‘Where do I sit?’ Transitioning from classroom teacher to educational researcher to explore students’ ideas about the Holocaust

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on recent doctoral research examining how students aged 12–14 make sense of the Holocaust during their history lessons on the topic. The research was ethnographically informed, and explored, through observing the ‘real life situation’ [Yin, Case Study Research, 2] of their history lessons, how students’ ideas about the Holocaust developed over time. The author is a former history teacher, conducting an ethnographically informed study in classrooms which were not their own, which required transitioning from teacher to researcher. This article is a reflexive [Brewer, Ethnography, 130–133] discussion of the challenges experienced making this transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• education
• teaching and learning
• ethnography
• participant observation
• researcher role

Introduction

This article discusses my experiences transitioning from classroom teacher to educational researcher to explore secondary school students’ ideas about the Holocaust. It explores how I made such a transition to complete three pieces of ethnographically informed fieldwork, conducted in classrooms which were not my own, as part of the research which contributed to my PhD thesis. Prior to studying for my PhD, I had been a secondary school history teacher for a decade. After leaving full time teaching to start my research, I worked part-time as a supply teacher, before, gradually, specializing in teaching about the Holocaust by working on a freelance basis for the Jewish Museum (London), Imperial War Museums, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, and the Holocaust Educational Trust. Conducting ethnographically informed fieldwork required my observing what was happening in the classroom through a lens different from the one I was used to using; that of researcher, not classroom teacher or museum educator.

The research supporting my thesis was based on three discrete pieces of fieldwork. The first was a two-week piece of exploratory fieldwork, during which I trialed some of the research activities undertaken by ethnographers, observing multiple classes in a variety of subject settings. The second was a longer piece of fieldwork conducted for a few hours each week over two school terms, during which I observed the history lessons of three Year 9 classes (aged 13–14), to contextualize my observations of their lessons on the Holocaust. The observations of those lessons on the Holocaust contributed greatly to the first draft of my thesis. The final, shorter, piece of fieldwork was conducted with students in three different classes in Year 8 and Year 9 (aged 12–14). During this fieldwork I observed only the students’ lessons on the Holocaust, exploring some of the ‘interrelated propositions’¹ suggested during the earlier fieldwork. The observations from this fieldwork added nuance and support to the findings I presented in my final thesis.

This article begins with a brief introduction to the ethnographic approaches which informed my research. It then outlines some of the challenges I faced on first entering the classroom as a researcher, and how some of these continued to challenge me when I began my second, longer piece of fieldwork. The final stages of the article explore how I was able, during the final piece of fieldwork, to develop a more useful approach to researching students’ ideas about the Holocaust. The conclusion comments on how other practitioners who become researchers in classrooms which are not their own might be better armed than I was to make such a transition.

This article contributes to this volume substantively by presenting some of the ideas which secondary school students in England present at different stages of their history lessons on the Holocaust. It contributes methodologically by providing suggestions for other practitioner researchers as they also begin to transition into this other, less familiar role.

Discovering Ethnography and identifying a research ‘problem’

Ethnography involves:

… participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research.²

Classic ethnographic studies exploring aspects of education include Ball (1981), Becker et al. (1961), Hargreaves (1967), and Willis (1977).³ Further texts explore how the principles of ethnographic research and how ethnographic studies are completed in practise. For example, Delamont (2002) described ethnographic processes in different places of learning.⁴ Brewer (2000) explained trends in ethnographic research.⁵ And Hammersley and Atkinson (1995) discussed the choices facing ethnographers.⁶ Using the term ‘thick description’⁷ they wrote of different forms of the participant observation at the heart of ethnographic fieldwork. Such texts described ethnographic research as ‘messy’,⁸ and ‘chaotic’⁹ which contrasted with the relative order and calm of the museum spaces in which, on starting my PhD, I was beginning to teach. As a former history teacher missing the sometimes messy and chaotic environment of the secondary school classroom, I chose to complete my PhD research using an ethnographically informed approach.

As an ethnographically informed study, my research was initially framed around a research ‘problem’¹⁰ rather than question. I wanted to spend time with Year 9 students (aged 13–14) in their history classrooms, examining how they understood the Holocaust. In Year 9, more teaching about the Holocaust took place in history than in any other subject, whereas ‘before Year 9, if a student has been introduced to the Holocaust during their school career, it is likely to have taken place in a subject other than history’.¹¹ I wanted to capture students’ ideas about the events before they studied them with their history teachers, where such ideas come from, and how the students approached new and unfamiliar notions of what happened. I wanted to examine how their pre-existing ideas about the Holocaust influenced their learning about the topic. I determined that this ‘problem’ related to how students ‘make sense’ of the Holocaust.

