‘He isn’t a teacher. He is our friend’: understanding the challenges and opportunities of conducting ethnographic research with children

ABSTRACT

The use of ethnographic approaches to study social settings has been steadily increasing over the last several decades. However, relatively few studies have been conducted with children, particularly in physical activity settings. This dearth of research may be due to the reported challenges of trying to ‘fit in’ in the world of children. This autoethnographic study provides insight into the approach utilised to conduct an ethnographic study with children and to become a ‘friendly adult’ in their world. The original six-month project focused on examining a cohort of 5–8year-old children to try and understand their engagement and relationship with physical culture. The project, conducted at a school in Victoria, utilised a range of ethnographic and child-centred methods to examine children’s engagement in PE and on the playground. This autoethnographic exploration provided the primary author the ability to reflect on and unpack his ethnographic approach to gain a deeper insight into his role in the project. This study investigates the challenges and opportunities that the primary author faced in trying to study the lives of these children. These challenges and opportunities included, embracing and engaging with past experiences; balancing roles as a former teacher; and maintaining a ‘friendly adult’ role. Being accepted into the world of the children required navigating these challenges and using them as opportunities to engage with the children as the gatekeepers of the research. Exploring these challenges and opportunities provided significant insight into how to engage with children in ethnographic research and build trust and rapport. Unpacking this approach through autoethnography provides a guide for future researchers working with children.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• ethnography
• children
• physical activity
• Bourdieu

Introduction

In the beginning of my fieldwork, as an ethnographer, I was plagued with doubt about whether I could effectively fit into the social world that I was about to enter. I was aware that implementing an ethnographic approach to study the shared patterns of behaviour, language and actions of a specific cultural group (Creswell, 2014), required a researcher to immerse themselves in that setting (Paulle, 2013). My trepidation came because I was conducting an ethnography into the lives of children, so was nervous about how I would immerse myself. I was worried because the difference between adult and children, including size and place in organisational hierarchies, makes it almost impossible for an adult ethnographer to ‘pass’ as a child (Fine, 1987). I was worried about how I would manage the balance between insider and outsider with the children, convinced that I would stick out and not be accepted in. Additionally, I was also worried about how certain experiences and dispositions that I held would affect how I navigated the field, interacted with the participants, and interpreted what I saw. Specifically, I knew that my status as someone who did not enjoy PE as an adolescent; my position as an adult; and my positioning as an experienced teacher were elements that could all impact this research project, leading to a consistent blurring of the lines between insider and outsider. Rather than seeking to limit these elements, I soon discovered that embracing these dispositions and learning to navigate them within a variety of different interactions, provided a range of challenges and opportunities that allowed for a deep immersion and engagement with the children as the gatekeepers within this setting.

The purpose of the original ethnographic research project was to examine how year 1 and 2 (ages 5–8) children embody and develop their physical subjectivities across several physical settings, and how this affected their physical activity engagement. To explore this process required examining the children’s embodied history and physical activity engagement across the home, playground, and PE spaces. This exploration required an ethnographic approach, so that I could spend a sustained period with the children in these settings. This prolonged involvement was essential to be able to truly understand their embodied history and how it effects the interactions that occur within different physical settings. Additionally, the use of an ethnographic approach aligned with a desire to include children as important social actors in the research, by allowing them to be at the forefront of the process (Thomas & O’Kane, 2000) and allowing their experience to be taken seriously (Bhana, 2016). The benefits of engaging in this ethnographic project were clear, but how I would conduct it was not. This was particularly worrying as this was my first significant research project and first-time conducting ethnography. My PhD supervisors pointed me in the direction of several ethnographic studies, but these were largely focused on working with older students (see Paulle, 2013) and did not provide much insight into how I would conduct my ethnographic fieldwork in physical activity settings. Instead, I had to learn to be reflexive and navigate the embodiment of these dispositions myself over my ethnographic journey.

