Echoes

Echoes

Ethics and Issues of Voice in Education Research

Edited by

Warren MidgleyUniversity of Southern Queensland, Australia

Andy DaviesSidra Medical and Research Center, Qatar

Mark E. OliverUniversity of Southern Queensland, Australia

Patrick Alan DanaherUniversity of Southern Queensland, Australia

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6209-489-5 (paperback)ISBN: 978-94-6209-490-1 (hardback)ISBN: 978-94-6209-491-8 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers,P.O. Box 21858,3001 AW Rotterdam,The Netherlandshttps://www.sensepublishers.com/

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with theexception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered andexecuted on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

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CONTENTS

Foreword viiFred Dervin

Acknowledgements xi

1. The Echoes of Voice in Education Research Ethics 1Warren Midgley, Andy Davies, Mark E. Oliver & Patrick AlanDanaher

Section One: Voice and Ethics: Challenges and ChallengingMark E. Oliver

2. A Faint Echo: Using Fictionalisation to Speak the Unspeakable 15Warren Midgley

3. Does Anonymising Steal the Voices of Researchers and ResearchSubjects? 25Andy Davies

4. Ethical Researcher or Vampiric Consumer?: A Post-structural FeministResearcher’s Reflections on Research Involving the Voices of YoungPeople in Contemporary Australian Schools 35Leonie Rowan

5. The Voice as Subject or Object 53Yvonne Salton

Section Two: An Exploration of Voice in EducationAndy Davies

6. Explicating Articulations: Intentions and Intonations in Researchingthe Voices of Retired Australians 69Phyllida Coombes, Geoff Danaher & Patrick Alan Danaher

7. Hear, Oh Hear, the Voices of the Marginalised: Assumptions, Methodsand Implications in Capturing the Voices of Expatriate Teachers inKorea 83Christian Y. Shin

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8. Deconstructing the Taken-For-Grantedness of Institutional Knowledgeand Power in Arts Education: Restoring the Voice of the CreativeStudent 95Mark Seton & Lycia Trouton

9. The Other Side of the Student Story: Listening to the Voice of theParent 111Donna M. Velliaris & Craig R. Willis

Section Three: An Exploration of Voice in ResearchWarren Midgley

10. Locating the Discursive Self in Language and Literacy EducationResearch: A Reflexive Consideration of ‘Voice’ 125Michael N. Trottier

11. The Confluence of Intercultural Communication and EducationResearch: Issues of Voice in the Performing Arts 153Sean Collin Mehmet

12. Research with Children: Voice, Agency and Transparency 165Louise Phillips

Section Four: Voice and the Practice of ResearchPatrick Alan Danaher

13. Dissonance in Participant Voice: Research Strategies That HarmoniseDistortions in Participant Data 185Mark E. Oliver

14. Principals’ Voices Via Modelling?: Issues of Voice in QuantitativeStudies and the Use of Complexity Theory 197Karen Trimmer

15. Using a Visual Method of Ethno-Symbology to Elucidate ParticipantVoice 211Robyn Torok

16. Echoing Contexts: Theorising Voice and Voicing Theories 227Vanessa De Oliveira Andreotti & Bruno De Oliveira Andreotti

Author Biographies 241

Index 247

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FOREWORD

Composed between 1914 and 1918 by the Hungarian composer and pianist BélaBartók (1881–1945), Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs is a collection of folkmelodies. Bartók travelled around Hungary and Romania to record, notate andcollect these melodies – a bit like an anthropologist who was trying to save thememories of a soon-to-be extinct tribe. Bartók’s obsession with preserving thesevoices was sparked by his overhearing Transylvanian folk songs during his teenageyears. He was ‘saving’ these songs for the future, for other people to enjoy. In asimilar vein, closer to our times, the Chinese composer Tan Dun ( , 1957-),better known for his score for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, embarkedin 2002 on a journey in Southwest China where he filmed a series of fieldrecordings of three Chinese ethnic groups’ music. The result is a piece called TheMap (Concerto for cello, video and orchestra), during which e.g. a cellist engageswith a video-taped Miao/Hmong singer in a Feige (a “flying song”). UnlikeBartók, who never played his music for those who inspired him, Tan Dun insistedon ‘giving back’ to the people who had contributed to his 55-minute piece bybringing a full-size orchestra to the historical site of Fenghuang Ancient Town inXiangxi Prefecture in 2003, where he performed for the indigenous villagers whohad shared their music with him.

I see many similarities between these two different forms of relations betweenthe composer and his sources of inspiration and the theme of this fascinating bookon voices in education. Bartók symbolises in a sense the way we used to doresearch many decades ago, while Tan Dun’s approach is closer to what thisvolume puts forward as ‘good practice’ for treating voices in research today.

In his famous poem September 1, 1939, W. H. Auden wrote: “All I have is avoice”. I believe that this could be the motto of all education researchers aroundthe world. As such, voice is the tool of their trade. Just like the human voice thatneeds many different organs to operate (the lungs, the larynx, the vocal cords, etc.)and to create talking, crying, singing, etc., researchers have to deal with voice bymeans of multifaceted perspectives and many and varied tools in our postmoderntimes.

While before the only obvious voice that interested researchers was that of theparticipants (a bit like Bartók), today the voice in research is considered ‘liquid’ (toborrow Z. Bauman’s metaphor for post-modernity) and more complex. The voiceswe work with (but also the accompanying silences) are often ‘given back’ to theirowners, when for instance we ask our participants to examine the transcriptions ofthe voices we have recorded for their approval. The old principle of ethics guidesthis ‘new’ treatment of voices.

