernist discourses seek resolutions of boundary dilemmas and transcendence of contradictions, post-modernist discourses resist resolution and embrace ‘in-between-ness’. The paper considers the implications for action research of taking seriously -- or even playfully -- post-modern notions of boundary work as transgression rather than transition. Vampires, cyborgs and ‘the abyss’ a...