There has been a growing body of literature on the use of autoethnography in the field of research in education, with many explicitly highlighting the benefits of the approach for exploring research phenomena (see Gerdin & Pringle, 2017; McLachlan, 2017; Valério et al., 2021). However, apart from a few autoethnographic published works (see Gouzouasis & Ryu, 2015; Gerdin & Pringle, 2017), there is a dearth of studies documenting the research journey of an ethnographer working with children, particularly in physical activity settings. The importance of conducting this ethnographic project in physical settings is significant because of the emphasis placed on the body in these settings (Smee et al., 2021; Van der Smee et al., 2022,) as the body is in the social world, but the social world is also in the body (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 152). Put simply, the social world plays a key role in impacting the body, but the body also plays a key role in impacting the social world. So, the physical setting would require examining the body utilising an embodied, nuanced approach. This gap in the literature was the original genesis for us as researchers to examine and unpack my research journey as an ethnographer working with children.

Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to unpack my journey as an ethnographer working with children across several physical activity settings, through an autoethnographic exploration. Conducting this research involved being reflective of and managing several dispositions (a disengaged ex-PE student; an adult, and a former teacher) to engage with the children and gain access to their world. This required overcoming my insecurities about maintaining an insider/outsider dichotomy and just embracing my role as an ethnographer. This study sought to revel how engaging with these dispositions and embracing my positioning provided both challenges and opportunities for my role as an ethnographer, but ultimately helped to build trust and rapport with the children. To begin this journey, we start by exploring the theoretical considerations.

Theoretical considerations

Bourdieu’s conceptual tools

To engage with my journey, we utilise the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine my personal experience within this ethnographic project. Bourdieu described his own work as constructivist structuralism (or structuralist constructivism) (Bourdieu, 1989):

By structuralism or structuralist, I mean that there exist, within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.), objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representations. By constructivism, I mean that there is a twofold social genesis, on the one hand of the schemes of perception, thought, and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures, and particularly of what I call fields and of groups, notably those we ordinarily call social classes. (p. 14)

Thus, within the social world, there are objective structures that through explicit or tacit means enable and or constrain human action/behaviour, often below the level of human consciousness. Key in this process is the habitus. Basically, habitus is the product of an individual’s social experiences in the world, a product of time and history (Bourdieu, 1990), which becomes inscribed in our bodies (Bourdieu, 1993). So, rather than individuals realising that their tendency to think and act in a certain way is because of their social history, they perceive these dispositions as natural occurrences. Importantly, the dispositions, schemas, forms of knowledge and competencies of the habitus, ‘function below the threshold of consciousness, shaping it in particular ways’ (Crossley, 2001, p. 93). Therefore, habitus is ‘that which one has acquired’ (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 86) and becomes unconsciously ingrained within an individual through repetitive and consistent exposure to social fields. An integral part of this process is capital, which comes in three forms (economic, cultural, and social) (Bourdieu, 1986), and is both the product and process in any given field (Grenfell & James, 2010), more easily accessible for those who possess a habitus that aligns with the conditions of the field.

The use of Bourdieu’s conceptual tools sits well with the autoethnographic approach because of the focus Bourdieu placed on researcher reflexivity in his own work (Reed-Danahay, 2017). Bourdieu perceived reflexivity as a methodological approach, in which a researcher examines their own position within the field of academic production, to develop their own understanding of the false distinction between both objectivity and subjectivity, and insider outsider status (Reed-Danahay, 2017). In other words, the focus is on a researcher examining their own positioning with the field and learning to move beyond these dichotomies. The use of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts allows for an autoethnographic exploration that positions me, as the researcher, within the social context that I was studying. This reflexive examination provided the ability to be aware of my own habitus, the dispositions that underpinned and influenced my actions, and the types and amounts of capital that I possessed within certain fields, particularly in relation to the children that I was working with. These dispositions, highlighted above and expanded later, were likely to provide a challenge because of their likelihood to affect the ability to achieve the insider status that is desired in many ethnographic projects (Coombs & Osborne, 2018). Instead, as Bourdieu highlights, this paper traces my positioning as both insider and outsider, often within the same interaction, and how embracing this positioning helped to build connection with the children.

