Videoed observation

The subsequent observation of a teaching session provided a contextualised ‘snapshot’ of what the teacher educator’s pedagogy looked like in practice, and formed the basis of the stimulated recall interview. The session to be observed was ultimately chosen by the participant, although this was constrained by factors of timing, timetabling, etc. It provided an opportunity to see at first-hand what was taking place in situ, and

to discover things that participants might not freely talk about in interview situations, to move beyond perception-based data (e.g. opinions in interviews), and to access personal knowledge. (Cohen et al 2000:305)

It also enabled any discrepancies between what participants said and what they did to be identified. Observation is suggested by Morrison (2003, cited in Cohen et al 2000:305) as a method for enabling

the researcher to gather data on pedagogic styles, and is eminently suitable for capturing the multi- dimensional nature of teaching and classroom interaction. It is also effective in validating as well as generating data.

The key characteristic of observation as a research method is that it takes place in a natural setting, and, according to Newby (2010), “there are no conditions or variables that are not usually present which could influence or disrupt what is being observed” (p364). However, I was aware that my presence as a ‘close observer’ – with a video camera – could affect the dynamics of the session, as Wragg (2012:14) cautions. Although my role was non-participatory, as an observer I was overtly an outsider to the group; Newby refers to this as being “inactive and known” (p367), which has the potential to be obtrusive. For this reason, I chose not to circulate during the sessions, and the camera remained static on a tripod at all times, positioned alongside me at the back of the room. The decision on whether or not to introduce me to the group, and then which details to provide, was left to each teacher educator. This provided them with ownership and authority within the research process. As student teachers had to be given the option of not being included in the filming (none took up this offer), and guarantees of confidentiality also had to be provided to them (see Appendix 4), they did need to be aware that this formed part of a research study, however. I was conscious that this may have made my influence non-neutral, as both teacher educator and students may have felt that judgements were being made on their ‘performance’; Cohen et al (2000) also warn of the potential of Hawthorne and halo effects (p315). It was also impossible to know to what extent the teacher educators were ‘performing for the camera’.

As the main purpose of the observation was to provide the video for stimulated recall interview, my role as a ‘close observer’ in three of the four cases (i.e. taking place within the setting, rather than as a ‘remote observer’ of the video (Newby 2010, p365)) was limited. Contemporaneous notes were taken, relating to pedagogical issues which had arisen from the semi-structured interview with the teacher educator, and which it was felt may provide leads for probes during the stimulated recall interview. In this way, the observation blended into the other forms of data collection, which meant that the structure of the manual recording procedure was not pre-determined. Cohen et al (2000) make reference to a ‘semi-structured observation’, which

will have an agenda of issues, but will gather data to illuminate these issues in a far less pre-determined or systematic manner [than a highly structured observation]… [They] will review observational data before suggesting an explanation of the phenomena being observed. (p305)

In this way, an ‘emic’ approach was taken; that is, using the perceptual frameworks of the participants, rather than that of the researcher, “where the definitions of the situations are captured through the eyes of the observed” (p313) – particularly as the observation was linked inextricably to

the stimulated recall interview. This ruled out the possibility of using a systematic approach with pre- determined categories, such as the Flanders Interaction Analysis Category System (FIAC), which has been widely used in (school) classroom research as a way of gathering quantitative data (Wragg 2012).

Whilst the purpose of the video was to facilitate the next stage of the research, there are also further benefits of having an audio-visual record of the observation. According to Cohen et al (2000), it “can overcome the partialness of the observer’s view of a single event”, and

has the capacity for completeness of analysis and comprehensiveness of material, reducing both the dependence on prior interpretations by the researcher, and the possibility...of only recording events which happen frequently. (p313)

Whilst these statements could also hold true in this case for the ‘observed’ (i.e. the teacher educator), there are further caveats in the case of this study to do with participants’ interpretations and selectivity during the subsequent stimulated recall interview (outlined in the next section), as well as caution about the risks of reactivity and selectivity with the installation of video cameras – either fixed or movable. These issues of validity and reliability (see also Section 3.8) related to observation methods pertain to the observation per se, as well as to that taking place within the stimulated recall interview, although, conversely, Cohen et al (2000) suggest that multiple methods of gathering data can “provide corroboration and triangulation…to ensure that reliable inferences are derived from reliable data” (p315).