Return journey: ‘snakes in the swamp’

Abstract

In 1985 Falmer Press published my first book, a classroom ethnography entitled Initial Encounters in a Secondary School, which helped establish me as an academic. However, it has long concerned me that the decade-long Victoria Road Lower School Project (as it came to be called) contained two resounding ‘silences’: • Silence 1 concerned the changing autobiographical, authorial ‘selves’ that lay behind it. • Silence 2 concerned the unknown impact ‘Initial Encounters’ had upon Lower School and the subsequent careers of the teachers who had featured in it. To investigate this last year I managed to trace and interview some 60% of the staff (15 in total) who had featured in the original study. ‘Return Journey’ is best regarded as an experiment in ‘retrospective ethnography’, raising issues relating to both the autobiographical self and the ethics of ethnography, neither of which were accorded much significance in the late 1970s at the time of the initial research.