Friendly-adult role

A key role that I took on in embracing this positioning was the role of ‘friendly adult’ (Fine, 1987). As discussed, attempting to engage with the children as an insider was not possible (Fine, 1987) or desirable, but attempting to gain an insider status, at least in the eyes of the children, while entering the field as an outsider was. Some researchers have argued that the best way to understand children’s daily lives is to take on the ‘least-adult’ role (Mandell, 1988). This purist role advocates that a researcher should avoid all typical adult-like roles, such as tying shoelaces, pushing children on the swings and fixing toys (Clark, 2011). I knew that trying to establish this ‘least-adult role’ (Mandell, 1988) would be nearly impossible. So, instead I acknowledged my role as an adult in the social world of the children. Importantly, as discussed later, this role required being reflective of the dispositions that I embodied and thinking reflexively, and often on the fly, about how these dispositions might affect each interaction I engaged in.

Autoethnography

As a research approach, autoethnography turns the research lens directly on the researcher. According to Liggins et al. (2013), the approach involves inserting the self into the study of social and cultural phenomena. The approach has been utilised by several researchers to explore a range of phenomena: including youth sport charities in the UK (Costas Batlle et al., 2018), child safeguarding policy (Bennett et al., 2022), and physical education teacher education culture (Valério et al., 2021), among others. The body of literature on autoethnography has highlighted that the use of an autoethnographic approach provides the opportunity to ‘connect unique personal experience with greater cultural themes’ (Carter, 2016, p. 1668) and can enable researchers to influence practice through the promotion of criticality and reflexivity (Bennett et al., 2022). Conversely, the approach has been criticised for lacking rigour (Delamont, 2009) and theoretical robustness (see Ellis et al., 2020) and questioned as a legitimate research methodology (Weir & Clarke, 2018). We refute these claims and utilise autoethnography for the insight that it can provide into the reflexive perspective within research phenomena (Costas Batlle et al., 2018), particularly in tracing my journey through this ethnographic process.

According to Manning and Adams (2015), there are two essential qualities that any autoethnography should have: It should include personal experience that is meaningful and culturally significant, and this personal experience should be reflexively considered using extant theory. In this case, our autoethnography incorporates these two features by examining my personal ethnographic journey, which is reflexively examined using the work of Bourdieu. Importantly, the use of autoethnography allows me to position myself within a social context and examine the perceived dichotomy of insider versus outsider status often emphasised in ethnographic work (Reed-Danahay, 2017), a key objective in this paper. Additionally, this autoethnographic project seeks to balance the key approaches of showing and telling (Sparkes, 2020) within our study to examine my ethnographic journey. By balancing these approaches, we seek to engage with my personal experience through the reflexive use of theory in a way that still provides guidance for future researchers hoping to do ethnographic work with children.

Research context and participants

I am a thirty-six-year-old Anglo-Australian married cisgender male from a middle-class background. I grew up in an affluent area of Sydney and attended a Catholic primary school, from kindergarten to grade four, followed by a private Christian boys’ school, from grade five to grade twelve. Some of my most distinct PE experiences include being picked last for teams; getting knocked over by the ‘sporty’ boys; not being passed to for entire scrimmages/games (and worrying about what I would do if I did receive the ball); failing to master basic ‘sporting skills’; and constantly being worried about embarrassing myself (especially during the performance of difficult sporting skills). Overall, my PE experience was a negative one, which eventually influenced my motivation to become a PE teacher, to address many of the issues that I had experienced. I spent five years working as a primary school teacher (three years as a 3/4 classroom and PE teacher and two years as a specialist K-6 PE teacher). Eventually I built upon this teaching experience and moved into academia to address these issues more broadly. This is what prompted my engagement in this PhD project.