Existing research had not examined how students ‘make sense’ of the Holocaust. In 2012, when I began my research, in England at least, related literature prioritized ‘teachers over learners’¹² and did not focus on ‘the learning process’.¹³ This is no longer entirely the case as there has since been a greater focus on students’ ideas about the Holocaust.¹⁴ Even now, however, no published research has used ethnographic methods to examine the ideas about the Holocaust held by secondary school students in England. Some studies conducted outside of the UK used ethnographic methods, if the term is used to mean ‘participant observation’.¹⁵ In such studies, the researchers observed lessons and classes which were not their own. Spector ‘spent 84 hours as a participant-observer in Mrs. Parker’s accelerated English Language Arts classes during the length of the Holocaust unit,’¹⁶ and Meseth and Proske used participant observation to examine the ‘gap [. . .] between pedagogical intentions and classroom interactions’ in lessons about Nazism.¹⁷ The most prolific researcher to use participant observation to study teaching and learning about the Holocaust was Simone Schweber whose writing¹⁸ included ‘vignettes, interspersed with analysis and theory, [which] are one way for ethnographers to write about education’.¹⁹ Research conducted with students of different ages and in different countries was more useful methodologically than substantively as I planned my research. Since the ‘meaning and significance of Holocaust Education vary with the peoples to whom and the places where it is taught’,²⁰ existing studies highlighted that researchers can conduct participant observation in classrooms which are not their own and draw meaning from such observations regarding how students engage with depictions of the Holocaust. However, they did not address the issue in relation to secondary students in England.

Making the familiar strange’²¹: an initial, exploratory, piece of fieldwork

A few months into my PhD, I conducted two weeks of exploratory research in a secondary school in England.²² Permission to do so was negotiated by my supervisory team who knew a Headteacher in a local school. The Headteacher herself contacted me to invite me into the school and drafted a lesson observation timetable for me. My aims were substantive but, more significantly, methodological. In substantive terms, I wanted to explore how students encounter depictions of the Holocaust and related topics in school, and how they use ideas from one context when learning in another. I hoped that exploring this issue in one school at this early stage might give me a clearer focus for my research. More significantly, I wanted to practise observing lessons, creating field notes, interviewing and engaging in conversations with students and teachers, and gathering ephemera, which would be essential to my conducting an ethnographic study.²³ Each required me to behave differently in the classroom than I had as a teacher and required exploration and practise. ‘Participant observation is […] not easy or quick. “Smash and grab ethnographies”, where observers breeze into the field and are quickly out again, are worthless’.²⁴ But my intention during these two weeks was not to conduct an ethnography; it was to hone my research skills.

Cusick mentioned ‘Taking off a former role of teacher-administrator and the suit, tie, official manner, and didactic communication pattern that went with it’²⁵ to explore, through participant observation, life as a high school student. The symbolic removal of the formal dress of his previous role symbolized his transition into his new one. In spite (or, perhaps, because) of my not going through such a symbolic transformation, throughout this exploratory fieldwork I felt more unsettled than I had anticipated. It was not simply that I was in a new school. In my recent work as a supply teacher, I had become used to being somewhere unknown. Nor was it challenging that I had was meeting the teachers and students for only a short period of time. This was the case in the museum education sessions I was beginning to deliver. The difference was my role within this familiar but new setting. Teaching was familiar; researching was not.

One unexpected challenge was my sensitivity regarding how I was perceived by the teachers who gave me access to their lessons. Aware of the principles of informed consent, as relates to teachers and students,²⁶ I recognized ‘Access is not negotiated once and then settled for the whole of the fieldwork,’ but rather an ongoing negotiation in which the responsibilities to all participants are constantly considered and respected.²⁷ Additionally, ethnography involves ‘being in, and negotiating, a complex skein of social networks and relationships’.²⁸ A key relationship was with the teachers whose lessons I was to observe.

On arriving at their classroom for the scheduled lesson observation, I told each teacher that I was not there to observe their teaching but to practise observing lessons. I said that, at any time, they could look at my notes, and ask me to cross anything out, or to leave the room. All the teachers on my timetable allowed me into their classroom. Nonetheless, since one teacher apologized if the lesson was not what I had wanted to see, and another apologized that I was not watching his top set, I wondered if my presence in the classroom caused some teachers a little discomfort. I had honestly said I was not there to observe their teaching but apparently encountered something of a ‘mismatch’ between some teachers’ expectations of me as a researcher and my research intentions.²⁹ As a former teacher, I wondered if, had I been a colleague new to the school who was observing lessons to understand school routines and policies, I might have had fewer concerns about whether my motives were understood. Those motives would have been more familiar to the teachers. As a researcher, I reflected that, had I had fuller conversations with the teachers before the observations, or asked for volunteer hosts rather than having a timetable from a headteacher,³⁰ my discomfort regarding how I was perceived by the teachers would have been less.

