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INTERPRETATION IN QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS: MULTILAYERED TEXTS 499
she, the teacher, sits on a chair, i.e. physically
above them).
The teacher controls and disciplines through
her control of the conversation and its flow,
and, when this does not work (e.g. lines
56, 71, 104) then her control and power
become more overt and naked. What we
have here is an example of Bernstein’s (1975)
‘invisible pedagogy’, for example, where the
control of the teacher over the child is
implicit rather than explicit; where, ideally,
the teacher arranges the context which the
children are expected to rearrange and explore;
where there is a reduced emphasis upon
the transmission and acquisition of specific
skills.
What we have here is a clear example
of the importance of the children learning
the hidden curriculum of classrooms (Jackson
1968), wherein they have to learn how
to cope with power and authority, praise,
denial, delay, membership of a crowd, loss
of individuality, rules, routines and socially
acceptable behaviour. As Jackson (1968) says,
if children are to do well in school then it is
equally, if not more important that they learn,
and abide by, the hidden curriculum rather
than the formal curriculum.
What we have here is also an example
of Giddens’s (1976; 1984) structuration theory,
wherein the conversation in the classroom
is the cause, the medium and the outcome of
the perpetuation of the status quo of power
asymmetries and differentials in the classroom,
reinforcing the teacher’s control, power and
authority.
The teacher has been placed in a difficult
position by being the sole adult with 27
children, and so her behaviour, motivated
perhaps benevolently, is, in fact a coping or
survival strategy to handle and manage the
discipline with large numbers of young and
demanding children – crowd control.
The children are learning to be compliant and
that their role is to obey, and that if they are
obedient to a given agenda then they will be
rewarded.
The ‘core variable’ (in terms of grounded
theory’) is power: the teacher is acting to
promote and sustain her power; when it can
be asserted and reinforced through an invisible
pedagogy then it is covert; when this does not
work it becomes overt.
Now, one has to ask whether, at the fourth level,
the researcher is reading too much into the text,
over-interpreting it, driven by her own personal
hang-ups or negative experiences of power and
authority, and over-concerned with the issue of
discipline, projecting too much of herself onto
the data interpretation. Maybe the teacher is
simply teaching the children socially acceptable
behaviour and moving the conversation on
productively, exercising her professional task
sensitively and skilfully, building in the children’s
contributions, and her behaviour has actually
nothing to do with power. Further, one can
observe at level four that several theories are being
promulgated to try to explain the messages in the
text, and one has to observe the fertility of a simple
piece of transcription to support several grounded
or pre-ordinate/pre-existing theories. The difficult
question here is, ‘Which interpretation is correct’
Here there is no single answer; they are all perhaps
correct.
The classroom transcription records only
what is said. People will deliberately withhold
information; some children will give way to more
vocal children, and others may be off task. What
we have here is only one medium that has been
recorded. Even though the transcription tries to
note a few other features (e.g. children talking
simultaneously), it does not catch all the events
in the classroom. How do we know, for example,
whether most children are bored, or if some are
asleep, or some are fighting, or some are reading
another book and so on All we have here is
aselectionfromwhatistakingplace,andthe
selection is made on what is transcribable.
One can see in this example that the text
is multilayered. At issue here is the levels of
analysis that are required, or legitimate, and how
analysis is intermingled with interpretation. In
qualitative research, analysis and interpretation
Chapter 23