This ethnographic study was conducted over 6 months, terms three and four, at a public primary school in Melbourne in 2017. The school had 112 year one/two students (ages 5–8 years) divided into five composite classes containing a mix of students across grades. I gained access to the school by corresponding directly with the principal, and the Victorian Department of Education. Ethical approved came from my university and the Victorian Department of Education. The children were involved through their own informed assent and legal consent from their parents. The assent form provided a basic summary of the project to the children, outlining the focus on their physical activity engagement, and introduced me, as a researcher who would be spending six months at their school as an unofficial member of the school community.

I attended the school every day and spent most of my time with the children in their PE classes or on the playground during recess and lunch. Each class engaged in PE once a week for an hour. The children spent approximately 1 h and 15 min on the playground every day, divided into 30 mins for recess in the morning and 45 mins for lunch in the afternoon. When I was not observing the children, I spent most of my time in the staff room writing up field notes or planning my next observation. While observing in PE and on the playground, I did not carry any note taking material, instead choosing to be fully present with the children and write up my recollections as formal notes after each session. In addition to observation, I also conducted several other ethnographic and child-centred methodologies, including map drawing, photo elicitation and video recording (for a full examination of these methods, see Van der Smee & Williams, 2023 ). Hence, this autoethnography is based on my ethnographic work which occurred over six months.

Data gathering and analysis

As highlighted earlier, at the beginning of the project, I knew that certain positions and dispositions were likely to affect my role as an ethnographer at the school. I knew that these dispositions were deeply embedded within my habitus and would likely position me in unique ways within the various field of the school, based on the capital that I possessed. I also knew that I would embody these dispositions in various ways without conscious thought (Bourdieu, 2000), which could affect my position as an ethnographer and the observations that I was engaging in. Rather than seeking to limit these elements, I sought to be reflective of them at every stage of the project. I attempted to deploy reflexivity as a methodological tool of rigour that prompted deeper reflection into every element of my project (Jachyra, 2016; Reed-Danahay, 2017). Accordingly, I sought to always position myself within the data that I was collecting, by utilising first person voice and situating myself with the interactions and fields that I was examining. Similar to Purdy and Jones (2013), my fieldnotes went beyond what I was observing, recording ‘me’ by providing insights into my thoughts, perceptions and emotions, as I conducted this ethnography. This focus on reflexivity provided a wealth of data to explore.

Engaging in the process of autoethnography, required re-examining the data from the ethnography and finding ‘me’ as I went on this journey. This makes sense since within autoethnography, I become data as well as the research instrument (Valério et al., 2021). To engage in this process, I re-read and re-examined the data from the original study, collecting these moments of reflexivity. I then utilised thematic analysis to sort and identify any moments that fit into the three pre-identified dispositions which I wished to explore. Once this data was sorted, I then explored the data in each theme and put each in chronological order by date. This allowed for a deeper exploration of my ethnographic journey and an insight into how I navigated each of these dispositions in different situations. To further explore these moments, I engaged with my co-author to examine the data and determine the interactions that had the most significant impact, as detailed further in the following section. The engagement of a critical friend allowed for a deeper engagement with the reflexive data.

Critical friend in autoethnography

In the writing process for this paper, I approached a colleague with extensive experience in autoethnography. We decided that implementing a collaborative approach, as a critical friend, would build rigour and strengthen this study. Although the concepts of ‘individual’ and ‘self’ are important in self-studies, such as autoethnographies, the dialogue that took place between me, as the researcher, and the critical friend was vital to help reframe experiences and push for deeper insights (Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2015). In this ‘joint venture’ of collaborating in self-study (Loughran & Northfield, 1998), the participants – critical friends – challenged the interpretations, problems and situations that could reveal biases, proceeding together throughout the process of data analysis. As Gibbs and Angelides (2008) argue, a critical friends’ responsibility is not circumscribed to feedback. The critical friend’s ability to notice specific nuances and details in the data was essential to build new knowledge that helped provide fundamental insights to further help guide future ethnographers working with children. Specifically, in this research, the critical friend supported and encouraged me to revisit my interpretations about previous assumptions and beliefs (Alan et al., 2021). For instance, specific practical situations that I lived were analysed by presenting provocative questions that were followed by critical comments. This allowed for a deeper reflexive examination of my personal journey in this project.

