Doing Reflexivity by Dean Jon

Author:Dean, Jon [Dean, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447330875
Google: 8EcotAEACAAJ
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2017-01-15T03:32:12+00:00

He also writes of expecting students ‘with insider or family knowledge of the place and previous experience at elite institutions’ to be the most successful at the school (Khan, 2011: 51). In fact these students – from historic families such as Rockefeller and Vanderbilt – are somewhat sidelined at St. Paul’s, shunted to their own dormitory, because the main student body, from the new elite, see them as representing an undeserving class of inheritors, rather than a deserving hard-working one.

Khan’s personal politics and personal experiences are at the fore here. He notes how he finds ‘too much inequality both immoral and inefficient’ (Khan, 2011: 4), and writes of how he was discombobulated as a teenager, unready for the world of a prestigious boarding school, and how fellow minority students, from poorer neighbourhoods than he, fared worse. Here, Khan is doing what all researchers do, thinking about what he might possibly encounter, the research issues that might arise, the questions he will need to ask. There is only so much that can prepare a researcher for the field, and that preparation has to be built on what the researcher can reasonably know. Personal experience, anecdotes and tales, feelings and ideas, are the only things to go on if no previous research exists on a specific locale. This shapes the research process, and these initial steps can be entirely unique to the researcher.

Khan is central to the narrative of Privilege, the pivot around which the data emerges. There are occasions where he has to move the story along using provocation as a research method (Pangrazio, 2016), not just through the researcher’s traditional method of asking questions, but in purposefully acting out of turn to see how participants, in this case young students, react. Khan tells the story of sitting on a sofa situated in the school Common Room that was usually the preserve of final-year students. The sofa was seen as a signifier of prestige and respect at the school, something that younger students would aim for as a goal to attain, indicating they had worked hard to make it through the tough academic environs of the school (Khan, 2011: 48). Khan and a colleague felt that such ‘consecrated hierarchies’ were a problem at St. Paul’s, and so decided intentionally to break the hierarchies and sit on the couch, inviting a younger student to do as well. The young student is made to feel uncomfortable in this instance, and Khan reflects that ‘what we had asked him to do was unfair’ (Khan, 2011: 43). I read this story as one of Khan making data happen, intentionally stirring things up to generate action, pushing his research participants to see how they react, beyond the usual manner of asking awkward questions in interviews. Is this ethical? Khan reports that the young student who was forced to sit down ‘looked terrified in his sunken posture’. A researcher should feel deep unease at causing research participants to be ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘look terrified’, especially if they are 14 years old.

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