supporting tiriti-based curriculum delivery in mainstream early ...

and challenges as they did this – the how of the journey. To use my privileged
academic “univocal” (Locke, 2009, p. 497) observation to judge the product of this
journey was not relevant, useful, or even polite as a guest in their centre. What I
could and would do was to further explore issues of how through interviews and
encourage teachers to also observe at the end of the research, which happened in
Case Study Two.
In addition to observing, participants in each study were invited to keep a
reflective journal documenting their perspective on the research as it progressed.
Each participant kept this documentary evidence which is discussed in the next
section.
4.3.2.2 Documentary Analysis
Several types of documentation were important in the data collection
process. Documentary evidence can be public, such as newspaper clippings, or
private, such as memos and email communications, which can provide context and
background to the research. They have the advantage of illuminating issues, can
exist independently of the research and are an easy way to obtain other peoples‟
perspectives. Documentary investigation can however, be time-consuming,
inaccurate, and people may be unwilling to share confidential documents
(Creswell, 2003; Hopkins, 2002; Morse & Richards, 2002). Much of the
documentary evidence in this study would fall into the category of private, as each
teacher participant kept a reflective diary, as did I, which became part of the data
collection.
As the implementation of Tiriti-based pedagogy for this study was to
occur during teaching sessions in early childhood centres and as action research
relies on reflection occurring about that teaching to transform what has occurred, I
considered reflective diaries to be an important tool in the research process.
According to Bell (1993, p. 107) “Diaries can produce a wealth of interesting data
and are relatively simple to administer”. Diary is an umbrella term for diaries logs
and journals (Morrison, 2002) and in research projects they record professional
activities. There are two main individuals who keep diaries in a research project:
the researcher and the participants.
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