Data collection

Table 1: Number of participants

Type of schools

Schools as referred in the study

Teachers Adolescents

State Public school 1 1 5

State Public school 2 1 4

Independent Private school 1 3

83 4.2.1 The participants in the study

The schools in the study

Public school 1 is a state-funded school located in the east of Sao Paulo. The school is located close to the second most populated slum3 in the city of Sao Paulo, and as a consequence it caters for their impoverished children. The school also caters for the children from lower-middle class and professional families who live in its neighbourhood. Public school 1 caters for children across the academic years from senior primary (Ensino Fundamental: years 5 to 8) to secondary school (Ensino Médio: years 1 to 3).

The school premises are ample, with a very large outdoor area where students spend their break time, a sports court, a canteen, and a library which had just recently been refurbished and replenished with a number of books sent by the Ministry of Education as part of a campaign to stimulate reading habits. However, it was closed to students at the time of the study. The deputy head teacher explained to me that this was the case because students did not know how to use this facility or how to care for its books. The school’s IT room was not in use either at the time of the study due to technical problems to many of their computers.

Public school 2 is also a state-funded school located in the east of Sao Paulo. Public school 2 is also located close to a slum, but in a different neighbourhood from public

3 _{Slums (favelas) Favelas have been defined as ‘subnormal agglomerates’ normally ‘settled in areas less}

appropriate to urbanization’ (IBGE, 2010). These, however, differ in their size and housing conditions including the presence or not of sewage, electricity and water.

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school 1. Their students are predominantly from lower middle-class families. The school also caters for years 5 to 8 of Ensino Fundamental and years 1 to 3 of Ensino Medio. It is a large school with outdoor and indoor areas for students’ recreation, a canteen, a sports court, an IT room, and a library. Like public school 1, their library had also been recently refurbished. It was open for students’ loans and support with school literacy during school hours.

The Private school in the study is an independent school located in an upmarket area in the south of Sao Paulo. It caters for all levels of compulsory education. Their student population comprises children from an upper-middle class background. The school is located in a big building with sports courts, libraries, ICT labs, science labs, and an outdoor patio. The school doors are protected by a number of security guards, reflecting the schools intake of wealthy children and the high level of violence in the city of Sao Paulo.

These three schools were suitable for this study given the social status of the children they catered for. As one of the aims of this study is to analyse and compare how adolescents from different socioeconomic classes engage with literacies, it was relevant to have schools which catered for different social groups in different parts of the city.

Getting started

I was put in touch with the two public schools in the study by one of my nieces who, as part of her work with street children in Sao Paulo, regularly liaised with public schools in an attempt to bring these children back into their communities.

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In both public schools I was granted full access to the facilities. I was in constant contact with the teaching staff, as I was allowed to use the staff room and share their school meals. As a result, in addition to semi-structured interviews with the participant teachers I also had a number of informal chats with them and their colleagues and witnessed the teachers sharing a number of anecdotes about students’ lives and aspects of these schools daily routines. I was also given full access to participant students, and was allowed to interview them during lesson hours and break times.

My initial contact with the private school in the study was over the telephone and via emails. I made a number of telephone calls and wrote several emails introducing my research project to five middle and upper-social class private schools in Sao Paulo. From these contacts, only one school agreed to take part fully in the study, which meant that I would be allowed to observe lessons, interview the Portuguese teacher, and recruit students to be interviewed and to keep literacy diaries. Students would not be interviewed on the school’s premises, as there were issues of time allocation, so my contact with students was mostly restricted to after school hours via the Internet and by telephone. Interactions with students

Public schools

From the outset, it is right to say that for the adolescent participants I was someone who came into the classrooms literally from the staff room, which meant that I was seen as another teacher. In addition, the fact of being introduced as a researcher studying abroad placed me further from their realities. On the other hand, my ethnic similarity to them and my ability to switch to a language variant very close to their own, the consequence of my

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own upbringing and the close contact with six adolescents and young adults in my own family, may have brought me closer to these students. Despite the difference in age, I was also able and open to relate to some of their interests in music, magazines (the same magazines I used to read as an adolescent are still around), and knowledge of the areas they lived in. In addition, I was also a member of their social network, Orkut. My contact with many of these students on the Orkut social network progressed until long after I left Brazil for the UK.

Some of these factors may have contributed to the level of ease with which these participants took to the project. Many volunteered to take part in the study, in fact more than I could take, and amongst those who got involved only two students from public school 2 dropped out.

Private school

As in the public schools, I was also able to wander around the school during breaks and could gather information on the school facilities. I also spent time in the staff room amongst other teachers and could pick up some comments and conversations about the school and their students. My face-to-face contact with students in this school was, however, brief. Contact with those who volunteered to take part in the study became more frequent once I left Brazil and started contacting them via email, MSN, or on the Orkut social network.

These participants also saw me as a teacher. They were frequently reminded that I was a guest from the first world by their teacher, and that because of that they should behave accordingly.

87 4.3 Research epistemologies

In the introduction to this thesis I discussed how postmodern thought has had an effect on scientific epistemology regarding literacy and language studies. Here I briefly revisit the notions of practice perspective as applied to research and knowledge.

