Analysis and representation

The table below captures the theories or tools for reading that were drawn on in the sense- making of the educational encounters in my study.

Rather than studying something that was static, the processes of this study were more about making encounters in which we would study practices and emerging discourses in the context of learning about water. Methodologically this involved a shift in the analytic agenda that rather “… seeks to compel, relate, or explore, and understand the inherent open-endedness of this act in contextual space and time …[and acknowledging that one is engaging in sense- making rather than discovering]” (Markham, 2013 as cited by Ellingson, 2017, p. 151). I see it as a process of making and sense making.

Pedagogical narration is the best way to describe the focus of my analysis process. This involved narrating encounters, and through narration, entering into conversations with drawings and skits. It is from here that I make sense of the encounters I facilitated, drawing on multiple modes of documentation, multiple theories and in conversation with others.

Writing about what I was seeing in skits, conversations and drawings allowed for me to build a critical distance between Anna as the educator who had an agenda of moving an inquiry along and Anna the pedagogista who wanted to understand what was going on in our

encounters. This involved putting anxieties aside and judgement aside and learning to sit with what I was witnessing. What was being said and what was it being said?

In this project, member checking was less about validating the truth about what had occurred and instead was “an additional opportunity to talk with participants and connect their

responses to researchers’ accounts…” (Sandelowski, 2002 as cited by Ellingson, 2017, p.

165). For each encounter, I selected an artefact from which to discuss with one or more of the educators. These dialogues allowed me to share my initial ideas and hear the thoughts of the educators who had been involved. I then entered into dialogue with a theory with which I could think further about my observations.

As described in section 3.4, I embraced multiple theoretical orientations in dialogue towards making sense of my empirical experience in water inquiries. In line with Nicolini (referenced in McKenzie and Bieler, 2016, p. 34) who argues that “the empirical study of practice is better served by intentional movement between theoretical sensitivities, given the inter-scalar and multidimensional aspects of practice”, each chapter draws on slightly different theoretical

orientations all aiding in reflecting upon the educational encounter and underlaboured by dialectical process. Table 3 below summarises these modes and theories or tools for reading.

Table 3: Table of analytical approaches Mode

Generated in our encounters, these were also modes of analysis in our process of making sense of water as they engaged with

information,

questions and ideas relating to water.

Documentation This is how the generated data was captured generating multiple modes engaging the idea that children have 100 languages.

Listening guides

Tools with which to understand and listen to the mode

Drawings Photographs Thematic analysis and with a concern for how the pictures in turn unravelled the themes. (Gullion, 2018)

Sociodramatic play Video Read with theory on play as a mode of children’s being and becoming

(Vygotsky, 2016) and dialogue with educators

Storytelling Captured on video

and transcribed narrative analysis (Barone and Eisner, 1997)

Questioning Captured on flip chart paper and individual interest forms

Drawn on to move the inquiry further.

Engaging matters of concern (Latour, 2015) and problem-posing approach (Noddings, 2013)

Information gathering Presentations

captured on video Narrative analysis (Barone and Eisner, 1997) and dialogue with the group (Noddings, 2013)

Improvisation

scenarios Video and

transcribed Process of analysing responses to questions in itself,

narrative analysis (Barone and Eisner, 1997)

Educator experience Written reflections Drawn on to think reflexively about the process elements of emergence (Ellingson, 2017)

Individual interviews with environmentally active youth across the city and educators

Audio recorded and

transcribed Read for the strongest feeling in this interview, in a sense beyond words.

And represented through a poem which was fed back to each learner.

In addition to a narrative analysis (Barone and Eisner, 1997) exploring experience and learning in

environmental organisations, based on the words and phrasing, these poems brought in the affective side for young people across a divided city grappling with the world they have inherited.

A note on ethics and representation: Ethical pedagogical narration is an issue of representation;

In the artefacts exhibited in this thesis I have removed identifiers and blurred photographs to enable anonymity for the learners who participated. Nutbrown (2011) shared a thorough and in-depth discussion on using photographs of children in research and noted that there is a tension between protecting the child (through anonymity) and enabling voice and authorship, aligning with the intention to research with children rather than research on children. This tension has been felt throughout this project as the multi-modal voices throughout this project were critical threads in the thinking and writing. However, due to the overall mode of a thesis manuscript traveling outside of the research encounters, I have decided to maintain

anonymity in relation to anyone who was not part of the project.

The concern for acknowledgement and authorship remains; how do I ensure that anonymity does not disrespect the voices of the children who participated in this study? In the research process itself, learners’ creations were celebrated and acknowledged amongst the group through a final screening of all we did together with case study 1, a play performance we did with case study 2 and the conversations and poetry done in the final conversations (chapter 7). Despite the removal of identifiers, the contributions remain significant, the bodily expressions in the skits, the questions posed, the conversations had and the drawings portrayed. This work does not focus on individual development but rather processes of learning and listening to learning and hence individual identifiers are not critical. The participants will recognise their contributions to this work. However, the travel of this work, via this final manuscript, beyond the space of the educational encounter, will maintain anonymity to people outside of the processes we engaged.

The practice of pedagogical narration is not intended to be an exact representation of what happened but a way of making our lenses explicit as it impacts the act of observation (Pacini- Ketchabaw et al., 2014, p. 188). I narrated my encounters and the artefacts from them, in order to build the capacity to reflect and observe.

Engaging the representational forms of story and play allowed for further dialogues about what was emerging in the work. In drafting the play, I collaborated with a educator friend and colleague. We worked with the play as a theatre-for-education piece. Launching off the series of scenes I had compiled based on my work with the high school learners, we built further meaning together in the process of crafting an effective theatre piece. Along with building actions into what was a text heavy piece, we brought a new scene into being, one that

revealed the multiple relationships of power and money along the journey of water to the tap.

Drafting the story was a process of pulling together the multiple voices from learners in their drawings and their skits, towards a speculative fiction that could represent my wishes and hopes for what could be. The story engages Nxumalo and ross’s (2019) proposal to use speculative fiction towards addressing some of the blindspots in environmental education research, including the blindspots relating to race and class. Through ‘speculative story- telling’ we might move away from “instrumentalist, already known approaches to teaching and learning young children” (Nxumalo and ross, 2019, p. 508). Resonating with the aims of arts-based research, Leggo and Sameshima (2014, p. 539) note that educational researchers

“support a poetics of research by investigating ways that creative writing contributes to knowing and understanding. … above all, we aim to make a story in collaborative dialogue with others always aware that the story is one of many stories, one of many versions of the story”. Thus ‘speculative story’ and fictional creative writing are interesting modes for educational research that aims to focus on the lived experiences of learning encounters.

This story provided the channel I needed to share the creations of the children and the way I had read their experiences in the world through our interactions and their creations. In other words, it served as a way for me to bring my reading of the plays and the drawings together, in an integrated way. The plays showed a little about social and cultural worlds of water. The drawings showed imaginings of places through which water flowed – these included

speculative experiments about visiting a water purification station. The form of story is thus a form of synthesis and analysis that resists abstraction and enabled me to incorporate my role in the relational encounter. (The work of this mode is discussed further at the end of Chapter 5, in section 5.7)