Methods of Data Production

I turn now to an overview of how data for this study were produced. Despite the objectivist stance implied by the conventionalized phrase data collection, “data are not simply discovered by the researcher but are jointly produced in the encounter between researcher and researched” (Bucholtz, 2011, p. 37); as discussed above, my presence in the classroom, my relationships with participants, and my subjectivity shape what kinds of data I “collected” and how I analyzed it.

Classroom observations, fieldnotes, and recordings. I began volunteering and

stepping into the “participant as observer” (Merriam, 2009) role from the second day of classes during the 2014-15 school year at Beachside. During the first week of the academic year, I was in the classroom almost every day and spent several entire days in Room G since my schedule allowed for this, since I wanted to get to know the kids well, and since I wanted to observe the initial implementation of socialization routines across a variety of activities and content areas. As the school year went on, my schedule changed, and I typically spent two to

three days in the classroom each week (for a total of approximately 5 to 15 hours per week) during language arts and math activities. These two content areas became the focus of my observations for theoretical reasons (most notably, for the reason that language arts is the activity during which students hear the greatest number of metalinguistic messages about academic language), for scheduling reasons, and for reasons of reciprocity (that is, math and language arts were the activities for which Ms. Mayzie had indicated a need for volunteers). During my visits, I participated in most classroom activities, usually by working individually and in small groups with students. Some of the students seemed to view me as a “teacher” (which was how Ms. Mayzie referred to classroom volunteers), and in fact, several of them often confused me with Ms. Mayzie, especially toward the beginning of the year. Other students seemed to view me as a big kid (e.g., some were surprised when they found out my age, having assumed I was a teenager or college student) and tended to interact with me in casual ways (see Chapter 7 for further discussion). For my part, I tried to position myself as an ally and even an older friend by using more casual language with students, asking them to call me by my first name, joking and smiling during conversations, and discussing some aspects of my life with them, particularly my cat. At the same time, I also tried to make sure I was helping students understand classroom norms and that I was supporting Ms. Mayzie’s instructional goals, which meant I often had to remind students about behavioral rules and encourage them to do their work more efficiently. This role negotiation was challenging, as is the case with all participant observer roles.

One source of data for this study is ethnographic fieldnotes, which are crucial in many ways. First, as Anderson-Levitt (2006) explains, the process of writing fieldnotes is one important technique for distancing oneself from an insider’s perspective. Second, in the words of Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995), “observing and writing about certain kinds of

events foreshadow what will be noticed and described next” (p. 29). Hence, writing

fieldnotes is an important part of the observational and analytic processes. Finally, fieldnotes themselves are valuable data and metadata for an ethnographer; they provide information about and analysis of the object of inquiry (in this case, teaching and learning interactions related to academic language), where to look within video and audio data, and the ethnographer’s experiences and insights related to specific temporal and interactional contexts. For these reasons, nearly every day that I was in Room G, I carried and used a small notebook to make detailed jottings and then write fieldnotes about language use, embodied action, and activities. These jottings allowed me to capture observations, but they also provided an important means of discussing my research with students since many of them commented on or asked me about my notebook, whereupon I typically explained that I was writing down “all the smart things” they said that sometimes adults might not hear. Even as I was observing them, they were observing me; as Jacobs-Huey (2002) puts it, the “so- called Native/Other(s) have been duly observed gazing and talking back” (p. 792), and this process of mutual observation was made especially visible by my fieldnote-taking practices. Yet I could not always write fieldnotes or even jottings. Indeed, my prioritization of the participant role often meant that I did not or could not capture the kinds of semiotic details that I wanted to.

Many of the semiotic details that I was not able to capture through fieldnotes are captured through audio and video recordings, which serve as the primary source of data and the focus of analysis throughout the following chapters. Once I received consent forms from participants’ parents and assent from students, I began video- and audio-recording students as they indicated willingness or eagerness to be recorded, as discussed above. On most days, I brought two lapel microphones, which I usually gave to any two students who wanted to be

recorded, though at other times I approached students I wanted to focus on and asked if I could record them; they usually assented, but when they did not, there was almost always another student eager to be recorded. In fact, more often than not, more than two students wanted to be audio recorded, so the students and I developed a system wherein I would put them on a list in my notebook so that I would remember they were “next in line” for the microphone. I also used a camcorder every day, positioning it on a tripod in a relatively unobtrusive location and focusing it on the student(s) wearing the lapel microphone.