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Research has changed immensely over the last four decades and paradigms suchas constructivism, post-structuralism and post-modernism have led researchers toquestion the voices that they hear and construct in research. Many researchers nowwant to avoid mere “ventriloquation” (Valsiner, 2002) – or repeating in uncriticalways what participations have co-constructed with them – and to consider insteadthe contradictory or conflicting voices of their participants (contradictions, ‘lies’,power-led discourses, etc.) to make research results more balanced, honest andrealistic. Research participants (and ourselves) are members of many differentsocial groups and thus “the individual will internalize the voices of many different,even conflicting, communities.” (Gillespie et al., 2008: 38). Dealing with voices inresearch means considering this ensemble of voices rather than the sole voice ofthe participant.

In his book on the saturated self of postmodern individuals, Kenneth Gergen(1991: 16) asserts rightly: “as we absorb multiple voices, we find that each “truth”is relativised by our simultaneous consciousness of compelling alternatives.”Relativising voices should thus be part of the researcher’s job… The followingquestions can help to do that: Who is really talking and making a statement? fromwhat position-s is an individual speaking? On whose behalf? Whose voice cannotbe heard? In what language(s) are people ‘doing’ voice1 and what impacts does ithave on what they say and their interlocutors? These questions can help us to moveaway from “surface voices” to deeper grounds.

Finally, the following question is becoming central in research: How much arethe voices that we analyse influenced by our presence, the context of interaction,the intertexuality we share with our participants? Researchers’ voices need to betaken into account: their inner voices through reflexive accounts but also the voicesthrough which they construct discourses with their research participants (ByrdClark & Dervin, 2014). This is far from being accepted by all: I received recently areview of one of my articles which claimed that the fact that I was using “I” andreflecting “too much” on my influence on the data was a-scientific and thus madethe article unpublishable…

The reader will be amazed and stimulated by the chapters that compose thisbook as they problematise and provide many answers to the aforementionedquestions. Its multivoicedness will undoubtedly accompany and influence manyfuture discussions around education.

Professor Fred DervinUniversity of Helsinki

Helsinki, Finland

NOTE

1 When I see the word ‘voice’, I cannot but think of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus ofEnglish, which is abbreviated as VOICE. Through this corpus researchers from around the world

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are able to examine the use of English as a Lingua Franca in many different contexts and to reflecton the impact this multifaceted form of English has on those who communicate through thismedium.

REFERENCES

Clark, J. B., & Dervin, F. (Eds.). (2014). reflexivity in language and intercultural education: Rethinkingmultilingualism and interculturality. New York: Routledge.

Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self, dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York: BasicBooks.

Gillespie, A., Cornish, F., Aveling, E., & Zittoun, T. (2008). Conflicting community commitments: adialogical analysis of a British woman’s World War II diaries. Journal of Community Psychology,36, 35–52.

Valsiner, J. (2002). Forms of dialogical relations and semiotic autoregulation within the self. Theory &Psychology, 12(2), 251–265.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors and authors are very grateful to the following individuals, withoutwhom this book would not have been published:

• Mr Peter de Liefde and his colleagues at Sense Publishers for beingencouraging and facilitative publishers of the book

• The scholars who provided double-blind peer reviews of one or more submittedchapters in the book:

– Dr Wendi Beamish, Griffith Institute for Educational Research, GriffithUniversity, Brisbane, Australia

– Dr Chris Beckett, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom– Dr Ali Black, CQUniversity, Gladstone, Australia– Dr Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia– Mr Ian Collett, Supervising Psychologist, Toowoomba, Australia– Mrs Phyllida Coombes, Independent Scholar, Bundaberg, Australia– Ms Elissa Cramb, Principal, Highlands Christian Grammar, Mt Hagen,

Papua New Guinea– Ms Allison Creed, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba,

Australia– Mr Martin Gill, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom– Dr Lisa Gunders, School of English, Media Studies and Art History,

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia– Associate Professor Robyn Henderson, School of Teacher Education and

Early Childhood, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba,Australia

– Dr Andrew Hickey, School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education,University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia

– Dr Henk Huijser, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education,Batchelor, Australia

– Professor Donna Mertens, Department of Educational Foundations andResearch, Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C., United States ofAmerica

– Dr Teresa Moore, CQUniversity, Rockhampton, Australia.– Dr Virginia Morrow, Oxford Department of International Development,

University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom– Dr Stewart Riddle, School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood,

University of Southern Queensland, Springfield, Australia– Dr Suzanne Robertson-Malt, Faculty of Health Sciences, The University of

Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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– Ms Lyn Sherrington, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia– Professor Tony Townsend, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland– Dr Donna Velliaris, Academic Advisor, Eynesbury Institute of Business and

Technology, Adelaide, Australia– Ms Donna Wilkes, Clinical Research Manager, The Hospital for Sick

Children, Toronto, Canada– Associate Professor Annette Woods, School of Early Childhood,

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia• Ms Jodie Gunders for managing the project, organising the chapter reviews and

typesetting the manuscript with consummate skill and timely efficiency• Professor Fred Dervin, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland for writing the

foreword• Our colleagues at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia for their

ongoing commitment to exploring complex issues relating to research