Methodological principles

3.1.1 Qualitative research

The research methodology for this thesis is located within a feminist poststructuralist ontological, epistemological and theoretical framework, which acknowledges how discourses and social practices construct both a representation of experience and a positioning of individuals as gendered subjects (Hiller 1998). It acknowledges that discourses and social practices are productive in that they have material effects which are produced as a result of this positioning, and that these material effects have the potential to be socially empowering as well as dis-empowering.

Pedagogical discourses are referred to in this study in an expanded sense. While notions of the practice of teaching, instruction and training within formal settings such as schools and universities are foremost, pedagogy is also considered in terms of the many ways in which individuals learn and are taught to position themselves within a gendered, patriarchal and predominantly heterosexual world, including punishments for transgression as well as rewards for conformity (Butler 1990; Lather 1991).

By critically analysing discourses of sexuality across academic texts, pedagogical discourses and policy documents, it is possible to make transparent those implicit laws and regulatory practices that operate within educational institutions to construct dominant notions of appropriate and inappropriate gendered subjectivities (Kress 1988a, 1988b). This study describes the material effects of these discourses upon the production of students‘ gendered subjectivities, and the implications for addressing issues of sexual violence, homophobia and discrimination within our community, thereby enabling educational research to ‗open up present ways of knowing to possibilities of thinking differently‘ and therein become a catalyst for resistance and change (Lather & Smithies 1997).

Feminist researchers in education, particularly those interested in developing a critical social science capable of empowering for change as well as understanding, traditionally find themselves situated within established

quantitative paradigms for doing social science, even as they called them into question (Lather 1992). Known as positivist, natural or physical science research approaches theoretically dominate educational research, with the preferred methods of data collection and analysis being detached observation, controlled experiments, and mathematical or quantitative measurement. Positivist methods are considered particularly unsuitable for a study such as this, which requires more interactive, dialogic and interpretive methods of data collection and analysis.

Post-positivism or qualitative approaches to research, however, where the focus is on constructed versus found worlds, prefer methods of data collection and analysis that involve description, interpretation and critical analysis. These methods are eminently more suitable for researching social issues such as sexual violence, homophobia and discrimination, and accord with the critical intent of this research; the production of new knowledges which can lead to emancipatory social change. Qualitative, or post-positivist, approaches allow this research to develop more interactive, contextualised, dialogic and humanly compelling methods of interpretation (Lather 1992). These methods assume there are multiple realities that grow out of personal interactions and perceptions, and that these multiple realities reflect and contribute to the importance of meaning making and context in human experiences (Mishler 1979).

The history of qualitative research is extensive, drawing from ‗the evolving curiosities of humankind‘ over the centuries and formally disciplined by ethnographers, social psychologists, historians and literary critics alike (Stake 1995, p.35). Some even note that the term qualitative is inadequate when ‗naming this unprecedented cross-disciplinary fertilisation of ideas‘ and that too often it is restricted by its label as ‗other‘ to quantitative (Lather 1992, p.90). However, choosing a qualitative research design presupposes a certain view of the world that defines how the researcher selects participants, collects data, analyses and approaches issues of validity, reliability and ethics. The importance of these issues is reflected throughout the researcher‘s ontological and epistemological positioning.

relation to a number of dimensions of social research, any distinction between the two is far from watertight (Denscombe 1999). These methodological approaches are not mutually exclusive and, in theory, the norms of regulation and discursive constructions of knowledge associated with the two approaches frequently overlap. Keeping this in mind, there are six features that are considered as specific to a qualitative research design. Qualitative research tends to be:

Associated with words as the unit of analysis. Associated with description.

Associated with small-scale studies. Holistic in perspective.

Associated with researcher involvement.

An emergent research design (Denscombe 1999, pp.173-76).

The view of knowledge implied by qualitative research draws from the human science research paradigm. Human science is distinct from natural or physical science in that its subject matter is the human world. It is the world of

the mind, thoughts, consciousness, values, feelings, emotions, actions and purposes, which find their objectification in languages, beliefs, arts and institutions (Van Maanen 1990, p.3).