My sensitivity to teachers’ unease was not only a consideration during lessons. Sitting in the staffroom during breaktimes, I would sometimes record my reflections on being in a school in this different role. Writing in my notebook caused me some discomfort. ‘It is impossible to do without this aid’³¹ but, through its use ‘one’s identity as an outsider, as observer, is reinforced’,³² especially when making notes when no one else is.³³ In the classroom, where everyone was writing in an exercise book, using my notebook allowed me to present as an insider, or someone taking on the habits of the group. In the staffroom, which is generally visited when teachers are not actively working, it left me feeling more of an outsider than sitting with nothing to do. As a supply teacher, I frequently joked with colleagues that they could tell I was on supply because I had time to read novels over lunch. Something said in jest proved a useful strategy as I tried to overcome my discomfort during this time. Though never feeling at ease during lunch and break times, I felt less exposed reading when on my own, expecting this announced I was not conducting research during such moments.

I felt similar discomfort when considering my ethical responsibilities to the students. To elicit the students’ informed consent to observe their lessons, at the start of each lesson, I introduced myself to the class. I explained I was practising being an educational researcher, hoping I would eventually get my PhD and become a doctor. I told them that I wanted to observe lessons to practise making field notes, offering the students the chance to read them, have their comments removed, or not to feature at all. Though always polite and willing to answer questions I posed them, I felt no student showed interest in my research when I explained it in this way. I knew developing a rapport with participants takes time, but felt I needed a more engaging way to introduce myself and elicit consent from the class.

In the second week, I introduced myself differently. I told the students I was studying for my PhD, referencing The Big Bang Theory,³⁴ a television program in which most characters have PhDs, but none are medical doctors. And I told them I needed to write a thesis, an essay almost as long as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.³⁵ This elicited more responses from students. Several sat up. More whispered to the person next to them than in the previous week when I was met by an ambiguous silence. Some asked about my research as I circulated the room. A few acknowledged me around the school. I used a version of this introduction during my subsequent fieldwork, giving students a copy of this statement to keep in their exercise books to refer when needed.

Even with a more useful introduction, during this exploratory fieldwork, I felt uncomfortable during lessons. The teachers all offered me an empty desk to sit at, and once sitting at a desk, some of my anxiety eased. The act of writing in a notebook reduced my self-consciousness in the classroom as reading a novel did in the staffroom. However, my sitting in one place posed further challenges for my transitioning from teacher to researcher. Sitting at ‘my’ desk was useful when observing teaching as I had done in my previous role; it allowed me a good view of what the teacher was doing. But, here, it did not allow me to interact with students other than those close by. To explore the worlds and experiences of the learners, I had to move between them and be part of their interactions, which was not possible from the static, if comfortable, position of my assigned seat somewhere towards the back of the classroom. As a teacher, I remained largely still when observing a colleague’s lesson. Becoming a researcher required my being far more mobile.

Returning to the literature after this fieldwork, I was relieved to find this discomfort could have been expected. In the completed ethnographies I had read,³⁶ the authors did not express a constant sense of confusion or discomfort. But the texts examining ethnographic processes highlighted that ‘The stresses and strains of fieldwork’³⁷ can lead to teachers conducting research in classrooms feeling ‘exposed and disoriented’.³⁸

Developing an approach to making field notes

‘Our data are only as good as our field notes’³⁹ and their creation is not simple.⁴⁰ Throughout this fieldwork I developed skills in creating field notes, trialing writing techniques, and ways of recording what I observed. I discovered that seeing what was happening and recording it in a useful way were two different though complementary endeavors, and that what I recorded at this stage would be one of several versions of my field notes.

My first approach to creating fieldnotes used similar techniques to those I had used as a teacher, when conducting lesson observations. This involved recording the learning activities happening at each point of the lesson, with commentary on timings, and a summary of how the teacher introduced tasks and of the students’ responses. I was immediately aware this was not useful. It placed the teacher at the center of the observation, since they managed the timings, structure, and content of each lesson. This over-focus on the teachers was what I was trying to avoid and counter to my assurance to the teachers that teaching was not my focus. More importantly, I was missing conversations between students and their interactions with the ideas with which they were being presented, which was my research concern. This too is apparently typical of teachers as researchers, since ‘The difficulty of making things strange in order to see them afresh would seem to be a particular problem for educational ethnographers working in classroom settings’.⁴¹

