Methodological Concerns Regarding the Research Design

Having decided that AR was best suited to the methodological challenges, I was aware of the onus to provide a flexible and inclusive method to assist with data collection that would be accessible to pupils identified with CMN. The Mosaic approach advocates the use of flexible, participatory and creative frameworks for young children and acknowledges that it is important to draw

Page | 40 “together methods which ‘play to the strengths’ of the research participants” (Clark and Moss, 2011, p. 73). Tay-Lim and Lim (2013), in a study conducted with pre-school children, comment that it is imperative that researchers attend to children’s “strengths as communicators” whilst enabling “their voices to be projected through mediums that empower them as adept informants of their own lives” (p. 68). The inclusion of pupils labelled with CMN in research therefore requires not only suitable methodologies but suitable methods if researchers are to overcome the complexities of listening to children’s voices (Tangen, 2008).

Initially, I considered that semi-structured interviews would be the primary data collection tool because this would allow for broad-framed questioning together with the freedom to probe pupils’ experiences and listen to their voices. The Life as a Disabled Child project (Shakespeare, 2005) observed more than 300 children in their school settings and conducted informal individual, paired or group interviews with 165. This study aimed to be inclusive and the “different styles of research relationships and activities were often mediated by the children themselves” (p. 2). Although the notion that children can mediate their own preferences regarding participation is interesting, nevertheless, this study was heavily dependent on talk and the spoken word to generate data to explore disabled children’s experiences. Whitehurst’s study (2006), involving pupils identified with SEND, uses interviews successfully to elicit responses by taking into consideration pupils “preferred method of engaging and communicating” (p. 58). This study had access to SaLT to support the interview process, but my research did not have funding for this level of provision. I began to have concerns about one-to-one interviews, especially regarding potential issues with communication, cognition and comprehension.

I felt a strong disinclination to use an adult-orientated technique and favoured a more child-centred approach that would not require specialist support to ensure communication. Further scrutiny of the literature revealed that researchers were adopting more child-friendly methodologies. Greenstein (2014) advocates the use of creative, “playful” methodologies as a means of including the voice of “inarticulate participants” (p. 71). Lewis and Porter express the need to develop methodologies that, “circumvent possible

Page | 41 problems including memory, emotion, social skills, linguistic pragmatics, receptive language, expressive language” (2007, p. 230). I began to reflect that an interview may act as a barrier given the level of communication challenges experienced by the pupils in the study. Greenstein argues that the research design should not be limited to the use of traditional data collection methods, such as interviews, because this restricts and acts as a barrier to participants who might use alternative forms of communication and “prove particularly difficult for children and/or adults with learning or communication difficulties” (2007, p. 71).

Consequently, I began to reflect that the interview approach might have the opposite effect to the one I intended and result in silencing voices. There also appeared to be a paradox in this research method precisely because one-to- one interviews privilege speech and the spoken word. Additionally, interviews rely on more traditional narrative forms and this could result in unauthentic voice because whatever question is asked there will be a recognised need for a response and an “immediate imposition of the discursive expectations or demands of the conventional qualitative interview” (Allett, Keightley and Pickering, 2011, p. 1). I concluded that interviews may in fact result in inhibiting participants rather than empowering them. Indeed, by adopting this method I might be falling into the same trap as the EHCp process which adopts the question and answer format in Section A without regard to communication preferences.

3.5.1 Modification of the Research Design

Qualitative research is frequently described as a journey and however well planned there will be unforeseen twists, turns and unplanned stops. It is not unusual for action researchers to become “confused and unsure how to proceed” (Arnold and Norton, 2018, p. 10). In terms of methodological concerns, a major challenge for my research during the ‘look’ phase was how to access pupils’ perspectives and their experiences of voice and participation. My apprehension centred on the form authentic voice and participation might take and concerns that my methodology was not rigorous enough to enable the voices of pupils identified with CMN to be central to the research and express opinions about their worlds through their eyes rather than those of an adult

Page | 42 researcher. Mayaba and Wood (2015) acknowledge that “authentic involvement of children in research is not an easy task” (p. 3). Furthermore, in my quest for authenticity I assumed that pupils’ voices would emerge miraculously if I got my research methods ‘right’. Nelson (2015) views the concept of “authenticity” as a “troubling” truth because it implies that authenticity will be achieved if researchers pay attention to both their research methods and the ways in which they “engage with students to elicit their unique experiences and promote their active participation in educational matters pertinent to their interests” (p. 1). This view is underpinned by an assumption that “voice can speak the truth of consciousness and experience” if freed “from whatever restrains it from coming into being” (Mazzei and Jackson, 2012, p. 745). This rather cavalier attitude towards giving voice resulted in a misguided assumption that getting someone to say something, anything, is tantamount to giving them a voice. Furthermore, this presumption assumes that disabled pupils previously had no voice and an imposed system, such as an EHCp, will miraculously result in individual and authentic voices being heard.

Having identified barriers to participation and the myriad reasons why pupils labelled with CMN have been traditionally excluded from research, I was on a quest to find suitable methods to enable pupils to be co-researchers. I returned to the literature in search of a more credible participatory, creative and child- centred approach to data collection.