105 Epistemologically I therefore, construct my research as arranged and situated, to investigate the complex power dynamics in girls‟ and boys‟ relationships within the schooling contexts. I have employed social constructionism, as discussed in Chapter 3, which explores how gender meanings are constructed to facilitate change in the lives of girls and boys in various and differing ways, and how these are associated with more extensive social or structural relations. I have used ethnographic methodologies (observations, document analysis and informal conversations) to learn about the everyday schooling experiences of girls and boys and participatory methodologies to respect the agency of girls and boys. It is the aim of this study, to find ways in which girls and boys find agency to navigate their gender-based experiences at school. I have adopted a reflexive stance to research to share my childhood experiences of gender and how they shape my views about the best ways we may come to know about gender experiences of children in the primary schools. These experiences have inculcated in my mind the centrality of understanding meanings that individuals make about the lives and challenges that local communities face as a valid means of knowing.
106 others, issues of methodology, design and literature (Neuman, 2000). For this study, I chose the emancipatory interpretivist paradigm.
The primary intention of the emancipatory interpretivist paradigm is the understanding of “the world of human experience” (Cohen & Manion, 1994, p. 36) – that is, understanding of the social world, based on the ontology that reality is socially constructed (Mertens, 2005).
However, the emancipatory interpretivist paradigm has a transformative agenda, which suggests that it is founded on the understanding that doing research needs to be interweaved with politics and a political agenda (Cresswell, 2007), as a mechanism for working for and achieving social justice, particularly for those sections of society that have been relegated to the margins of social life. A transformative or emancipatory agenda suggests that the emancipatory interpretivist paradigm has a reform or action agenda “that may change the lives of the participants, the institutions in which individuals work or live, and the researcher's life” (Cresswell, 2007, p. 9- 10). Therefore, the emancipatory focus of the emancipatory interpretivist paradigm is the substance of a political agenda that provides options for confronting and challenging social oppression at whatever level it occurs (Oliver, 1992). That is, the emancipatory interpretivist paradigm is not about being neutral in understanding human experience; it is about making a deliberate choice of either being on the side of the oppressor or the oppressed, and not about being objective and independent (Barnes, 1996). That is, it views the research endeavour as part of the struggle to confront and challenge oppression – gender oppression in the case of the current study.
107 The emancipatory interpretivist paradigm was deployed as a template to understand and interpret the experiences and meanings that children have attached to the world around them, as part of the struggle to identify, confront and challenge root sources of gender oppression. However, this struggle is about the agentic nature of human experience; therefore, it is about empowering the oppressed and the marginalised, women in particular, to participate in their own emancipation.
Therefore, this research endeavour was about both the researcher and the participants using research production as a means to identify, confront and challenge hegemonic constructions of gender. In employing this paradigm, the intention was to comprehend the universe of human experience from the perspective of girls and boys who were participants in this research production endeavour. The point here is the location of the struggle for emancipation in the hands of those who are most directly affected by the continued existence of gender inequality, and in the hands of all others serving as allies in the struggle against gender oppression, where social interaction is not merely the means by which consensus is reached, but part of the larger struggle. “This is about research production aiming to dispel the myth that the problems the oppressed experience every day of their lives are as result of their own personal inadequacies and limitations” (Oliver, 1992, p. 101), and aiming to examine the complex and subtle ways in which oppression in general, and gender oppression in particular, operates and attempts to “depoliticise the unavoidably political” (Abberley, 1991).
The emancipatory interpretivist paradigm, by its very constructivist nature, suggests that there are multiple truth regimes, casting truth as a subjective concept that has thus different meanings and contexts for different people (Robson, 2002). The primary focus of this study was to try and uncover the meanings girls and boys bring and attach to their life experiences. However, based
108 on the above understanding about truth, this was undertaken with a “clear understanding that there would be no clear window into the inner lives of these boys and girls” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003, p. 35). This was premised on the understanding that my interactions with the girls and boys would be situated in socially constituted instances filtered through a gaze of complex identities shaped by individual experiences, characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors, and social and political contexts. Secondly, I understood that the “politics of the researcher”
(Griffiths, 1998, pp. 130-134) would further make it difficult to see clearly through the window into the inner lives of girls and boys (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003). As such, I had to “put the moral issues on the table” (Wolcott, 1995, p.123), as research always occurs in a context permeated by issues of power, emotionality and interpersonal processes (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995).
