CHAPTER FIVE
5.3 Epistemology: Interpretivism
5.3.2 Symbolic Interactionism
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The aim of interpretive phenomenology is to understand the life-world from the participant‟s perspective, to identify what enables or restrains practice as well as identifying sources of innovation and change and how this impacts on classroom activities especially in the context of this study. Therefore the researcher identified the philosophical stance of hermeneutic phenomenology as appropriate for this study which sought to understand the implementation of the road safety education programme in a changing educational environment. It is this understanding of the participant‟s perspectives of their teaching and learning environment through reflection on the phenomenological text which resonates with the concept of curriculum change and its implementation as examined in Chapter Four, Section 4.6.
Because hermeneutics can contribute to the practice of education and education research by understanding the meanings that participants assign to their experiences of implementing curriculum change, hermeneutics was considered to be appropriate to guide this study. Subsequently the meanings that teachers assign to the implementation of the road safety education programme can be interpreted and analysed. Similarly symbolic interactionism seeks to explore the understandings inherent in our culture in order to understand the viewpoint of others. The social world is interpreted through the meanings that different people assign to it and definitions may change accordingly. Symbolic interactionism is another research orientation that will frame the research design, because the conceptions of reality are highly subjective.
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Interactionists study social interactions through participant observation. It is argued that close contact and immersion in the everyday lives of the participants is necessary for understanding the meaning of actions. Meanings emanate from interaction and the re-construction of the participants perspectives in this methodology. Denzin (2003) states that interactionists assumes that human beings are capable of making their own thoughts and activities the objects of analysis. The meaning of an object resides not in the object itself but in the definitions that it brings and hence must be located in the interaction process. For consensual lines of certain objects within a group‟s perspective are subject to continual negotiation. The self is the base object for all interaction (Denzin, 2003). The self carries a multitude of differing interpretations. It is these shifts in definition which gives group life its changing character.
A fundamental concern of the interactionists has been with the conditions that give rise to new perspectives, new points of view and new lines of action. It was in the face of divergent perspectives that Mead located change and creative activity.
Symbolic interactionism is primarily about understanding other people‟s meanings.
Symbolic interactionism is therefore akin to phenomenology because of their focus attributed to meanings in everyday life.
Interactionists have persisted in believing in the presence of a concrete real subject.
This subject‟s presence in the world is given through subjective and objective reports about personal experience and the interaction process. Language and the verbal reports it permits has been viewed as the window into the inner world of the person.
Early and contemporary interactionists were and are still preoccupied with the stream of consciousness of the subject (James, 1890 as cited in Denzin, 2003) and the experience of temporality in the organization of social acts (Mead, 1910; Reece &
Katovich, 1989 as cited in Denzin, 2003).
The theory that underpins symbolic interactionism is that in conceptualizing the self, there is the “I” and the “me”. The self of the person is a reflected appraisal of the reactions of others. It is based on self, feeling and the imagined judgement of others.
It arises out of the individual‟s experience. The stream of experience is continuous, albeit fragmented, immediate and unique to each person, selective in content with moving horizons and fringes of shifting awareness (Denzin, 2003). At the centre of the person‟s state of consciousness is the self, in its main form of knower, or subjects
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(the “I”). In experience the “I” interacts with the “me” or the self as object. In this study the “me”, that was of interest was the teachers who were implementing the road safety education programme in the context of the selected primary schools. The researcher was interested in their experiences as they were involved in the dynamic process of curriculum change and implementation. From a symbolic interactionist‟s perspective people are considered to be active agents of change.
States of consciousness are known through the process of introspection or reflection on our thoughts and perceptions. Reality comes in multiple forms. Emotions and feelings are central to the belief in any one of these forms of reality. Interactionists believe, that society is an abstract term which refers to something that sociologists have invented in order to have a subject matter. Interactionists, study how people produce their situated versions of society. They see these situated versions of the social everywhere. Inter-actionist believe, in writing local narratives about how people do things together. Interactionists do, not believe in using complex sociological terms which refer to things that cannot be immediately observed in the interactions of individuals. Concepts are reworked to describe the recurring meanings and practice which persons produce when they do things together. Interactionists use everyday language and interpretive theories and are concerned with actual lived experiences. More than simply being implicated in the social process society and the person derive from that process: they take on their meanings as those meanings emerge in and through social interaction (Strykes, 2011). This conception of society as further iterated by Strykes (2011), incorporates the view of the human being as
“minded” and that “mindedness” as potentially reflexive.
This preoccupation between acts and experience led to a continual, search for a method of analysis that would incorporate the subjective and interactional features of human conduct into valid scientific documents about human society (Couch, 1987).
This has created an interpretive heritage that relies on the soft qualitative methodologies. This is based on the assumption that the subject is the final authority in the subjective experience interactionists seek, a methodology that will produce unimpeachable data. For the purpose of this research, the researcher chose the case study because it is situated within the interpretivist theoretical perspective.
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This study is justified on the grounds that students learning experience are shaped largely by their teachers mediating the “written” curriculum and the notion that the nature of the mediation is influenced largely by the teacher‟s perspectives on that curriculum. In this instance it will be the teacher‟s perspectives of the road safety education programme and the way that the teacher implements it.
To pose such an aim is to adopt a „theory laden‟ research agenda where symbolic interactionism is the theoretical position. According to Woods (1996), the current tenet of this paradigm is that in order to understand social reality one has to study how individuals interpret the world around them; the particular view that an individual has of the social reality is constructed and negotiated by individuals acting according to the perspectives they confer on the phenomena in their environment. To retain the integrity of the phenomena being investigated, efforts are made to get inside the person and to understand from within (Cohen et al., 2011, p. 18).
5.4 Research Methodology