Documenting classroom life: how can I write about what I am seeing?

Jones, Liz, Holmes, Rachel, MacRae, Christina and MacLure, Maggie (2010) Documenting classroom life: how can I write about what I am seeing? Qualitative Research, 10 (4). pp. 479-491. ISSN 1741-3109

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Abstract

The article is located within a UK based ethnographic research project where the central aim is to understand the processes by which 4— 5 year-old children begin to develop an identity as ‘naughty’ within school. This article considers certain practices that are embedded within the act of documenting data and how these relate to and are connected with identity. Having foregrounded what could be regarded as tactics for ‘authenticating’ data we then move to offer alternative sets of practices where data is considered more in terms of a ‘montage’ where ‘several different images are superimposed onto one another’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003: 6).