Therefore, the understanding in this thesis is that girls and boys construct their own knowledge of gender from their different understandings, interpretations, subjectivities, and lived truths. I was further interested in what teachers and parents think is real, based on their own ontological assumptions about what is real for them. This suggests then that, primarily, production of data for this study was a product of the meanings girls and boys attached to their everyday experiences of gender within their schooling contexts. The intention was therefore to unearth structures of meaning in use in their settings and to try to synthesize, understand and interpret the images of their social reality
Critical sociologists often dispute the taken-for-granted forms of power inequalities propagated by dominant discourses of gender, which tend to cast men and women, boys and girls as victims of the structural aspects of gender identity (Renold, 2005; Mohanty, 1992; McKay, 2000). This study takes a social constructionist stance in explaining practices and discourses that produce
109 gender inequalities in different contexts, including schools. Critical theorists posit that gender values are produced and/or duplicated by social relations, which oblige, however do not alter, singular activity and personality. However, although gender identities are not fixed, they are not arbitrarily contrived (Burr, 1995). The idea of experience as having “both discursive and embodied aspects evoke the significance of embodiment, which suggests that gender is also a way of bodily being in the world.” (McLeod, 2005b, p.7). Therefore, individuals possess agency to interpret their experience in the world, and are thus affected by such experience in fluid and diverse ways. Such fluidity might allow for spaces to counter dominant gender discourses and ways of performing gender, with the potential to challenge inequitable gender relations in various settings, including learning environments. Adopting the emancipatory interpretive paradigm therefore provided a space to evaluate hegemonic discourses and practices of gender that affect children‟s geographies in different schooling contexts.
Habermas (1984) has “criticized and challenged the view held by empiricists that all knowledge is based on things that can be experienced and measured”. His argument is that such a view is oblivious of the fact that it is human beings who construct and produce knowledge, and that human beings do not always fit themselves into ready-made regimes of knowledge and conform to hegemonic social construction of who they are, and believe and accept what Gregen (2012, p.
138) calls “taken for granted” knowledge as the absolute truth. For example, this thesis views boys and girls as active participants, who are capable of constructing their own meanings to issues that affect them and can identify, confront and challenge those issues where their effects in their lives are undesirable. That is, children are quite capable of making their voices heard.
110 This study utilized focus group interviews with photovoice in order to produce data on gender discourses and practices within school. Steinberg and Kincheloe (2010) assert that knowledge that is produced by human beings within the context of critical theory has the potential to reduce human suffering in the world, depending on how it is deployed. This thesis therefore set to unearth ways in which girls and boys negotiate their experiences of gender, which is the essence of empowerment and emancipation. In order to allow the multiple constructions of reality and truth to emerge, girls and boys were allowed space to freely talk about issues that affect their lives. The important benefit of the emancipatory interpretivist paradigm is that it afforded space for girls and boys to speak about and share their experiences of gender spaces and relations, and participate in advancing the transformation agenda to equitable gender relations, by generating ideas and solutions for their own situations and contexts (Jordan, 2003).
In the above sense, the emancipatory interpretivist paradigm is empowering and transformative in that makes it possible for participants to deliberate on and formulate possible solutions to their problem and to define the conditions under which these solutions work (Nkoane, 2012).
Furthermore, its nature of allowing multiple realities and perspectives to be considered and allowing one to go for a deeper meaning, make it possible for the participants to identify the challenges and recognize the possible and plausible threats that construct and leads to inequalities of gender, hence putting measures in place that will help avoid them (Mahlomaholo, 2009).
The emancipatory interpretivist paradigm therefore offers an appropriate theoretical frame to respond to the key research questions for this study, as it has potential to foster mandates for
111 action and allow for ethical practices, press for social justice, and advance the agenda of expanded epistemologies regarding issues of gender equity (Gustavsen, 2001).