I tried alternative approaches to recording and analyzing what was happening⁴² during the lessons. I considered recording my observations in an analytical grid in which I wrote, in adjacent columns, a description of the room, what was happening in the lesson, what it might mean, and what questions it raised. This was over-complex. It was impractical to observe, record, and analyze simultaneously. So eventually I created something of a reflexive journal to record my field notes. This approach remained with me throughout my later research. I used plain A4 notebooks. On the right-hand page I sketched plans of the classroom and wrote what I observed or heard. On the left, I wrote my reflections during the lessons. The right-hand page served as my commentary on the lessons, and the left as ‘analytic notes’.⁴³ The combined pages read as a commentary on what was happening in the lesson, and how I interpreted it at the time. I then subsequently reread these notes repeatedly, adding further reflections, each time in a different color, illustrating the development in my thinking. These notes served as ‘a hybrid of research ideas, research observations, general thoughts, and even a diary’.⁴⁴ It was on notes initially written like this that I was able to base the vignettes which now appear in my thesis.

Drawing substantive ideas from the field

My primary intention during this initial fieldwork was to develop my research skills. Nonetheless, there were moments which contributed substantively by clarifying the issues I wanted to explore. These involved my hearing comments from students which were worthy of further reflection. Such moments in relevant literature included a student called Brooke saying ‘blah, blah, blah’ over extracts of Anne Franks’ diary which contradicted her expectations of Anne Frank herself,⁴⁵ and the interaction in their ‘Gestapo’ simulation when many students appeared angered by the choices Ms. Bess asked them to make.⁴⁶ Both allowed the authors to present readings of situations which added to the analytical narratives they presented through their texts.

My field notes captured some students’ comments which raised questions shaping the later research. In a Year 10 history lesson, the students were reading an historical source about the Weimar Republic. One student apologized to the student next to him for using his ‘English head’. It sounded as if he thought he was examining the text as he would in his English lessons, then apologized as if this were inappropriate. I wondered why. A related incident took place in another Year 10 class’s English lesson. They watched an excerpt from a film version of a Shakespearean play, then the teacher led a discussion on imagery in the scene. Several students used the term ‘religious’, but without specificity, mentioning neither a particular religion nor practice. Having observed religious studies lessons in the school, I had seen Year 10 classes, and younger students, quoting aspects of different faiths in nuanced terms which they did not use here. I wondered whether they were using only their ‘English heads’ and choosing not to reference ideas gathered elsewhere. In a Year 12 English lesson, too, I observed students using simplistic terms to discuss God, religion, and faith to discuss allusions in a mid-century play. I listened for references to specific aspects of religion and observed that beyond the word ‘religion,’ they only made fleeting mention of ‘how faith works’ and ‘definite proof’. A student observed the same, making an ironic comment to her group suggesting she, too, thought they could have found more sophisticated language to discuss what they were reading; others laughed at her wry comment, suggesting they also appreciated they had other words they could have used, but for some reason chose not to.

These comments are not presented to criticize the students or teachers. They are also too brief to be compelling evidence of a pattern of students’ avoiding deploying understandings from one subject in another. Yet they indicate how this exploratory fieldwork directed my research. They led me to question how usefully and confidently students draw on understandings taken from one context in another. And though the comments were made in lessons unrelated to the Holocaust, I considered them in the light of what I discovered during the fieldwork about the role of Holocaust in this school’s curriculum.

Displayed in the school corridors were a newspaper article about a school trip to a Holocaust related site, a poster about one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ recognized by Yad Vashem for rescuing others during the Holocaust, and a photograph of a survivor sharing her testimony in the school the previous year. Reflecting on schools I knew well, I felt there was an unusual focus on the Holocaust on the corridor displays in this school. During the two weeks I engaged in ‘conversations with a purpose’,⁴⁷ to find out about the place of the Holocaust in the taught curriculum. During one such conversation, a teacher explained that the students first learned about the Holocaust in Year 8 in English, by reading The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.⁴⁸ They then learned about it in religious studies and history in Year 9.⁴⁹ And a sixth form student asked why I was with his class. When I mentioned my topic, without prompting, he said that they did ‘lots’ of Holocaust education in the school and mentioned Holocaust Memorial Day and having recently had a guest speaker visiting. Significantly, these were not spaces in the formal curriculum where he had learned about the Holocaust, but other spaces in which the events were represented in the school.

Yet I had heard students of different ages and in different subjects apparently unwilling or unable to refer to language, understandings or ways of thinking discerned from one subject in another. This raised questions with implications for my research. I wondered whether students in this school, who would learn about the Holocaust first in their English lessons, would be willing and able to use what was in their ‘English heads’ to engage with ideas presented subsequently in their history lessons. Would they demonstrate the same reticence as I had observed elsewhere? How would they utilise and reconcile the ideas with which they were presented? How would they, and the students involved in the rest of the research, make sense of the Holocaust when they learned about it in their Year 9 history lessons?

