Methodological Challenges
in Researching Inclusive School Cultures
Melanie Nind, The Open University,
Shereen Benjamin, University of Birmingham
Kieron Sheehy, Janet Collins, The Open University
& Kathy Hall, Leeds Metropolitan University
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference,
University of Exeter, 12-14 September 2002.
Address for correspondence:
Dr Melanie Nind
Senior Lecturer in Inclusive & Special Education
Faculty of Education & Language Studies
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
Email:
Methodological Challenges
in Researching Inclusive School Cultures
Melanie Nind, Shereen Benjamin, Kieron Sheehy,
Janet Collins & Kathy Hall
Introduction
This paper tells the story of a project on inclusion in schools, and the methodological challenges that have arisen within it. Telling the story is both an opportunity to engage in a self-reflexive process, and an invitation to share in dialogue with other researchers facing similar challenges. For us, because our study is a pilot project, these methodological challenges are as central to our interest as any findings we gathered. The paper tells, in chronological order, the story of the research from its original conception through to the data analysis phase. This chronological sequence both allows but also requires us to map the challenges and dilemmas as if they took place in discrete chunks of time, and then were resolved, allowing us to move on. The reality of course is less simple than this. Indeed, certain phases of the research were characterized by specific dilemmas, such as finding appropriate schools and negotiating entry. Other dilemmas, such as those around defining what we collectively mean by particular terms, phrases, and concepts, continue to challenge us. Perhaps the pleasure, as well as the problem, of a story such as this is that some tensions and differences cannot be resolved, and our task is one of making the most creative use we can – for ourselves, our research participants and those who may one day engage with our research findings – of the resulting challenges.
Getting Started
When five of us got together with a desire to research inclusion in schools our first methodological challenge was to know what it was we really wanted to focus on and to do. We spent a good deal of time discussing our aims and in particular the dilemmas of whether we wanted to examine ‘good’ practice or ‘everyday’ practice, and whether we primarily wanted to enhance inclusive practice or enrich our own understandings about the processes of inclusion. We knew, of course, that these were false dichotomies, but we were a group of academics with very varied theoretical and practitioner backgrounds. We had varied amounts of experience in ethnography, action research and experimental methods, and we had a variety of recent and not-so-recent experiences of teaching in primary, secondary, further education and specialist settings, and of educational psychology. Without extensive dialogue on the tensions arising from our distinct backgrounds and perspectives we could not proceed. So we began talking about what each of us understood by inclusion and the communities of learners that most concern us, and this discussion is ongoing.
Gradually our focus sharpened to an interest in inclusive cultures and practices. Some of us were particularly interested in teachers and some in pupils – about what each do and think and feel and how they are constructed and construct themselves. Our coming together was in our interest in what goes on in classrooms (and playgrounds, assemblies etc) in interactions between teachers and pupils, and pupils and pupils, and teachers and teachers. It is this common agenda that steered us toward the research questions of:
· What do inclusive school cultures look and feel like to Year Six pupils?
· What do inclusive school cultures look and feel like to teachers and other adults in primary schools?
· How are processes of inclusion/exclusion produced through the daily interactions of pupils and teachers in schools?
· How do these processes relate to teachers’ stated classroom intentions, to school policy, and to the larger context of national policy/rhetoric on ‘inclusive education’?
With these questions and this agenda our decision to adopt a case study approach drawing on ethnographic methods was relatively straightforward in that we shared a general agreement about fitness for purpose. Less straightforward was our next challenge of communicating what it is we wanted to do to our funders, colleagues and potential participating schools. This meant establishing a common language amongst ourselves, and a way of describing our project and key concepts that was meaningful for the schools, parents and children. We grappled somewhat with the school staffs’ desire to know what we thought about inclusive cultures and practices before we knew well enough for ourselves. We wrote different introductory documents to engage our different audiences, aware of the need to capture the interest of busy teachers in schools. Our fundamental research questions, which we had conceived in terms of school cultures, we presented to our potential research partners in schools as ‘school ethos’. This, and other such elisions, posed an acute problem for us; how far should we assume that teachers would be unwilling or unable, given the constraints of time that characterize teaching, to engage with our research questions in the terms that we ourselves found most meaningful? Were we guilty of ‘dumbing down’ our aims in order to appear credible and feet-on-the-ground (Blythman, 1996), or were we simply being careful of our language for the sake of clarity? Somewhere between these two poles, we developed some working definitions of inclusion, inclusive schools, inclusive practice and inclusive ethos and found two primary schools who were willing to engage in this project with us, St Blythes Primary in the Midlands and George Holt Community Primary in London.
The methodological challenges that followed ranged from the pragmatic to the ethical and more often than not combined the two together, for example, ‘how might we interview the children?’ incorporates how can it feasibly be done and how can it be done responsibly, as equitably as is possible, and without causing harm. Similarly, ‘when will the teachers find time to talk to us?’ meant both finding the actual time and judging whether it was acceptable to take time away from teachers’ contact with pupils and time for solitary reflection or recovery. We discussed such challenges at a distance from the classrooms that enabled us to dwell on moral dilemmas, but ultimately some decisions were made on the spot by the researchers in the field. This meant that some good intentions, for example, fully explaining the project to the pupils as part of ensuring their informed consent, were de-railed. In St Blythe’s this turned into an uncomfortable brief explanation during an outdoor PE lesson. Many of the issues we faced are the kinds of issues that any ethnographically-oriented classroom researcher faces, but some of the issues we regard as more acutely framed by the nature of our study as a study of inclusive cultures and practices. Clearly, there is nothing mutually exclusive in this categorization, but for the sake of focus it is these latter issues that we dwell on in this paper.
