Recording the natural world: Dilemmas in educational research

Abstract

An important aspect of educational research in Britain today emphasises interests and skills that are not commonly regarded as being in the general purview of the researcher. Artistic and literary sources are being used in a search for exemplars, metaphors, or even techniques which will help to record the subjective world of people. This new direction, stemming from phenomenological enquiry, is turning to elements from anthropology and ethnography to grasp the complex realities of individual interactions in everyday life. Increasingly, demands on the researcher for intuition, sensitivity, and empathy have drawn closer the worlds of social scientific inquiry and artistic observation and recording. Consequently, there are researchers who are moving away from a theorised research process toward traditions of humanistic inquiry. The Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the UniVersity of East Anglia has been pointed in this new direction and has probably beert its most consistent trail blazer. Threaded through CARE's different projec~ is a search for a method of observing and recording which reflects the nat~ concerns of the participants and is bound within an ethical relationship. Metaphors drawn from documentary film-making, fiction, and journalism have been used in this search for an improved research practice. This article stems from our work in trying to understand the concerns of CARE workers. It seeks to place them in a tradition of social observation which hitherto has not been represented in educational research. Looking briefly at the arguments within documentary film-making, which has a close association witti the federation of interests we call the social observation tradition, we will try to show parallels and divergencies with CARE. Arguments within art about the recording or understanding of reality will be briefly reviewed for the same purpose. Finally, Mass Observation, which was ~ significant movement ia the thirties, has strong parallels with CARE, and, we feel that a short introduction to its concepts would be helpful in interpreting problems found within naturalistie educational research. The purpose of these excursions into documentary, art, and Mass Observation is, first, to place CARE within a loose but fairly weltdefined tradition and, second, to reveal the problems in this tradition and the ways in which alternative or critical arguments may be generated that still concern themselves with social observation and the nature of reality.