The challenges and opportunities of working with children

In the remainder of this paper, I explore the three dispositions, their effect on the research and how I chose to manage them differently in different situations, constantly blurring the lines between insider and outsider with the children. This section explores those challenges and opportunities that arose from this engagement with the children.

Adult authority or friendly adult – finding balance inside of a roller-coaster

Entering the field of the school, I knew that my easily identifiable status as an adult would make it difficult to engage with the children. As discussed, I could not pass as a child, nor was this a goal, but engaging with the children as the gatekeepers of the project and building strong relationships was. So, influenced by the work of Fine (1987), I took on a friendly adult role, thinking that this would be easy to stick with for the entire project and would help me to sit in a middle ground between the teachers and the children, but identify closer to the children. This friendly adult role (Fine, 1987) required establishing myself as a trustworthy companion that valued the children’s views, strove to build trust, and recognised the inherent power balance that existed between myself and the children (Jachyra, 2016). So, early on, I acknowledged my role as an adult in the social world of the children. Instead of avoiding adult responsibilities I took them on: I tied shoelaces; helped students on and off playground equipment; gave students piggyback rides and provided support to students when they were upset. By taking on this role and accepting that there were a variety of adult responsibilities that I would need to take on, I was able to build a strong rapport with the children. This role provided a high level of access to the children’s daily experiences. I participated in games (both structured and imaginary); walked around the playground with children; engaged in daily conversations and occasionally played during sports. I was able to move relatively quickly from a stranger at the school to a taken for granted presence on the playground. In fact, eventually I would not even need to seek out the children to observe their interactions, groups of kids would wait for me to enter the playground and then invite me to play games or want to walk around the playground together. Sometimes, I stayed with one group for the duration of a recess/lunch period, but more often, I spent time with a variety of different groups. To know when to move on, I utilised Carspecken’s (1996) method of priority observation that suggests a researcher spends as much time with a group as he/she feels is required.

Adopting this role also meant having an awareness of the inherent power imbalance between myself and the children. The positioning of the adult–child relationship is inherently based upon power, with children primarily positioned as the least powerful in the institutional settings of their daily lives (Christensen, 2004). This is particularly true for research conducted within the primary school, where the adult researcher has a different status and can draw on ‘adult authority’ when needed (Martin, 2011). Although I attempted to distance myself from positions of authority (such as playground monitor), as much as possible, I could not escape my status as an ‘adult authority’. Like Martin (2011), I found that the children frequently appealed to me as an adult, to help sort out their problems or discipline other children. When these moments did occur, I tried to avoid engaging with the authority and the capital that my positioning in the field afforded me (Bourdieu, 1986), as the following notes shows:

The children are lining up at lunch. A few of the children are jostling to be at the front of the line. As I approached the line, Luthor called out to me, ‘Cameron, can you tell everyone to stop pushing?’ This is interesting because Luthor does not treat me like he does other adults at the school. Luthor spends most of his time teasing me and usually does not listen when I ask him to do anything. Yet, when a situation like this occurred, Luthor seeks me out and asks me to use my authority as an adult. Luthor knows that because I am an adult if I ask the students to stop pushing then they are likely to follow my request. I chose not to intervene in this situation and left it to a teacher to sort out. (Reflective field note, August 31st)

