Triangulating data

During this phase, I triangulated data I collected through participant observation in order to strengthen the trustworthiness, or internal validity, of this account (Cohen et al., 2000, p. 107). Discussed below, these methods included arte-

fact collection, informant-led data collection, and interviews with participants and partners.

During the first 10 workshops I observed, I collected some artefacts, including objects created by participants. At some of the outdoor sites, the artists also gave parents observation booklets in order to stand back and describe what their chil- dren were doing. Thirteen observation booklets were completed by parents across multiple sites and were shared with me. Like photographs, these artefacts provided another perspective of particular events and supported elicitation in interviews.

Triangulating methods was aided by feedback forms that the organisation devel- oped and administered after each workshop. These feedback forms asked (Brennan, 2004):

1. What were the children doing?

2. What were the children learning? What did they enjoy most?

3. What else would have been useful/made the workshop more enjoyable? 4. What did you learn? What did you enjoy the most?

5. Is there anything you’d like to do next?

These open-ended, primarily descriptive questions were useful in drawing my at- tention to the interests of parents and children. Receiving over 40 completed feed- back forms, they also provided further ethnographic evidence of what I observed, as well as what parents and artists described during interviews. As I mentioned, there were also two artist-led reflective conversations and three organisational re- treats during which the artists and site partners reflected upon the workshops I observed. During one conversation in particular, the artists and partner began to

describe how their workshops lessened the fear of the unknown, or as the partner put it, softened the blank sheet. They noted moments during workshops when participants would be struck with fear when they faced the ambiguity of their workshops. They described navigating that by, for example, providing simple ma- terials and a prompt. In my subsequent individual interviews with three parents and two partners, I used a semi-structured interviewing approach to gather their perspectives on how the artists used materials, spaces, and provocations to soften the blank sheet.

To further strengthen my analysis, I collected over 50 organisational documents, including brochures, websites, job descriptions, program evaluations, risk assess- ments and grant proposals. Based on my experience producing this literature as an organisation director, I was aware of the ways in which these artefacts could be skewed as corporate advocacy. I took the above into consideration whilst weigh- ing the relative strength of data in the ongoing and iterative process of analysis described in greater detail next.

4.3.3.3 Grounded data analysis

To develop descriptive cases of artists’ pedagogies, I faced the difficult challenge of how to bound them for analysis. Individual artists worked in pairs across multiple sites as members of an organisation. To address the different dynamics at each of these levels, I attempted to allow for this complexity and take a nested ap- proach to further understand each individual part whilst paying attention to their relationship to the whole (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 29). I decided to begin writing cases bound by site. I approached each site as its own story, believing this provided the best narrative structure. I focused on each artist within each case,

how different pairs of artists worked together, and how features of these artists’ pedagogies were similar and different across each site.

In writing about each site, my aim was to provide vivid and varied represen- tations of what took place there. I was still attempting to refrain from more abstractly theorising their pedagogies as I wrote these cases. Yet, I recognise that the boundaries between these two aims blurred, as my understanding of artists’ emic concepts informed what descriptive data I collected and selected to use in the cases (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 91). Moreover, the line between emic and etic concepts also began to blur, as I found strong evidence, for example, to further examine phenomenological and pragmatist themes such as the body within each case. Therefore, my data analysis began to shift towards both a deductive and inductive approach.

At this point, I decided to deselect two of the five sites as potential descriptive cases. I was not comfortable with the level of participant consent. At these sites, children participated without parents, and I was unable to directly communicate to their parents without extensive effort I could not afford. As a result, one artist featured across the three sites that I had selected. Whilst minimising variation, I believed that my ethical concerns should prevail. Curiously, the three sites selected featured the artists working outdoors. Although the outdoor focus of these three workshops minimised variation based on what I observed (e.g. one series took place in a school), it was more representative of the organisation’s workshops during the time of this research.

To develop the three remaining descriptive cases, I continued to use criteria to progressively focus on data from both the second and third phases of research.

These criteria included:

1. The ongoing emphasis and repetitiveness of what artists did and said. 2. Inconsistencies between what they said in the second phase and what they

did in the third.

3. What interested participants in interviews, feedback forms, and documenta- tion booklets.

4. What appeared to be the most salient concepts based on my emerging un- derstanding of their pedagogies.

During this analysis, I wrote over 120 memos totalling approximately 60,000 words to reflect on data selected using this criteria.

I wrote vignettes that attempted to give a story-like structure to the data se- lected (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Then I compared vignettes and considered how to maximise opportunities for variation within each case. In other words, I avoided selecting two vignettes that described how artists opened their workshops, if their openings were similar. To further add to the complexity within each case, I attempted to select vignettes that balanced multiple perspectives and described what artists did among various artists and participants. I considered the relative status of different types of data and attempted to avoid selecting data simply to make a coherent story. I was still aware that outliers would add complexity to my representation. I also wrote the descriptive cases longer than they ultimately would become. Providing longer drafts allowed artists to comment upon a broader and more varied sample of events in member checking interviews. Then I could better ascertain aspects of their workshops more significant to them.

In addition, I started to consider the formal qualities of my representations. I became more aware that I was writing sparsely, perhaps as an effort to put for- ward an undistracted focus on what artists did. I believed this would allow for more varied interpretations from the reader, which I believed would benefit the research’s contribution to the field. I also decided to use metaphors in some in- stances to emphasise the ambiguity of what artists did and its multiple possible meanings.

I decided to write myself into the text to further add to the situated and complex nature of my representations. I wanted to be transparent about my presence. I included the feelings I felt and the memories I encountered during workshops to further illustrate these were not pure, objective accounts (Lassiter, 2005). But I also doubted whether a highly introspective vanity ethnography would be useful (Van Maanen, 1988). This approach questions its own form until it is formless. Alternatively, I wanted to present a coherent but obviously constructed narrative that told stories about what artists did, how it was meaningful to them, and what vocabularies they used. By September, I finished drafts of three descriptive cases. Now I further discuss the concept of reflexivity and its impact on how I conducted fieldwork and wrote these descriptive cases.