CHALLENGING METHODOLOGIES
4.6. VOICE AND POSITIONALITY WITHIN THE SYNTHESIS PROCESS PROCESS
One of my aims in the synthesis study was to listen, across the chronicles, to the plural voices of teachers who were traditionally marginalised from the practice of school leadership in our country in order to explore their understanding and experience of teacher leadership. In so doing, I wished to foreground the issue of voice in relation to teacher leadership because, with voice usually comes agency.
Furthermore, as a qualitative researcher, I was also aware of my own voice (and lack thereof) during many moments in the writing up of this thesis. In the sections that follow, I discuss these two levels of voice at work in the thesis [the voice of the educators (as research participants) and my own voice (as researcher)].
4.6.1. The plurality of teacher voice
To reiterate a point made earlier in this chapter, my research interest was in the
‘school teacher as leader’ and specifically the post level one teacher who did not hold a formal management position, although I did not exclude the SMT member from the category. From a critical theorist perspective, my intention was to listen to the plural voices of teachers who were traditionally marginalised from the practices of leadership in our country and call them to activism. In so doing, I wanted to advance a sociopolitical commitment to the practice of teacher leadership as a framework for transforming schools into democratic learning communities and was of the view that a transformative analysis was needed. I elected to foreground issues of “audience, perspective, voice, and advocacy” (Greene, 2008, p. 19) in relation to teachers as leaders because I wanted teachers to realise their own agency (Mezirow, 1991). A transformative research framework was thus best suited to my research.
Ontologically, I worked from the premise that there are multiple socially constructed realities of teacher leadership each of which can be described within a “historical, political, cultural, and economic context” (Mertens, 2003, p. 159). Thus my task in the thesis was to acknowledge and value the different realities and varying contexts across the chronicles and theorise teacher leadership in relation to these differing realities. Epistemologically, I worked from the premise that knowledge is socially and historically located within these multiple contexts and is therefore subjective and value-laden. A transformative lens therefore assisted me in providing “a framework for examining assumptions that explicitly address power issues, social justice, and cultural complexity throughout the research process” (Mertens, 2007, p. 213).
I was acutely aware of the power differentials implicit in my interaction with the research participants during the five year period of the study and I worked consciously to develop a “level of trust and understanding to accurately represent viewpoints of all groups fairly” (Mertens, 2003, p. 159). In introducing the concept of teacher leader to the educator participants in my study, my intention was also to disrupt the current status quo in schools which denies authentic teacher involvement in the practice of leadership. In so doing, I hoped to raise consciousness of the transformative power of teacher leadership. I explicitly wanted to offer, in the words of Greene, “a discordant
reframed as one that “recognises inequalities and injustices in society and strives to challenge the status quo, who is a bit of a provocateur with overtones of humility, and who possesses a shared sense of responsibility” (Mertens, 2007, p. 212).
4.6.2. My voice and positionality
Postmodernism claims that in our work “our Self is always present, no matter how much we try to suppress it – but only partially present, for in our writing we repress parts of ourselves, too” (Richardson, 1994, p. 520). This quotation struck a chord with me on two accounts. In the first instance, it reminded me that as researcher I was partial and situated in my research, both at the level of the individual chronicles and during the synthesis process. I was not a “disembodied, neutral authority” (McCotter, 2001, p. 7) but located and interested. My lived experience as white lesbian woman, teacher, academic, partner and mother shaped my research. As sole author of five chronicles and prime author of three, and as sole selector for their inclusion in the PhD, I was the “constructing narrator” (after Fine, 1994) of the thesis. Thus this doctoral study necessarily reflects my own processes and preferences – it is not an innocent text but “an act of construction; a drawing up of boundaries, a marking off of divisions, oppositions and positions” (Ball, 2004, p. 1). As such, I was alert throughout the study to my subjective positioning and attempted where possible in each of the research strands to employ a range of data collection methods in the pursuit of “completeness rather than confirmation” (van der Mescht, 2002, p. 49).
Furthermore, in line with the thinking of van der Mescht, I attempted to be
“methodical (organised and careful)” as well as “systematic (consistently operating within well defined and transparent guidelines” (2002, p. 49).