I emerged from this fieldwork with a clearer sense of my research intentions. I hoped to spend several months observing a Year 9 class in their history lessons and other lessons where issues related to the Holocaust were discussed. I intended to capture their ideas about the Holocaust through observations, interviews, and conversations with a purpose. I hoped spending that lengthy period in the field would allow me to draw greater meaning from my observations of those history lessons which were at the heart of my research.

A longer, more ethnographically informed piece of fieldwork

At the start of the following academic year, I began a piece of lengthier fieldwork conducted in two schools in London. I was invited to each by a teacher happy for me to observe their classes. Both teachers were colleagues I had met whilst working as a supply teacher but had not worked with closely. Each asked to me contact their Headteacher for approval before confirming that I could research in their schools. Once this was granted, I spent several weeks observing their Year 9 classes’ history lessons, paying particular attention to the lessons which focussed on the Holocaust, which took place during the final weeks of the school year. During this second, longer piece of fieldwork, I uncovered some tentative findings, which I subsequently explored in my thesis. In a first draft of my thesis, I used a framework examining the students’ ideas about the Holocaust as they demonstrated them before, during, and after their history lessons on the topic.

Before their lessons, it appeared many students recognized that Jewish people were murdered during the Holocaust. However, they presented Jewish people in simplistic terms, and few could name a victim of the Holocaust other than Anne Frank. Most students mentioned ‘Hitler’ rather than ‘The Nazis’ when discussing who perpetrated the Holocaust. If the students were able to explain some of what happened during the Holocaust, their descriptions focussed mainly on some of the minutiae of what took place in the extermination camps (with specific reference made by many to the use of gas chambers, and to people being ‘tricked’ into entering the gas chambers by being told they were going to have a shower). Yet most could not discuss the broader narrative of the Holocaust, in terms of when it took place or where, and any discussions of its causes focussed almost exclusively on Hitler’s own feelings towards Jewish people. Students were more likely to suggest that the events happened in Germany, with a few also mentioning Poland. Significantly, the students commonly spoke about ‘he’ or ‘him’ when discussing what happened; such allusions to Hitler were common when the students were discussing the causes of the Holocaust as well as how it was carried out.

During their history lessons on the Holocaust, the students made references to a limited number of sources with which they were already familiar to make some sense of the ideas being presented to them by their history teachers. Most cited was the film of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,⁵⁰ which some students appeared to anticipate all their peers had seen. Students made some references to the story, if not the diary, of Anne Frank; significantly, however, when asked what they knew about her, few referred to how her experiences related to the Holocaust, and more mentioned her age, hopes and hobbies.

Perhaps most interesting, the data tentatively suggested that the students held quite similar ideas at the beginning and end of their lessons on the Holocaust. Hitler still appeared to dominate their ideas about what happened, with his name, or simply the pronoun ‘he’, being used by many when presenting what happened and why. The students still largely presented only Jewish people as the victims of the Holocaust, of note not because this is incorrect, but rather because some of their teachers used a definition of the Holocaust which also mentioned non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. And many still appeared hesitant in explaining which countries were involved, how, and when.

Yet despite spending several weeks with the students, developing a rapport with them and observing them particularly closely when they learned about the Holocaust, I emerged from this fieldwork with limited data from which I could draw significant and convincing findings. When writing both my lesson observations, and, subsequently, the earliest version of my thesis, I found I could make few substantive claims. Rather, I found myself trying to demonstrate multiple findings drawn from, but not necessarily supported by, the same short quotations or observations.

Although I had a clearer sense of how I would write them, my field notes did not capture all that was happening in the classroom. I simply could not see every interaction between teacher and student, or between the students themselves. I was aware that my asking questions of some students, whose comments during class discussions suggested they were worthy of exploration, meant that I was not able to engage with others. When exploring the answers the students had written in response to classroom tasks, I found they often did not address all the questions I wanted to explore.

This was primarily the result of my continuing to find it challenging to transition from teacher to researcher. I had taken too far a concern not to interfere in the ‘real life’ situation I was in the classroom to explore. In trying to be unobtrusive in the classroom I had not found ways to capture all the data I needed; rather, I naively assumed that this would materialize from simply observing the lessons. Additionally, my concern, as a teacher, not to interrupt the lesson or to disturb colleagues who had generously invited me into their classrooms meant I did not ask for their consent to conduct more active research activities with the students, though such activities could have shed greater light on the issues I was exploring. Essentially, I had become an observer but not the type of participant observer whose work can be considered ethnographically informed. This had implications for the type of claims I could make.

Developing more focussed research problems

I repeatedly redrafted a thesis based on the potentially interesting but tentative data I had collated in the second fieldwork. As I wrote, a series of ‘interrelated propositions’⁵¹ emerged. These were a collection of connected questions which were raised by, but could not yet be answered, by the field notes, ephemera, and other data I had acquired.