This was not an easy task and required a difficult balancing act. I knew that engaging as a friendly adult was the best way to engage with the children and build the types of relationships that were required to examine their interactions, but I was also visibly an adult and could not escape this. The children engaged with me as a friendly adult most of the time but then displayed their embodied knowledge of the adult–child power imbalance (Christensen, 2004) on other occasions by trying to utilise my adult authority, often for their own purposes. As I will discuss later, in these moments the students did not see me as a teacher, but rather as an adult with all the trappings of adult authority that could be relied upon to utilise this capital. I attempted to navigate the power imbalance between myself and the children by utilising my adult power/authority selectively. I called on my adult authority only to intervene in situations that could impact the safety of the children. In this, I followed the logic of Birbeck and Drummond (2007), who stated that ‘the intervention of an adult to prevent harm is a socially-natural and expected role’ (p. 28). By controlling my disposition to engage as an adult and utilise my authority, I was able to observe and let interactions occur naturally on other occasions. Early on, I learned that this required being reflexive in the moment and making a range of quick decisions by reflecting on how interactions might affect my positionality with the children. This would be a skill that would pay dividends in learning how to manage my other dispositions. Maintaining a balance between my adult authority and the friendly adult role, provided the opportunity to build trust.

Embracing and engaging with my past

Supporting the children – conducting a PE study as a disengaged ex-PE student

Going into the school, I was unsure how my negative experiences in PE would affect my actions and the lens that I was viewing the childrens actions through. I was worried that I would feel the constant need to intervene into both the practice of the teacher and the actions of the students. Early on, I did feel this desire to intervene after witnessing the practice of the teacher:

Most of Mr King’s activities prioritise sporting skills, such as throwing, catching, kicking and striking. Mr King sets up four stations, divides the children into groups and then leaves them to engage in the activities that emphasise these skills. The children do not always enjoy these stations and those students with low skills struggles to learn in these self-managed activities.¹ Should I intervene and steer Mr. King towards more inclusive practice? Should I help Mr King differentiate his activities to include more children? I know I have the experience to do this, but should I? (Reflective field note, July 30th)

Based on my own experience, as a disengaged student, I felt a need to suggest better practice to engage all of the students. I knew that my position as an HPE academic provided a high level of capital (Bourdieu, 1986) in the field of PE and that the teacher would listen. However, I was worried that overstepping the boundaries that I set up with the teacher, particularly after telling him I was not there to study him, might have affected my relationship and affected the interactions that I was trying to examine. Instead, I decided to note these practices in my field notes to contextualise the interactions, and rather than intervene in the actions of the teacher, I would act as a support for the children, when needed.

I knew that my habitus, formed through negative experiences, would likely lead to unconscious interventions, so instead I decided to focus on judging each situation differently and responding based on the needs of the children. At other times, I empowered the students to resolve situations themselves rather than directly intervening:

A group playing Piggy in the Middle came to clarify a rule. They were arguing,loudly, over whether the Piggy had to touch the ball or catch the ball to get out. I suggested they vote on it. 3 out of the 4 voted for the ‘touch’ to be able to get it. To add a bit of a compromise I suggested they make it a 2-hand touch. The group agreed and played on with no problems. (Reflective field note, October 18th)

These students were arguing, unable to continue playing. They came to me for help and rather than fixing the situation for them, I made a few suggestions and empowered them to resolve the situation themselves. The group was able to continue and engage positively. Finally, I was also able to resist intervening in other situations but still provide support to the students:

Jay is struggling to kick the ball, missing completely on half of the attempts. Finally, the instructors blow the whistle and end the activity. Jay walks away and loudly exclaims, ‘I hate kicking’ and looks dejected (with his head down and his shoulders slumped). I turned around to him and said, ‘Don’t worry it is okay. I could not kick a ball when I was your age, and I still can’t do it now’. This made Jay smile and he enthusiastically walked off to get a drink. (Reflective field note, November 1st)

In this situation, I could have easily intervened, pointing out to teacher that his demonstration did not help Jay, or spent 10 mins with Jay working one-on-one, which might have made him feel self-conscious. Instead, I decided to support Jay and help him process this moment. This helped Jay to feel more positive about his learning in the moment.