Educational research as practice

Working from a practice perspective in research has the result that data collection and analysis should attend to its ethos. Barton and Hamilton (1998) explain that on taking the theoretical perspective of literacy as social practices their research design asked for an ‘ecological approach, where literacy is integral to its context’ (Barton and Hamilton, 1998 p.4). In this study I attempted to reproduce this ethos, firstly by using data methods (literacy diaries, interviews and observation) which aimed to collect details of participants’ practices within a specific time and space, and secondly to investigate participants’ local and wider historical contexts. Details of local contexts were gathered through the investigation of participants’ narratives about literacy practices, families, communities and schools, and the observation of the school domain. The wider historical context of education in Brazil was investigated through the analysis of the debate of literacy and language in educational policies and in academia in Brazil. This shed light on the historical context of language oppression and discrimination and on the transformations that these discourses have undergone in the last decades.

Literacy and ethnography

There is now a tradition in literacy studies from a New Literacy Study perspective to investigate individuals’ literacy practices through an ethnographic approach (Street,

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1984; Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Grenfell et al. 2012). Theorists contend that there are differences between applying an ethnographic approach to research and doing anthropological ethnography (Bloome, 2012 and Street, 2012a). Street (2012a, p. 39) explains that a middle term between an ethnographic study conducted by anthropologists and ‘the ethnography we all learn as members of society’ is:

characterised by disciplined and reflective ethnographic inquiry, in which an ethnographic perspective is systematically applied to specific situations and processes. (Street, 2012a p. 39)

Street (2012a, p. 39) posits that this is the approach followed by anthropologists, educators, practitioners or policy makers in New Literacy Studies projects in order to ‘attempt to describe and understand events and the practices of those around them’.

With respect to this study, a more in-depth view of these contexts would ask for a longer time spent within the different social domains that participants inhabit and the observation of literacy in practice (examples of these are Heath, 1983; Street (1984), in Iran; Barton and Hamilton 1998). As things stand, this study follows an ethnographic style but falls short of anthropological-style ethnographies. Without the wider resources of anthropological ethnography research this study is formed by snapshots of participants’ realities in literacy, the realities they, to a certain extent, chose to register and report and which passed the researcher’s own cultural and theoretical filter at the data analysis stage.

On issues of reflexivity

Usher (1996 p. 25) suggests that to see social and educational research, as social practice is to see it as ‘the product of one of many social, historically-located practices’, rather

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than as a ‘technology’. He ponders that ‘if we see all research (…) as a social product, this foregrounds the possibility of critiquing the process of research.’ (Usher, 1996 pp. 25/26, sic.). Usher posits that:

Postmodernism reflects the contemporary decline of absolutes and a questioning of the belief that following the correct method guarantees true results. It is not anti-science, but instead emphasises the need for science to be self-reflexive about its limitations. (Usher, 1996 p. 25)

In this way, several aspects of what are the standards of a positivist/empiricist epistemology tradition are denied in postmodern thought, and some of these are:

1. observation is value-neutral and atheoretical; 2. experience is a “given”;

4. data are independent of their interpretations (Usher, 1996 p. 26)

In this way, to see research through postmodern lenses is to accept issues of reflexivity in the design and analysis processes. Street (2012a p.40) ponders that:

[through] reflexivity, we can be aware of the reasons for undertaking the research in the first

place, of the experience, beliefs and values which we bring to the task.(Street, 2012a p.40)

Norum (2000 p. 334) posits that drawing on our experiences to make meaning of what we are studying does not necessarily mean that we contaminate our research, but ‘[rather] it may mean that we bring a new dimension to our research, a level of understanding that may not be there otherwise [...]’(Norum, 2000 p. 334).

From a Bakhtinian perspective to dialogism, a research, like any other text, is a set of discourses, some old, some constructed anew. It is also a way of reading a reality which

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is brought about in text through the intertextuality of voices and dialogues between and within the researcher and the researched (Bakhtin, 1981).

Another aspect of a postmodern approach to research is, in fact, the central role of language as a meaning maker. Language, texts and discourses are the producers of knowledge and culture, they ‘govern what can be known and what can be communicated’ (Usher, 1996 p.27). Usher points out that a consequence of this is that knowledge can only be ‘partial and perspectival’.

In addition, the unequal power relations in human interactions which are now widely acknowledged in philosophical studies (c.f. Foucault, 1981; Bourdieu, 1991) are also bound to reinforce issues of reflexivity in research.

In summary, from these perspectives research is seen as the writing of specific practices in a certain moment in time and space, as reported by the researched and analysed by the researcher from a certain theoretical perspective and life experience. Its value is in the record of this reality against the wider and historical contexts and situations surrounding it. Education in Brazil is as complex, paradoxical, and distinct as the country’s geographical, historical and societal aspects are (Mortatti, 2010). This study does not claim to account for its entirety, it claims to account for one aspect of its complexity, that of literacy and language and how they are perceived by participants from three different schools in three different areas in Sao Paulo. Nonetheless, to refuse to make a claim about generalization does not, however, overwrite the likelihood that these individuals’ experiences with home and school literacies could also be reproduced in different areas and communities of the same city, mostly given the issues of socioeconomic inequality

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and language discrimination that make up for the wider context of education in the Brazilian society (see Bagno, 2004).

I discuss the methods and stages of data collection and analysis adopted in this study below. In addition, I attempt to highlight the affordances and limitations of these methods and, when possible, offer suggestions (but not solutions) for issues of reflexivity.