Jones et al. (2010) Documenting Classroom Life: how can I write about what I am seeing?
Observation = field notes // we need to question and examine the objectivity of the observer.
Truth is inseparable from the procedure establishing it … but what constitutes procedure?… The process is that of seeing. (Deleuze, 1988: 63)
Observation notes…. “are invested with power, desire, subjectivity and writing’s fraught relation to reality”. (Jones Et al 2010, p481)
They highlight that it’s not just seeing, but also thinking that plays a part in this activity.
How do we internally construct and label behaviours to then recognise them?
‘writing is described as a pharmakon (Plato’s definition of writing) for while, on the one hand, it can facilitate the recording and transmission of knowledge, on the other it depersonalises human knowledge by taking it away from its oral tradition and therefore its authentic living source. (Jones, 1999: 107, our emphasis)’
Complexities:
- Changes to observation with shorthand, (scribble) translated into typed notes.
- Writing in the present tense:
The ‘ethnographic present’ instils a sense of being present and in this sense contributes towards an authoritative account where there is no space between the object and the observed because both were present at the same time. (Jones Et al 2010, p484) - To move or slip into a retrospective tone, is making an assumption that what is being observed always happens (influenced by past experience and knowledge about what happens or what should happen) This, they state, is evidence of the montage motif they use (layers of editied information).
- ‘Memory therefore has a capacity to interrupt what it is we are ‘actually’ observing’ (p486)
- Data can lack useful detail, in an attempt to keep the account ‘clean’ and ‘objective’ and avoiding bias.
They propose a more ‘baroque’ method, “characterized by oscillations of scale and confusions of time, where stable hierarchies of subject and object, play and reality, text and world, specific and general, are brought into productive disarray, and uncertainty becomes a resource for releasing difficult questions that recognize the complexity and the opacity of culture” (cf. Law, 2003; MacLure, 2006).
This could also be explained, they state, as making the familiar strange.
“What this necessitates, however, is putting to one side a desire for clarity. As ethnographers this means working with data that offers degrees of fuzzy details with the accompanying ramification that understanding these cannot be gained by simply using linear logic”.