Out of the mouths of young learners: an ethical response to occluded classroom practices in researcher-initiated role play

ABSTRACT

Conducting research into young learner experiences of school poses methodological challenges which are compounded when, as is increasingly the case, the classroom interaction is multilingual and the research methods are participatory. Each new or adapted method sheds further light on the issues that can arise. Researcher-initiated role play is a method where a researcher invites a group of children to engage in role play, something that many young children do spontaneously. This gives children the interactional space to take control of the specifics of the role play and to present their perspectives and concerns through multiple semiotic layers. This paper explores ethical issues that arise when role play reveals familiar but occluded practices; practices that are not readily presented to outsiders. Specifically, when this researcher-initiated role play was used to explore how children in their first years of school learn to read in different languages and in different multilingual, primary school contexts, certain occluded disciplinary practices were revealed. This paper considers the nature of an ethical response to such revelations.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• young learners
• occluded classroom practices
• observer's paradox
• ethnographic methods

Acknowledgements

This paper would not have been possible without the young learners and teachers in four schools in Malaysia, and the Malaysian children in the UK who shared their classrooms and literacy practices as part of a doctoral research study by Aizan Yaacob, supported by the Malaysian Ministry of Education.

Transcription conventions

Bold – Bahasa Malaysia

Normal – English

<italic> – English translation

(laughs) – non-verbal behaviour

(pause) – pause for a few seconds

CAPITAL LETTERS – reading from the text

XXX – unclear talk

[] overlapping talk

I = interviewer

T = teacher

Ss = students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.