The embodiment of my disposition as a disengaged ex-PE student provided a practical knowledge of the field (Bourdieu, 1990). It meant I was in a privileged position to identify the children’s negative experiences. I was able to understand the make-up of the field (Bourdieu, 1990) with an awareness of how the experience of certain children were prioritised and what this meant for the other children and how certain actions might impact their experience in PE (Van der Smee et al., 2022). This practical knowledge provided the opportunity to know when to intervene in small ways and when to stay away. This process was not always easy and did provide a significant challenge. Similarly, it meant learning to be reflexive in the moment to react quickly in these situations, to decide whether to intervene or not. Importantly, intervening in these small ways provided a significant opportunity. It meant I was able to build rapport and trust with the children, which is a key objective of ethnography with children (Birbeck & Drummond, 2007). By intervening in these small moments and supporting the children it meant that they trusted me enough to let their guards down and eventually saw me as more than just a researcher there to study them.

Balancing roles – an experienced teacher conducting education research

Going into the field, I knew that my experience as a teacher would play an important role in how I was positioned at the school. I had worked as a teacher for five years and without careful consideration, it would be easy to fall back into this role. As Bowen Paulle (2013), highlighted in a similar school-based study, it can be hard to stay on the side lines when you are a teacher conducting research in an educational setting. As an experienced teacher, who was still working as a Casual Relief Teacher in the months leading up to the study, my teaching habitus (Oliver & Kettley, 2010) was likely to affect how I engaged with the students. In fact, there were numerous times during the project that I had to resist my primary instincts as a teacher, such as, raising my voice to tell a group of students to be quiet. This was a disposition that I had to navigate daily with both the teachers and the students.

My status as a teacher served as a form of social and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986) with the other teachers. It meant that the other teachers at the school viewed me as a pseudo-teacher, who could help or be relied upon when needed. However, with the students I was wary of them viewing me as a teacher. Within the school environment, my teaching habitus (Oliver & Kettley, 2010) and the capital that I had acquired automatically put me in a position of power over the children. So, I did not want the children to see me as a teacher and embody their unconscious understanding of the teacher-student relationship, which meant they might not act like themselves around me.

Similar to Jachyra and colleagues (2015), I attempted to distance myself physically and symbolically from the other teachers in a number of ways. Firstly, I introduced myself to the students by my first name from the start of my time at the school. Considering that all the other teachers were addressed formally, as Mr, Miss or Mrs, this distinguished my relationship with the children. Secondly, I spent very little time talking with the teachers in front of the children, typically only exchanging greetings on the playground. Instead, I spent all that time with the children. Finally, I attempted to distance myself from the teachers by dressing less formally. I also avoided wearing sport attire that could have led to an association with the PE teacher. Importantly, I never wore the high visibility vest that teachers were meant to wear while on playground duty. Consequently, I was able to position myself outside the typical teacher-student hierarchy (Jachyra et al., 2015) at the school.

This attempt to distance myself from the teachers and limit my own teaching habitus proved to be successful on a variety of occasions:

I am standing near the fence with Danai, Rhonda and Uma. Danai suggest that they sing Moana. Uma says, ‘I don’t want to sing in front of a teacher'. Danai responds, ‘ He isn’t a teacher. He is our friend. You can sing in front of him'. Uma agrees and the three girls start singing. (Reflective field note, August 25th)

Moments like this showed that my attempts to distance myself from the other teachers worked with the children. Many of them saw me simply as Cameron, their friend, not a teacher that they had to change their behaviour around, which was reflective of my efforts to portray myself as the friendly adult (Fine, 1987). By seeing me this way, it meant that many of children could let their guard down around me and didn’t have to worry about their behaviours and actions being seen by a teacher. This meant I witnessed many things on the playground that teachers would not normally see, including engaging in swearing and rude language, play fighting, talking about taboo topics, and engaging in activities that they might get in trouble for. Conversely, I learned that this meant I existed in an authorative grey area, where the students knew they did not have to treat me with the same reverence that they did a teacher, as shown below:

