CONTEXTUALISING THE RESEARCH JOURNEY
1.9 Methodological considerations
In researching this study, I adopted a qualitative approach by employing career life stories/narratives. Regarding career life stories, “people make sense of their lives according to the narratives available to them. Stories are constantly being structured
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in the light of new events, because stories do not exist in a vacuum but are shaped by lifelong personal and community narratives …” (Webster & Mertova, 2007, p.2). In this study, career life stories were chosen due to the nature of Rwandan culture where values and traditions were transmitted from one generation to another (Vansina, 2004). The use of career life stories was found appropriate to research the experiences of Rwandan secondary school history teachers on teaching the Genocide against the Tutsi and its related controversial issues that are related to historical events to safeguard the importance of orality in Rwandan culture.
Concerning the research approach, for Merriam (2009, p.5), “qualitative researchers are interested in understanding how people interpret their experience, how they construct their world, and what meaning they attribute to their experience”. Thus
“qualitative researchers want to know what the participants in a study are thinking and why they think the way they do” (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2006, p.431). The purpose of qualitative research is thus to promote greater understanding of not just the way things are, but also why they are the way they are (Amin, 2005). In this study, I have adopted an interpretivist paradigm (Nieuwenhuis, 2007). This was because my aim is to understand history teachers’ experiences of teaching the Genocide and its related controversial issues in history in Rwandan secondary schools. At the outset, I have to premise that this research is purely qualitative. By analysing the views of eleven Rwandan secondary schools’ history teachers on teaching the Genocide and its related controversial issues, the study does not aim to generalise the findings rather to understand the phenomenon according to the selected teachers.
In qualitative research there are no clear rules on the size of the sample and in the case of this research it was informed by ‘fitness for purpose’ (Cohen, Manion &
Morrison, 2011). This was so because I emphasised the uniqueness, and idiographic and exclusive distinctiveness of the phenomenon under study. As such the research participants represent themselves, and nothing or nobody else (Cohen et al, 2011).
Consequently participants contained at least one of the following characteristics: a specialised history teacher; a non-trained history teacher; a teacher from a well- equipped school in terms of educational resources; a teacher from a school with poor educational resources and a genocide survivor teacher were selected from seven secondary schools from Kigali City and up country. The emphasis on these
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categories was motivated by the desire to ensure that rich thick research data on teaching experiences related to the Genocide were obtained from a wide range of history teachers with different background and from different Rwandan settings.
By dint of the controversial nature of the topic being researched, different data generating methods were used. These included drawings, photo elicitation, semi- structured individual interviews, and the writing of a short statement. Holm (2008) points out that an image is not neutral and is produced with specific intentions in mind. Consequently the history teachers were asked to create a drawing depicting their teaching experiences of the Genocide and its related controversial issues. They were given ten minutes to complete their drawings. Most important were not their drawing skills but the meaning assigned to their depiction of their experiences.
One of the positive aspects related to the use of visual methods and a drawing in the case of this research is to deflect attention away from personal sensitivities by projecting them onto another external object (Cohen et al., 2011). Furthermore, visual images have the ability to facilitate discussion on controversial issues and in so doing increase participation in the research process (Carnes, 2009). In terms of photo elicitation a range of images related to the general history of Rwanda and the Genocide from the Internet were presented to the participating history teachers. The thinking was to allow them to explore and engage with the selected photographs to elicit teaching experiences that would be difficult to otherwise produce (Motalingoane-Khau, 2010). The photographs provided helped teachers to talk about teaching methods, content and challenges they faced in teaching.
The drawings, as well as the images selected for the photo elicitation part of the research served as a starting point to the semi-structured individual interviews (Kings
& Horrock, 2010). At first, the drawings of the research participants were discussed.
This was followed by a conversation about the photos selected during the photo elicitation exercise. During the interviews the participants were listened to carefully and probed for clarification on how their drawings and the selected photos spoke to their experiences of teaching the Genocide. The interviews were thus used to construct detailed accounts of specific educational experiences related to the teaching of the Genocide against the Tutsi and to avoid misinterpretation of the
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drawings. Lastly, participants were asked to produce a short written statement on experiences related to the teaching of the Genocide and its related controversial issues that were not touched on by the research methods employed. The aim was for teachers to draw on their memories outside of their formal participation in the research process (Bryants & Livholts, 2007; Jansson, Wendt, & Åse, 2008; Lapadat, Black, Clark, Gremm, Kranja, Mieke, & Quinlan, 2010). In so doing they were empowered, through the act of writing, to maximize the depth of description of experiences they had about teaching the Genocide (Bryant & Livholts, 2007; King &
Horrocks, 2010).
The data from participants’ drawings were put in a separate chapter and analysed by means of semiotic analysis (Johnson & Christensen, 2008) because drawings are able to reveal some sociological insight that is not accessible by other means. Photo elicitation, semi-structured individual interviews, and the writing of a short statement were utilised to construct eleven career life stories but only seven were chosen according to specific criteria to be part of this study due to a huge amount of data.
Thereafter they were analysed by means of open-coding (Cohen et al., 2011). The themes that emerged after saturation was reached were used to construct the experiences of the Rwandan teachers on teaching the Genocide against the Tutsi and its related controversial issue. In the case of this research emphasis was placed on the teaching aims, historical content, teaching methods experienced and rationale behind the way the content is taught. This thinking is based on Thien’s ideas (2014), that the aims, content and teaching methods are the trinity of education.