I had wanted to record young children's perspectives of exclusion to a PRU and the research was to understand the best methods to do that. Initially I had intended to do action research and had planned neat cycles that would fit in with the academic year. Indeed this is how I started by gaining consent, staging semi-structured interviews, asking pupils to complete Pupil View templates (Wall, 2008) and asking for pupil's to share their stories through visual methods such as photographs. The aim was to be able to draw conclusions that could be generalised and my theory was that a tool box approach would be needed that was reflexive to meet the needs of each individual. It was a good plan. It passed the ethical scrutiny of the university and that of the Local Authority I work for. It was all systems go. I remember talking to my supervisors explaining that I did not want to do woolly research. My research would be meticulously planned and would be focused and clear.
Yet things changed. Just before Christmas and into the second research cycle I started to be given spontaneous pieces of work by the pupils, unplanned for and unasked for. Some of the work was through drawings of the PRU or their previous school and these were handed to me for my 'box' in which all of their formally gathered work was put. Sometimes they asked me to take a photo of something they had done or they wanted a photo of them using the equipment I had used for kinaesthetic work with them. Other times came the request to write down our conversation in my research journal. Once I was brought the page of a story book showing a child depicted as a devil with the comment, "That's me at my old school."
What was I to do? I was at a cross roads. I could either plough on with the formal plan and risk loosing these rich snippets of their lives, or I could totally change direction and run with what they were giving me. I ran with them as how could I fully record their perspectives if I ignored the stories of themselves which mattered to them? I run the risk of telling the stories that I perceived to be important and not what was of significance to them. So the research became more and more woolly, planning had gone out of the window and I was totally dependent upon what they chose to share. Stories became more and more important until, ultimately, I submitted 8000 words largely written as narrative and dialogue.
One of the issues this has left me is just how academic can a story be? As with anything in academia, there are a variety of opinions and arguments for and against which I am still grappling with. In hindsight my interest in stories stemmed from those in the bible. As a teenager I had never felt that they could or should be taken literally yet that did not mean that they were unable to contain truth. It hadn't mattered to my teenage faith that I did not believe in the historical truth of the gospels, I mean just which emperor decreed a census during Mary's pregnancy? Nor did I feel the need to make the stories of the Hebrew's true, I didn't need to know the name of the pharaoh who Moses lived with. Although I knew friends who did believe in the bible being written by the holy type writer of God, I did not dispute some pressure to do so. But at university I felt set free. One of my favourite lectures was Old Testament Studies led by Walter Moberly and we studied a book by Robert Alter called, 'The Art of Biblical Narrative' in which the author posed that one could read the books as literature and see them as 'true' even if the events were not historically true. Another lecturer compared the stories of the twelve tribes of Israel to the formation of the Scottish clans and their tartans, both were an attempt to create a historical background in order to give some sense of worth and purpose: this is who we are today because of our past. The fact that they were not historically accurate did not draw away from there being a level of truth in them.
So stories, and the layers of truth in them, has been in my mind for a long time. The scary thing is now testing out that belief in an academic setting. The stories my pupil's tell of their exclusion and the stories their schools tell may both offer different levels of truth. Can an academic story of this provide truth as well?
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