The English Examining Boards: Their route from independence to government outsourcing agencies

41

...The problem of ‘going native’ presented an interesting dilemma. (Semel
1994: 208)

Certainly my position was not one of a participant observer - a sort of examining
board ethnographer whose account could be described as “subjective, biased,
impressionistic [and] idiomatic” (Cohen and Manion 1994: 110) Yet my approach is
too linear to conform to post-structuralist preferences for “the particularity of
historical experience, the material hereness and nowness... ” (Quoted in Windschuttle
1996: 102) where subjectivity is assumed. Instead, I have seen my role as a variation
on the Levi-Strauss notion of a bricoleuse∖ “a constructivist who interrogates the
materials...to discover what each could signify" (Crotty 1998: 50). I have tried to
assume the role not of ‘critical friend’ but of dispassionate interpreter of the
examining boards. I recognise that at times this role may appear to verge on advocacy,
but I have made every effort to avoid slipping over that line. Also, although from the
outside I might appear to fit the pattern of ‘insider’, within the Board my position as a
teachers’ union nominee meant that my allegiance was not viewed as an
unquestioning one.

I believe that, with my status clarified, this dual role has been a strength in both my
grasp of the issues I have been analysing and my ability to access material normally
not open to public scrutiny. Certainly, as I said above, my being known to nearly all
the individuals I approached for interviews enabled me to gain access to people who
do not normally speak openly. In 1981, Michael F D Young commented that: “It is
not without significance that the dominant tradition of educational research has never
conceived of investigations into the practice of the powerful” (Young 1981: 38). Since
that date, a growing body of qualitative research theory addresses the importance of
such interviews and considers aspects of their design which have influenced my

<<   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   >>

More intriguing information