There were a couple of different kids in this group that were trying to engage with me by teasing me. Over the course of this lesson, two girls (Henrietta and Isel) called me ‘Mr Ape’, ‘Mr App’, and ‘Mr Poopy Pants’ and one boy (Kennedy) called me ‘Mr Custard baked Apple Pie Banana' These students thought this was hilarious. (Reflective Field note, September 20th)

The children teasing me became a regular thing, as did other acts such as hanging off me or playfully hitting or slapping me, despite all my protests and attempts to stop it. This did provide a level of acceptance as this was often how they treated each other, but I became worried about the other teachers seeing these moments. In subverting, the normal hierarchy of the field I had given the children access to a type of social capital that is not normally available to them. They happily acquired and accrued this capital by subverting the power dynamic. Importantly, I knew that I could not report these moments to the teachers because it would break the trust that I had built up with the students. My attempts to distance myself from the students had provided a high level of access to the students’ interactions, them seeing me as a friend rather than a teacher, but meant they sometimes engaged in poor and unsafe behaviours that might get them in trouble with their teachers.

My contribution: an ‘accepted’ adult in the lives of the children

This autoethnography presents the journey of an adult ethnographer in the world of children and highlights how utilising reflexivity as a methodological tool (Jachyra, 2016) is an essential part of the ethnographic process (Reed-Danahay, 2017). I was anxious and nervous before starting this project, stressing about how I would engage with the students in the projecs but maintain the reflexive distance as an outsider, that is often stressed in ethnographic projects (Coombs & Osborne, 2018). As discussed, I was particularly aware of several dispositions that were embedded within my habitus and how I would navigate these dispositions, and how I would build trust and rapport with the children. At the time this caused anxiety and made the possibility of conducting this ethnographic project particularly daunting. I now recognise that this should be case, ethnographic work is hard (Valério et al., 2021) and positionality is a key concern for many ethnographers (see Jachyra, 2016; Valério et al., 2021).

Engaging in the process of autoethnography provided several key learning opportunities that were essential for me as a developing ethnographer but are also essential for other novice ethnographers wishing to do research with young children. Firstly, in reflective ethnographic research there is no clear distinction between both objectivity and subjectivity, and insider outsider status (Reed-Danahay, 2017). Initially, I assumed that I had to try and be completely subjective to try to maintain a clear distinction between my insider outsider status. This was not the case, nor was it even possible within the field of the school. Instead, I was often subjective and objective at the same time and was both insider and outsider in the same interaction. I learned to manage these situations on the fly, and it actually enhanced the data. Secondly, that the dispositions I was so worried about managing provided both challenges and opportunities within the project. Learning how and when to manage these dispositions, embodying them at times and limiting them in others, proved to be a quite successful strategy and provided opportunities to build rapport and trust with the children. This provided the opportunity to engage with the children, as the gate keepers of the study, and gain access to their interactions and activities in a way not accessible to their teachers. This was not easy and required quick decision making but was in sharp contrast to my initial strategy of limiting these dispositions entirely. Finally, this process reinforced the importance of reflexivity in ethnographic research. As discussed, I attempted to utilise reflexivity as a methodological tool (Jachyra, 2016) to examine my positioning and be reflexive of these dispositions. This provided the ability to be reflexive in the moment and make quick decisions, based on reflection from previous situations, about my positioning within a particular situation. Additionally, this proved to be a critical decision for this autoethnographic examination. It provided a wealth of reflexive data for myself and my critical friend to examine, leading to unique and nuanced examinations of my positioning and the implications.

These lessons provide guidance for future researchers to take on board for their own ethnographic projects. However, this is not a recipe or framework for guaranteed ethnographic success. The context and positioning of a researcher are vitally important. Another researcher conducting an ethnographic project with children will likely have a uniquely different context and set of positioning concerns and dispositions to manage. Despite this difference, we would still encourage these researchers to embrace the challenges, rather than shying away from them or trying to navigate them objectively, for the potential opportunities that they can provide. This can make all the difference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a further exploration of these practices see Smee et al., 2021; Van der Smee at al., 2022 ).