Integrity and trustworthiness

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)

Integrity and trustworthiness begins in relationships: being a part of what was studied was a methodological choice of this PhD, to be part of and reflect on educational practice. The integrity of this research began with the relationships formed through the fieldwork. These relationships were not without tensions that are normal to humans working together,

especially humans working across structural divides, but being attentive to these relationships was a priority of integrity.

Even though the writing of this thesis was carried out in isolation, this did not mean these relationships ended. I think that there are ways in which relationships can be honoured with differentiation in time and space. In fact, there is a value in differentiation and I found Biesta’s articulation of critical distance helpful to think with: “it is as important to try to bridge gaps between research and practice as it is to keep a critical distance between the two, both from the side of educational research and from the side of educational practice” (2007a, p. 5). As I worked with my participants in an embodied way, very suspicious and critical of any form of separation, I had to learn to differentiate. Importantly, I was not differentiating for the sake of hierarchical ordering of voices; I was differentiating for the purposes of

“interpretable traces” (Rinaldi and Gandini, 1998) that move “toward counter-practices of authority” that are adequate to emancipatory interests (Lather, 1993, p. 674). As I worked towards representing this research in a written thesis, which itself is a form of differentiation as critical distance, there were some elements to consider

Traceability: As I read across the documentation from our encounters, my inferences were linked to artefacts produced or moments recorded on video or reflected on in writing.

Traceability is important in research as all our observations and even the frames of

documentation are partial, resulting from the need to make traceable observations which can be used in dialogue (Rinaldi and Gandini, 1998, p. 121). I always understand this data to be generated – that is with a conscious concern for the conditions in which it was created. At the same time, I am sensitive to the idea that “data is partial, incomplete and is always in a process of a retelling and remembering” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013, p. 262).

There is both backwards and forwards traceability. Chapter 5 begins with the videos and drawings of the learners without any researcher voice present; these are followed by

pedagogical narration of what I observed, dialogue with theory that helped me to understand what I was observing and finally, some lines of thought for environmental education. Chapter 6 begins with a play which is a composite representation of the context at the time of the

water crisis. This includes scenes that emerge from everyday experience. While the play is heavily framed, it was written over the time of this work. What follows is a pedagogical narration and analysis of critical moments over the arch of our inquiry. Njabulo’s story is a representation of a composite child’s perspective of moving between home and school space and the variety of ways water is observed and interacted with across those spaces. I trace the producing of this story, after it is shared, as writing the story was the process of making sense and only after it had been written, did I have the words for what I was achieving by writing it.

Voice (How do I represent voices of others?): Acknowledging the power I hold as the primary author of this work, I do not make final claims about voice as it emerges from talk, text, drawing, skits, but rather tentative proposals with critical reflection of the lenses I bring.

I think about voices in the context of the nature of the encounter and carefully think through what the acts of narration were responding to at that time: whether it was a story being told allowing a certain degree of fictive imagination or a presentation given where there is an expectation for certain facts. Crucially, the representation of my own voce in the first person is a practice with consequences; I represent myself through this and try to be conscious of the ways I frame my thoughts and actions in the process.

Sensitivity to language and multi-lingualism: In the context of my research a sensitivity to language is crucial. While I studied isiXhosa throughout my fieldwork months, I was never proficient enough to engage on a first language basis. All educational encounters had the possibility to work and interact in isiXhosa. For example, the bucket skits were enacted in isiXhosa and the final play was rehearsed with isiXhosa dialogue despite the key messages in each scene being written in English. I worked with a translator to understand some of the isiXhosa dialogue and this working went beyond direct translation to unpacking meaning within the idioms used. For example, “save water” was sometimes translated as

masisebenzisa kakuhle. I had a particular understanding of the save water and the meanings that came with it. Masisebenzisa kakuhle is phrasing which explicitly foregrounds the fact that we use water, and we need to use it carefully, rather than a decontextualised ‘save water’

message. This creative engagement with language is the beginning of the wish to realise the possibility of multi-lingual education which Neville Alexander (2012) envisioned for South Africa and the practice that most school learners today engage in anyway.

Selection: I was selective about which pieces of data I focused upon. I describe a number of selection types that informed my sense making in this PhD.

I. Pedagogical selection – moments in the data which informed the movement of our inquiry and encounter together. These included questions that were difficult to answer or gaps in the information provided.

II. Disruptive potential – re-framing water and re-framing learning about water, contradicting an assumption I had held.

III. Substantive selection – material produced revealing substance about water in social- cultural material context.

IV. Ethical selection: Did I have the consent to work with this piece of data?

While both case studies included a range of these selection types, in Case Study 2, I had more of the first three and Case Study 1 included some work in ensuring the pieces I were working with had full ethical consent.

Writing in the first person and the inclusion of my lived experience in this PhD neither claims to be a perfect correspondence to reality, nor a transparent narration but offers a way to reveal my “frames of seeing” and engage a reflexive dialogue with my own act of representation (Lather, 1993, pp. 675–676). By attempting to make my own frames clear, I offer insight into the body involved in this knowledge production. In other words, I try to make explicit the

‘instrument’ of research which in this case is not an instrument at all, but rather my head, heart and body that is the holding porous node of what is produced. In this way I am inviting the reader into a conversation.