A qualitative approach is eminently appropriate for this research, as it aims to identify patterns between language and social practices, and to demonstrate the constitutive aspects of language for society and the people within it.

3.1.2 Critical ethnography

Critical ethnography provides a way for inquiry into the creation of knowledge about everyday social life; in particular ‗its critical thrust raises serious questions about the role of schools in the social and cultural reproduction of social classes, gender roles, and racial and ethnic prejudice‘ (Anderson 1989, p.251). As such, it is also useful as a methodological frame for data collection in a research project that aims to understand how issues surrounding a social problem are embedded within the way social life is currently organised. Critical ethnography generally refers to the study of the culture which a given group of people more or less share; it sources notes, reflections, conversations, the reading of texts constructed by teachers, students, policy documents and the writings of others (Moss 1999, p.39). In this case, the culture is one of a local,

Tasmanian, secondary co-educational government school and a set of classrooms.

Critical ethnography emerged in the field of education as a result of rigorous methodological and theoretical debates between various critical theorists and ethnographers. These debates arose out of

… ethnographers‘ dissatisfaction with social accounts of structures like class, patriarchy, and racism in which real human actors never appeared, and critical theorists‘ dissatisfaction with cultural accounts of human actors in which broad structural constraints like class, patriarchy, and racism never appeared (Anderson 1989, p.249).

While this debate was centered in the field of education, it was in fact paralleled by a debate and reassessment of dominant ideas and methodologies that were under way in the social sciences between qualitative and quantitative social researchers (Anderson 1989). At the same time questions were being raised regarding the role of schools in issues of social and cultural reproduction. Critical ethnography, as a form of representation capable of providing social explanations ‗sensitive to the complex relationship between human agency and social structure‘, emerged ‗from the ashes of this academic debate‘ and is in keeping with the critical and emancipatory objectives of this research thesis (Anderson 1989, p.251).

The collection of data for this research is also informed by Van Maanen‘s (1990) critical ethnographic approach to researching lived experience, which sees the appropriateness of the researcher embedded within the culture and discourses of various school settings during curriculum-based sex education classes, including those of government and non-government organisations who deliver sex education programs to schools, in order to collect and analyse relevant data. During the 12-month pilot study for this research, the researcher observed, recorded and interpreted how individual classroom teachers and school principals positioned and supported the inclusion of non-government organisations into their schools to deliver sex education programs at both the primary and secondary levels.

Informed by critical ethnography the researcher was embedded within a non- government organisation‘s culture in order to better understand the constraints experienced by this organisation and their sexual health educators, when asked to deliver programs regarding intimate and ‗dangerous knowledge‘ (Epstein & Johnson 1998) to students whom they have never met, in an environment they were not familiar with, and within a limited time frame. Informed by this positioning, the researcher documented and critically analysed the findings using the methods of constructivist grounded theory to identify patterns and themes within the data (Charmaz 2006). This process of systematic coding grounded the research in its initial aims and objectives, enabling the researcher to establish that while the inclusion of non-government organisations was of benefit to those students who otherwise were not exposed to sex education programs in their schools, the limited time in which the outside organisation had to deliver their program meant that they could only offer a cursory overview of the fundamental basics of sexual reproduction and coitus from within a fact-based biological model of knowledge. The impact this had on students in general was minimal.

The pilot study enabled the researcher to identify that the dominant discourses regarding the production of knowledge regarding sex, sexuality and sexual decision-making and students‘ production of gendered subjectivities were those which dominated within the school environment. The discourses used by the external non-government sexual health organisation were in fact subsumed within the school-based health educators discourses. As a result of this preliminary finding, the research moved to the second stage of data gathering and analysis. In this stage the researcher continued the qualitative critical ethnographic approach and was embedded in the culture of a local, secondary, co-education government school to observe, record and analyse the design and implementation of a six-week, curriculum-based sex education program.