Inquiry #7

What's the Issue?

What do people care about here? What are the issues that people navigate in their everyday lives? How will you find out?

First and foremost, begin with the assumption that people in this place already know a lot about working in and around this nexus and the discourses that uphold it. Approaching the site as a learner means recognizing that people here know more about their daily lives than you do. And no matter what you are studying here, recognize that you are also taking up their time and resources. Researching with participants requires us at least to engage issues that actually matter to people in this place.

Asking Participants

Video Prompted Discussion

Asking participants about their concerns in focus group discussions can identify the issues that people in a given place see as their top priorities. However, it is also clear that the devil is in the details: just asking teachers about their literacy teaching can yield shared educational discourses that mouth pedagogical maxims that “everyone just knows” but that cover a wide range of disparate teaching practices. Of course, these issues will also be mired in a nexus, under familiar practices that hide the entrenched complicity of participants (including researchers!), so engaging these issues will be complicated, and there will be much nuance to uncover such as the ways global discourses mask their own power, and so on.

Video Analysis

Asking focus groups to identify issues within examples in video clips or work samples moves the conversation from abstract to concrete and allows you to more fully unpack discourse. It’s important to remember that children are participants too, and their goals and concerns should be considered in researching classroom nexus.