Awareness of Presence: Developing the Researcher Self

Abstract

How should gradua-2 students be taught to become qualitative researchers? How can they learn about research decision points and consider different ways of being present in a research setting? How can they develop sound researcher judgment and discover researcher selves that fit both them and their unique research situations? As interest in qualitative inquiry in education grows, these questions are being raised with more urgency (Eisner 1991;Nowakowski 1990; Reinharz 1990).Most qualitative research instruction focuses on reading the methods literature and learning how to gather, code, and analyze data by conducting small-scale research projects. Whether the focus of preparation is on naturalistic research methods or on a research topic, graduate students rarely learn how to be present in the lives of research participants. In this article, we reflect on a qualitative-research-methods field experience through the following questions: How many ways can researchers be present in a given situation? How might each way of being present affect the lives of those in a research setting? How might each way of being present affect what we learn about a situation?Our field experience as long-term participant-observers in a high school was undertaken as an independent study. We both had been secondary teachers and administrators; so the field experience allowed us to look at a school as a research setting and to explore the complexity of being present in a school as researchers. Our focus was on the process of being a researcher, rather than on a research topic. By not pursuing a research question, we did not have some of the pressures of doing research. However, we had the latitude to try out a variety of research strategies to learn about different aspects of schooling.As qualitative researchers-in-training, we were instructed to watch ourselves closely by recording decisions that we made about how to be present in the research setting and by reflecting on responses to our decisions. The development of our judgment as researchers centered around four themes: (1) thinking of our presence as a crossroads for Anthropology 6 Education Quarterly 26(1):112-122.

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