Having observed that students initially considered Jewish people in simple mono-cultural terms, often framed by their knowledge of how they were portrayed by the Nazis, I wondered whether students who were taught about the diversity of Jewish people before the Second World War would demonstrate more nuanced ideas about them at the end of their history lessons. Given that most students initially presented Jewish people, alone, as the victims of the Holocaust, I was interested in how those presented with a multi-victim group depiction would respond to such a depiction during their history lessons. Since most students presented Hitler as having responsibility for and being the primary perpetrator of the Holocaust, I was interested in how they would present his relationship with the Holocaust if their teachers presented depictions in which others were implicated. Most students initially described the Holocaust primarily in terms of what happened in the extermination camps. This prompted questions regarding whether they would incorporate into their ideas information about the role of the ghettos or the Einsatzgruppen, if these were discussed during their history lessons. A further interrelated proposition asked whether the students presented with more contextual information about the Holocaust would hold more ideas about its chronology, geography, and relationship to existing antisemitism and the Second World War at the end of their history lessons than they did at the start. Finally, the field notes suggested that the students commonly had a familiarity with the stories of Anne Frank, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,⁵² which raised questions regarding how they understood such narratives, and how such narratives influence the students’ ideas about the Holocaust itself.

It was clear that answering such questions would make my findings more useful to a practitioner readership and would add rigor to the claims I was making. It was also clear that I needed to return to the field to be able to do so, and that I needed to collate more focussed and more compelling data. This require my making a more active transition from teacher to researcher and being a more participatory observer than I had been in during the previous fieldwork.

Returning to the field

To examine the issues raised but not fully explored by the data I had collected during the second piece of fieldwork, I contacted three more teachers, from two new schools. Two were colleagues of a friend and the other was known to a colleague of my supervisors. I asked if they might be able to host me, specifically, for their students’ lessons on the Holocaust. Both agreed in principle, but before asking them to agree in practise I shared with them a more developed research plan than I had presented to the teachers who had hosted me previously.

I showed them a questionnaire I wanted to give the students before their first lesson on the topic, which tried to capture their ideas about what happened during the Holocaust, and what happened, when, where and why, as well as where they had learned about the Holocaust previously. I explained that I wanted the students to return to this questionnaire at the end of their lessons, to make any changes reflecting what they understood at this stage. I asked permission to record some of the students’ comments, using a voice recorder so I could capture lots of ideas in quick succession, and without asking students to write extensively beyond their regular classroom activities. I asked to be allowed to ask short questions to the whole class, to capture more students’ ideas than my conversations with individual students had previously allowed. I asked for the flexibility to ask follow up questions with individuals if I thought their comments during class discussions were especially interesting. And I asked to be able to see and make notes on the students’ responses to written tasks. In short, I asked to be a participant observer during the students’ lessons on the Holocaust.

I told the teachers that they could see the students’ responses to any written tasks and reminded them that they too would be able to hear the students’ answers when I posed questions aloud. They would not, then, need to ask to see my field notes to get an initial sense of my observations, but would be able to see students’ responses in real time. And I believe that my openness about being a former teacher, rather than causing discomfort as I felt it had done during my exploratory fieldwork, reassured the teachers that I was going to be as undisruptive as possible within the lessons I was observing. In this sense, more than in the previous fieldwork, I was suggesting I would be working in greater partnership with the teachers. The three teachers offered to host me, ensured the research activities I had planned were incorporated into their lesson plans, and allowed me, whenever I asked, to ask the whole class questions, and, without asking, to circulate the classroom whenever the students were working independently, to explore their thinking at different points.

It was due to their ongoing flexibility, and willingness to be a partner in the research, that I was able to follow up on the ideas raised during my earlier fieldwork. Based on the data I collected, I was able to more systematically examine the most common ideas held by the students before and after their lessons on the Holocaust. I was able to examine how the students responded to ideas which were in some contradiction to the ideas they had brought into the classroom. I was able, also, to examine the influence of a familiarity with the stories of Anne Frank and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas⁵³ on their initial ideas about Holocaust, as well as how the students understood the stories themselves. This article is primarily focussed on some of the methodological considerations when transitioning from teacher to researcher. However, it is worth, given the focus of this special addition of the journal, acknowledging some of the findings which emerged from this final piece of fieldwork.

A summary of findings

Students’ questionnaires confirmed that, before their history lessons on the Holocaust, they commonly held Hitler personally responsible for what took place, perceived the events almost exclusively in terms of what happened in what they referred to, simply, as ‘camps’, had limited ideas about the timeframe of the Holocaust and generally located the events in Germany. The lesson observations suggested the students viewed Jewish people in somewhat simplistic and mono-cultural terms. Furthermore, questions addressed to whole classes suggested that most students believed antisemitism was introduced by Hitler, rather than being a pan-European phenomenon which had been present in different forms for many centuries.

