Paradigmatic and methodological standpoints

The present exploratory study is located within the interpretivist paradigm and makes use of appropriate qualitative methods. It is therefore important at this point to consider two of the prevalent paradigmatic choices in educational research and explain the choice of the best approach for the current research.

Research in education is about conducting systematic investigations to explore phenomena in depth that can be interpreted by different conceptions and interpretations, comprising different philosophical positions or paradigms (Pring, 2000; Bryman, 2008). A paradigm is a theoretical perspective that reflects on how the researcher is going to approach the research, how research is designed, how

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data is collected and how results are analysed and discussed (Grix, 2010; Creswell, 2014). A paradigm may be defined according to four elements, which are ontology, epistemology, methodology and method (Cohen et al., 2013). The first two elements represent the theoretical framework of the researcher, whereas the last two represent the approaches, strategies and tools for collecting the research data. Although different paradigms are mentioned in the research literature, however, the following sections will consider two of them as they are the prevailing ones in the educational research. Thereafter, a clear justification will be given to the choice of the underpinning paradigm in the current research.

The first common paradigm in educational research is the positivist paradigm, mostly associated with or based on scientific method, which treats the social world as value free and objectively verifiable (Crotty, 2009; Cohen et al., 2013). It assumes that reality and knowledge can be seen and measured through tools such as experiment and observation. Therefore, “there is no place for what is not observable or empirical” (Pring, 2000, p.91). Positivism is mainly concerned with objective verification of realities, replication and generalizations or laws through controlled variables, and seeks to correlate them, refute a hypothesis or validate it objectively (Punch, 2013). The ontological assumption of the positivist paradigm is realism about the social world as physical and tangible; it exists independently of our minds. The epistemological stance of the positivist is objectivism. This means that the researcher can be detached from the reality under observation; positivists separate themselves from the world of the study. One of the major criticisms of positivism is that it strips social sciences of what defines the social world, including the feelings and voices of participants and researchers (Cohen et al., 2013). Positivism can thus be seen as treating human behaviour as passive, controllable and determinable which is not the intent of the current research where TESOL

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teachers will speak through their reported experiences and how do they perceive the concept of teacher leadership in their context. I therefore have not used a positivist paradigm, as it neither fits the research aims nor answers the research questions, though it is useful to set out its characteristics here in order to highlight the contrast with the interpretivist paradigm that has been adopted. My standpoints will be shown in the following section, as a contrast to the positivist paradigm.

The contrasting paradigm that underpins the current research, then, is interpretivist. It acknowledges that knowledge is personally experienced, and reality is perceived, understood and interpreted by people in society, rather than acquired or imposed from outside (Creswell, 2007). The interpretivist paradigm is based on a relativist ontological stance, which assumes that reality can be constructed socially and experientially, and adheres epistemologically to subjective principles that assume the entrenchment of subjectivity in meaning- making processes (Cohen et al., 2013). Its principles thus assist the current research in studying teacher leadership by interacting with teachers in their actual social context, public schools. Ontologically, Saudi English-language teachers' multiple views constitute the reality of teacher leadership as it is understood and experienced by them. Epistemologically in this study, I interact with teachers about teacher leadership in their professional setting. As it is implicit in my research questions, participants were asked to speak about teacher leadership from their point of view and how this constructs their understanding of themselves as teacher leaders. Based on their ontologically multiple views, teacher leadership practices have been explored through participants’ construction of their meanings of the concept of teacher leadership.

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Methodologically, this research is exploratory in design, and aims to make sense of “phenomena from the perspectives of people involved” (Welman & Kruger, 1999, p.189). As a methodological design, it is used when less research has been done about the topic under research and the context being studied. Creswell (2014) states that in an exploratory research design “the researcher seeks to listen to participants and build an understanding based on what is heard” p.61. it is used when a phenomenon has not been explored or defined in a social context. I studied teacher leadership as a multi-viewed phenomenon that has not been researched in the context of the current study. The purpose of the research is about the exploration of the “teacher leadership” in its lived experience of TESOL teachers and how this might influence their professional practice. As the reviewed literature on teacher leadership (Chapter 3, section 3.2) suggested that previous research has not defined the concept with a universal definition, this implies that teacher leadership is a phenomenon that hold different realities in the lived experiences of people and appears to be situational (Muijs & Harris, 2006; Johnson & Donaldson, 2007). DeMore Palmer (2011) stressed that “The term teacher leadership might have particular meanings in diverse contexts. Those contexts, in conjunction with the teacher leaders themselves, may contribute to various definitions of teacher leadership” p.5.

Therefore, the constructed multi-realities of Saudi TESOL teachers and my own personal and professional experience about teacher leadership are in consistent with the interpretivist paradigm underpinning the current research. This is to say that from an ontologically interpretivist perspective the intention of the research was to explore teacher leadership from the multiple views of the participants, and that therefore epistemologically the data is regarded as constructed through the

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reciprocal perspectives and the reported experiences of both researcher and participants.

To this end, the current research utilized questions that were “directed to the participants’ experiences, perceptions and convictions about the theme in question” (Welman & Kruger, 1999, p. 196). Thus the findings that the data might reveal in this exploratory study are “rich descriptions of phenomena and their settings” (Kensit, 2000, p. 104), as one of the feature of an exploratory study, and avoid imposing pre-formed ideas onto the research subjects and the data collected. In-depth understanding of the “lived experience” of people (Richards, 2003, p18) about the concept of teacher leadership contributes to the authenticity and credibility of the research by giving a voice to the participants and avoiding the imposition of existing concepts or norms. The questions of the current research (Chapter 1, section 1.3) solicited participants’ interpretations of their own experience and their constructed perceptions of teacher leadership to gain an understanding of individual experience (Creswell, 2014).

Observing the teachers in meetings or whilst teaching in classes may have been interesting in order to see teachers’ beliefs-in-action, which the present research does not have access to. But this would have shifted the focus away from giving a voice to teachers about how they conceive of their leadership; indeed, moving towards evaluating the teachers in their practice would not have been coherent with the research aims and the subsequent research questions devised.

Based on the underpinning paradigm and its exploratory nature, the current research utilized three qualitative methods which will be discussed in the following sections.

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