Although Ms. Mayzie had encouraged students to pretend the equipment was “invisible,” I often noticed students orienting to the cameras and microphones. While many have argued that participants’ orientations to recording equipment are a problem in relation to the “observer’s paradox,” others, such as Heath, Hindmarsh, and Luff (2010), argue that this issue of reactivity is often exaggerated. Furthermore, my participants’ reactivity also had many advantages; like my jottings, the recording equipment led to conversations about the research situation, and sometimes I exploited this to teach students new concepts. For instance, during the week that students were learning the academic vocabulary word observe in small centers groups, I used the recording equipment as an example of the observation tools I use as a researcher, which in some cases led to conversations about social science and graduate school. In relation to the “observer’s paradox,” it is also important to note that this concept is rooted in the positivist belief that there is one underlying reality to be captured, a reality that is necessarily obscured by an outsider or observer. Yet as Trechter (2013) aptly puts it, “within any community, the reflection on and observation of language and interaction with outsiders is somewhat normal...a research approach that assumes the observer is causing unnatural interference is less likely to allow research participants to assume different roles and degrees of agency” (p. 34).

Interviews. Interviewing is a key part of the ethnographer’s toolkit because it provides

important ways of building relationships with participants, contextualizing one’s

observations, and understanding participants’ worlds in their words. At the same time, an ethnographer must keep in mind that an interview is not a straightforward window into insiders’ worlds. Talmy (2011) characterizes such a view as a (neo)positivist “interview-as- research-instrument” perspective, wherein the interview is seen as a means of “giving voice” to participants or revealing truths, according to which logic “data contamination” must be avoided. By contrast, from what Talmy calls an “interview-as-social practice” perspective— which is the perspective that has guided my approach in this study—interviews are “not sites for the excavation of information held by respondents, but [entail] participation in social practices” (p. 28), and thus are co-constructed by the researcher and participants.

Ethnographic interviewing is challenging for a number of reasons, including its tendency to highlight the researcher–researched power differential. As Brenner (2006) discusses, interviewers are often presumed to control the questions and focus, and this power differential is especially heightened in interviews with children because of the multiple lines of actual or presumed difference between children and adults (i.e., adult–child, researcher– researched, and “expert”– “novice” differences). At the same time, an ethnographer can use certain strategies to address these and other challenges. One important principle is to find ways of feeling comfortable with participants, which, in Brenner’s (2006) view, is “the key to a good interview study” (p. 368). For this reason, I began conducting interviews only several months into the study, by which point my regular presence in the classroom and my

interactions with students had allowed me to establish relationships with them. Other important strategies I employed were conducting interviews on the participants’ “own turf” (Murphy, 1980, p. 83), using some of each participant’s own words in the course of each

interview, and being flexible with my questions and my overall interview agenda. When interviewing the students, I also used strategies such as interviewing them in pairs or groups rather than individually, creating a natural context by embedding the interview in larger activities they were already engaged in or familiar with (such as doing role plays showing how to ask for help in Room G), and providing opportunities for students to ask me questions (Eder & Fingerson, 2002).

Beyond these strategies, however, I found larger principles to be most helpful in approaching interviews, especially with my second-grade participants. First, it was important to recognize young people as linguistic and cultural experts in their own right (see, e.g., Bucholtz et al., 2014) so that I could learn about and from them. Similarly, as Thorne (2001) emphasizes, it was crucial to break with common adult perceptions—for example, the idea that children’s actions are trivial, cute, or irritating, and that children themselves are passive recipients of adult teaching—by entering the field with an “assumption that kids are

competent social actors who take an active role in shaping their daily experiences” and with an “attitude of respectful discovery” (p. 225). A second guiding principle was to approach the interviews and my ethnographic study as a whole as an opportunity to accompany my participants through part of their educational journeys, rather than paternalistically seeking to “empower” them (see Bucholtz, Casillas, & Lee, forthcoming).

Since “the skill of the ethnographic interviewer is seen in the ability to ‘build’ the interview as it proceeds” (Brenner, 2006, p. 359) rather than in the interviewer’s adherence to any one set of questions, I used the “interview guide” approach described by Patton (2002). These interview guides can be found in Appendix B and were developed in consultation with Diana Arya, one of my committee members. Because of its emphasis on keeping the topic in focus while encouraging spontaneous wording and ordering of questions,

this interview approach is compatible with the ethnographic understanding that the role of the researcher is to learn about and from the participant. As Brenner (2006) points out, the interview guide approach also “allows an interviewer to capitalize on the ethnographic questioning cycle described by Spradley (1979), in which the informant’s cultural and personal vocabulary and framework are incorporated into questions” (p. 362).