These initial ideas, the questionnaires, follow-up discussions and lessons observations suggested, related to their previous encounters with depictions of the events. Some such encounters took place in their primary schools, where many students remembered learning about Anne Frank or reading or watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.⁵⁴ Both of these narratives, my research suggested, contributed in some way to the students’ perceptions of the centrality of Hitler within the Holocaust, and to their lack of knowledge of the roles of the ghettos or of the Einsatzgruppen in the persecution of Jewish people.

Significantly, when returning to their questionnaires or being interviewed at the end of their history lessons on the topic, many students demonstrated Hitler-centric and camp focussed ideas about the Holocaust which were strikingly similar to the ideas they demonstrated at the start. This led to my focusing, through an analysis of the totality of their written work and contributions to class discussions, on how the students responded to depictions of the Holocaust challenging or contradicting their own. Such analysis forms a substantial element of my thesis and explores some of the cognitive aspects of learning about the Holocaust. It was only possible to elicit such findings because of the willingness of the teachers in this study to allow me to transition into my new role of participant observer – to speak to the students about what they were learning, set discrete research tasks, observe them during lessons and examine their written work.

Conclusions: how teachers can become researchers

Reading completed ethnographic texts could not prepare me fully for the challenges I faced transitioning from teacher to researcher. Such transition will be different for each practitioner researcher. It is informed by the type of research being conducted, the nature of the field, and the researcher’s relationship with the specific site and individuals within it. Published ethnographies generally focus, quite reasonably, on methodology and findings, rather than on the researcher’s feelings in the field.

While such presentations provide neat, tidy accounts of the conduct of research they are nothing short of misleading, for in this context, research is presented as a linear model with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Yet the reality is very different and infinitely more complex.⁵⁵

This article reflects some of my experiences engaging in this complex reality. It demonstrates the challenges I faced transitioning from teacher to researcher and provides other transitioning researchers with an understanding of experiences they might encounter and choices they will make when managing their new role. I emerged from each piece of fieldwork with more appreciation of what was required to transition from teacher to researcher.

From my initial exploratory research, I appreciated that ethnography required a different approach to observing lessons than I used as a class teacher observing a colleague. It required my moving around the classroom, not remaining at ‘my’ desk. This provided more chance to see what was in the room and to catch the student interactions which shed the strongest light on the issues I was exploring. My moving around the classroom in the later stages of my fieldwork allowed me to develop more rapport with the students. Asking the teachers hosting me for their consent to introduce myself to the students, and move around the classroom and speak to them, allowed me to research as a participant observer rather than simply an observer. I was initially somewhat hesitant to do so, concerned that, in moving around the classroom, I would disrupt the lesson and distract the students and teachers. However, as I considered my priorities as a researcher, I drew on my teaching experience to decide how to balance getting to know my participants’ ideas with not interrupting their learning, reading the lesson to make a sensitive judgement about when such conversations could best take place.

The second, longer piece of fieldwork highlighted that, in ethnographically informed research, the most interesting ideas might not be immediately obvious. The commonality of students’ ideas only became clear when they were demonstrated multiple times in the field notes. Any findings, like the field notes on which they were based, developed over time. This was best evidenced by the questions which were raised by, but could not be answered by, the tentative findings which emerged from my writing the first drafts of my thesis. These were framed above as ‘interrelated propositions’⁵⁶ In teaching, I was expected to give prompt feedback to the teacher after an observation; as an ethnographer, I could take my time, looking at collections of data through which patterns and paradoxes might emerge, and writing and rewriting my field notes, accounts and analysis, and, if necessary, returning to the field to explore further some of issues raised.

Additionally, my time spent writing about the lessons I observed as part of this second fieldwork required different skills to those needed to write up a professional lesson observation. Writing ethnographically is almost a literary endeavor; the skills required take development. Conducting my research ethnographically required another form of transition. I also needed to transition from teacher to writer.