Firstly though, we offer a brief summary of what our methods were and the questions we asked of the data, in order to present the methodological challenges within a more holistic context. We worked with two urban English primary schools, one in London and one in the Midlands. Two members of the research team were keen to take on the fieldwork role. Each of these two had made the original contact with one school each, and we planned for them to spend a complete school week in one Year Six class in their respective schools, followed by a series of about six day visits. Alongside field notes, the data gathered included interviews with the headteacher, class teacher and groups of children, and audio and video recordings of lessons. In addition to unstructured thematic analysis of the data, some pre-specified questions were used to prompt data collection and analysis:
· What characterizes the children who are most at risk of exclusion in these schools?
· Where do we see barriers to their learning and participation?
· What are the exclusionary processes going on?
· Where do we see evidence of inclusive cultures?
· Where do we see evidence of inclusive processes or actions?
Choosing inclusive schools to research: inclusive - says who?
Corbett (2001) says of her decision to choose Harbinger school for her study of inclusive pedagogy, that it was because the school was already known to her and that, through discussion with teachers, she knew it to be inclusive according to a set of criteria. In finding our schools, whose inclusive cultures and practices we were keen to understand, we did not have this straightforward clarity but instead faced all kinds of quandaries.
We could study practice in schools whose inclusiveness was already in the public domain, such as Harbinger, Cleves (Alderson 1999) or other Newham schools. But there was something uncomfortable about over-researching these schools at the expense of other schools that might be doing equally good but under-explored inclusion work. To somehow build up ‘hero schools’ seemed to us to undermine the concept that processes of inclusion (and exclusion) go on in everyday schools every day of the week.
We could devise our own pre-set criteria for deciding that a school is inclusive and therefore worthy of study in a project concerned with inclusive cultures and practices. This, however, felt a little like answering our own research question without even entering a school! Moreover, it went against our understanding that at classroom level inclusion is a process, a series of choices made throughout the day, thus pre-ordained benchmarks could be misleading and detract from our focus on learning about these intricate choices. We decided against pre-defining rather than exploring.
We could opt out of having to define a school as inclusive according to our own criteria and instead use official criteria. This would lead us to schools viewed as inclusive by Ofsted or the LEA. Alternatively, we could seek out schools that self-identified as inclusive, using for example their school prospectus or information given out when recruiting new staff.
In the end we went with a mixture of recommendation by others - senior advisory staff in LEAs - combined with self-identification in that the schools were interested in further understanding their own inclusive practices. Practice varied greatly in the LEAs in which we were interested. In one LEA, an initial telephone enquiry by the researcher led to a conversation with the Chief Education Officer (CEO), who made himself available for interview, and recommended schools to us. Such schools were pleased to have been recommended, and the CEO’s recommendation made approaching the schools much easier. In another LEA, telephone messages went astray, and senior personnel were unavailable. Schools who were contacted ‘cold’ mostly declined to participate. We were interested in year Six classrooms and this meant that we were competing against the school’s SATs agenda and largely loosing out. Our approaches to schools were also made in the context of a culture of surveillance created by the inspection regime (Rea and Weiner 1998; Morley and Rassool 1999), which may have added to their wariness. This had more impact on the study than we could have anticipated. We found ourselves trying to sell the idea of the study to the schools, flattering the headteachers with comments about their recommended status, and promising a supportive process focused on the good things going on in the schools. (This came back to haunt us later when we found we had not constructed an ideal context in which to constructively share the data about the processes of exclusion we found.) Eventually, though, potential partner schools were identified, and their participation confirmed following a visit in which the fieldworker made some subjective judgement that this school was open and responsive to the project.
Collecting and analysing data: how do we look? and how do we know?
How do we look for inclusive cultures and practices and how will we know when we have seen them were the next challenges. For Peters’ (1995) research on inclusion the decision to use ethnography and participant observation was an obvious choice, but as a disabled researcher she could avoid studying ‘other’ and make good use of her ‘personal baggage’ as a disabled person. Like her we wanted to look at the flow of behaviours and at the attitudes and emotions interacting with the behaviours. We wanted the ‘holistic, thick description of the interaction process’ (Lutz, 1981, p.52) that ethnographic methods offer and we had the ethnographic desire to understand other cultures on their own terms. But we recognized the tension of creating the culture by studying it and articulating it.
We faced the challenge of seeing through the layers of what we found in schools: the official culture, the school culture, classroom culture, playground culture, sub-cultures related to class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and so on. Moreover, we needed to see through the pressures upon the schools that shape their culture such as the pressure of SATs, league tables, religious affiliation and financial survival. We needed to be aware of the bigger picture whilst examining the microcosm of school interactions, for as Corbett (2001, p. 400) argues: “school culture can be felt in the general atmosphere of the building, in the way people speak to each other, what is visible and valued, where images and artefacts are placed and how the school projects its ‘self’”. We were interested in her notion of deep culture as “the intangible process whereby children are taught to see themselves as either valued or devalued group members” (Corbett, 1999, p.129). For Corbett, researching inclusive education requires a new paradigm – looking differently and asking philosophical rather than sociological or psychological questions, for example, what are these values? whose needs take priority? why are differences to be celebrated? (Corbett, 2001, p.7). This informed the agendas of our researchers in the field and influenced us all as we grappled to tease out the understandings the data offered us.