Initially, as constructing narrator, my research into the phenomenon of teacher leadership was located predominantly within the interpretive paradigm as I attempted to understand and interpret the world (leadership in schools) in terms of the actors (the teachers and the SMT members). However, as my research progressed, I realised that merely giving an interpretive account of the perceptions and practices of teacher leaders was insufficient. I became aware of the need to adopt a critical stance in my study and by this I mean that I needed to be able to stand back and engage with my work “at the level of meta-research” (van der Mescht, 2002, p. 49). I also began to
critical social theory lens to my work. Critical social theory, according to Cohen, Manion and Morrison, seeks to “emancipate the disempowered, to redress inequality and to promote individual freedoms within a democratic society” (2007, p. 26).
However, although our Self is always present in our work, it is “only partially present, for in our writing we repress parts of ourselves, too” (Richardson, 1994, p. 520). This quotation struck a second chord with me. In this second instance, there were times during my doctoral journey when I was ‘at sea’ about a way forward in constructing a thesis by publication. For a period of the study, I was troubled by the pioneering aspect of the work and the absence of a concrete template and yearned for a model to guide me in the synthesis process. As a consequence, I lost confidence in my ability to write and instead adopted the words of published authors to speak on my behalf and, in so doing, suppressed my own voice. Whilst my colleagues and supervisors continually reminded me that I had already established an academic voice through the eight chronicles, there were times when I was unable to insert my voice and agency in relation to the thesis. Each time I began to write, a flood of questions in relation to my work, its purpose, value, direction and process, arose which undermined my confidence and left me feeling inadequate and silenced. How was I supposed to construct a PhD by publication? What would transform the eight chronicles into a PhD? When would I know that my work was at a doctoral level? Was the new knowledge I was expected to create inherent in the chronicles or was it to be found in the synthesis of the chronicles? How was I going to create a text, at doctoral level, that was vital and sufficiently interesting to be read at all?
At some point in the struggle to reclaim my voice and agency, I stumbled across the work of Richardson which helped me to navigate some of these questions. She argues that the mechanistic or static writing model of traditional quantitative research
“ignores the role of writing as a dynamic creative process” (1994, p. 517). She challenges us to put ourselves in our own texts, “nurture our own individuality and at the same time lay claim to knowing something” (p. 517). I realised some time later as I revisited my methodology chapter that I was searching for the ‘single’ way of writing an academic text – the one truth – I was searching (in vain) for the voice of someone who had ‘got it right’. In essence I was colluding with the positivists who claim the existence of a one universal truth, one ‘right’ way of knowing and doing. I was struggling with what bell hooks (1990) calls a ‘politics of location’:
Within a complex and ever shifting realities of power relations, do we position ourselves on the side of colonizing mentality? Or do we continue to stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, of making culture, toward that revolutionary effort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible (cited in Fine, 1994, p. 71).
I found my subconscious positioning of myself on the side of the “colonizing mentality” in relation to my PhD writing process exceedingly ironical given my claimed identity as a critical theorist and my standpoint on the power of teacher leadership to bring teachers from the margins into the process of leadership. It therefore came as a relief to me to read Richardson’s work and be reminded that one is allowed “to know ‘something’ without claiming to know everything” (1994, p.
518). I did not have to have ‘all the answers’ on teacher leadership and neither was there one ‘right’ way of synthesising the chronicles. It was up to me to own the synthesis process and insert myself – my voice- into my work as I re-interpreted the chronicles and organised them into a coherent whole. I came across Govender’s (2009) use of the term ‘logic of discernment’ which assisted me in finding a way forward. For her, ‘logic’ denotes reasoned thought while ‘discernment’ implies good judgement. Govender explains how her ‘logic of discernment’ draws from “the authoritative guidance of scholars (external guiding logic) and my total (both sub- conscious and conscious) imprints of my own experiences and intuitive sense (an internal guiding logic)” (2009, p. 113). Claiming my own ‘logic of discernment’, the liberty was mine to discern the way forward and I had to trust my own insights and perceptions in weaving the chronicles together in a creative and imaginative way. In doing so, however, I had to remember that my purpose was not to homogenize and suppress individual voices (Richardson, 1994) but rather to extend, in a trustworthy manner, the scope, breadth, and range of inquiry into teacher leadership through the eight chronicles in the search for multi-nodal dialogic explanations. It is to issues of trustworthiness in relation to my study, that I now turn.