Finally, and most significantly, my time as a transitioning researcher highlighted that the teachers whose lessons I was observing were being asked to transition, too. This was made most obvious during the final fieldwork, when I had a much more definite sense of what issues I wanted to explore and how, and shared this with the teachers from the outset. I was asking that the teachers transition too, albeit temporarily, from teacher to participant. When conducting my research, I was another adult in the room, and one who was also a teacher. In the earlier fieldwork I sensed that this had positioned some teachers whose lessons I was observing in a place of discomfort. My appreciation of this dynamic initially contributed to my feeling uncomfortable in the classroom and staffroom. But it highlighted the importance of considering my responsibilities to teachers beyond asking their consent to be in their lesson, offering to show my notes, and reassuring them that I was not observing their teaching. For my final fieldwork, I contacted the teachers personally, and spent time with them, discussing my research interests and intended methods before asking them to consider offering me access to their classrooms. This enabled me to involve them in establishing the boundaries of the research and facilitated greater discussion about my aims. Once the research began, I made greater efforts to maintain ongoing dialogue with the teachers about what was happening in the lessons. I realized the importance of sharing my observations more actively with the teachers after each lesson, informing them of interesting moments I had spotted or conversations I had overheard, in the hope that this made the research more collaborative. And as I became more active in the observations, asking students to complete discrete research tasks, I invited the teachers to look at their responses to the surveys and other activities I conducted, so that they learned more about their students as I did.

My greatest sense of security in this new role came when I acknowledged that the classroom teachers and I were transitioning together, me from teacher to researcher and writer, and they from teacher to research partner. Together we had a greater chance of eliciting from the students’ lessons some new understandings of how they made sense of the Holocaust.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catrina Kirkland

Catrina Kirkland is a PhD candidate at UCL Centre for Holocaust Education. She recently completed her thesis and at the time of writing is preparing for her viva. She was, for over a decade, a secondary history teacher, working in comprehensive schools in London and Wolverhampton. After leaving classroom teaching to complete her PhD, she worked as a supply teacher before becoming a freelance educator for the Jewish Museum (London) and the Imperial War Museums and produced teaching materials for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. She became a freelance educator for the Holocaust Educational Trust in 2012 and an Education Officer for the Trust in 2016, working primarily in their teacher training program.

Notes

1 Ball, Beachside Comprehensive, 280.

2 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, 1.

3 Ball, Beachside Comprehensive; Becker et al., Boys in White; Hargreaves, Social Relations; and Willis, Learning to Labour.

4 Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings.

5 Brewer, Ethnography.

6 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography.

7 Geertz, Thick Description. The term is usefully explored in Brewer, Ethnography, 39.

8 Brewer, Ethnography, 5.

9 Ibid., 103.

10 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, 24; and Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings, 77.

11 Pettigrew et al., “Teaching about the Holocaust,” 37.

12 Richardson, “Transformative Transition,” 83.

13 Gray, “Preconceptions of the Holocaust,” 306.

14 Richardson, “Holocaust Education”; Gray, “Preconceptions of the Holocaust”; and Foster et al., “What Do Young People Know”.

15 Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings, 7.

16 Spector and Jones, “Constructing Anne Frank,” 39.

17 Meseth and Proske, “Mind the Gap”.

18 Schweber, Making Sense of the Holocaust.

19 Mills and Morton, Ethnography in Education, 6.

20 Acedo, “Lessons from the Shoah,” 1.

21 Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings, 51.

22 The locations of the schools are not specified in this article and references to the school sites, teachers and students are largely nondescript. This is to render the schools unidentifiable. Additionally, teacher and students’ comments are generally summarized rather than verbatim, and classroom resources are discussed with little specificity. This provides anonymity for the teachers and students involved in the fieldwork.

23 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography; Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings; Brewer, Ethnography.

24 Brewer, Ethnography, 61.

25 Cusick, Inside High School, 7.

26 Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings; Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, and Burgess, In the Field.

27 Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings, 95.

28 Mills and Morton, Ethnography in Education, 67.

29 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, 81.

30 Burgess, In the Field, explored the implications of teachers’ being asked to host an observer in their classroom by someone ‘higher in the hierarchy’.

31 Brewer, Ethnography, 87.

32 Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings, 65.

33 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, 177.

34 Lorre et al., “The Big Bang Theory”.

35 Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

36 Including, as previously cited, Ball, Beachside Comprehensive; Becker et al., Boys in White; Hargreaves, Social Relations; and Willis, Learning to Labour.

37 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, 113–120.

38 Mills and Morton, Ethnography in Education, 30.

39 Delamont, Fieldwork in Educational Settings, 59.

40 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, 175–204.

41 Mills and Morton, Ethnography in Education, 29.

42 Approaches to ‘Recording and Analysing Field Data’ are discussed in Burgess, In the Field, 165–184.

43 Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography, 191.

44 American Anthropological Association, “Confidentiality of Field Notes”.

45 Spector and Jones, “Constructing Anne Frank,” 43.

46 Schweber, Making Sense of the Holocaust, 88–90.

47 Burgess, In the Field, 102.

48 Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

49 The extent to which this was a typical experience of learning about the Holocaust in a secondary school in England in 2012 can be elicited from Pettigrew et al., “Teaching about the Holocaust”.

50 Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

51 Ball, Beachside Comprehensive, 280.

52 Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Burgess, In the Field, 31.

56 Ball, Beachside Comprehensive, 280.