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Qualitative educational research has evolved dramatically over the last 25 years, from early participant-observation studies painting descriptive portraits of happenings in classrooms to today’s multi-perspectival and critical reflexive studies employing literary devices to transform the consciousness of both the researcher and the reader. This exciting evolution has been wrought by pioneering researchers crossing disciplinary borders into otherwise alien territories (the Arts, Humanities, Theology, Quantum Physics, Philosophy) and returning with a rich array of innovative perspectives and methodologies. But along with the excitement of the new, comes serious challenges. Whilst new methodologies address refreshingly new research questions, the basic notion of what constitutes research, indeed ‘valid’ research, has become complex, confusing, and not a little confronting, particularly for novice researchers in science and mathematics education.

Is it that you come to know how to write, or is it that the writer, writing and knowing emerge together? I can say that since starting on research my writing has developed in style and, as a process of inquiry (Richardson, 1998), writing helps me work out what to say. The process includes reflection and searching for language to define the situations under interrogation. So, through writing, I have come to understand my teaching and my existence in this world in new ways. However, I still do not find the act of writing easy. I rely on the advice of others to help me revise my drafts. A friend who reads my work gets so irritated by my frequent use of participles and by commas that she says I scatter like confetti. So after I complete a paper, I do an electronic search on ‘ing’ and ‘,’ to rectify the problems. Other advice I have been given is to write in the present tense for crispness and impact, and to aim for consistency in the position of references within a paragraph – so that they are all at the beginning of a sentence, such as “van Manen (1990) said ”, or all at the end. This makes for smoother reading.

As I entered the classroom for the first day of my research, I was eager for the opportunity to observe and dialogue with science teachers about the many issues surrounding student assessment. I looked forward to rich discussions and an increase in understanding, on my part, of what teachers were thinking about the assessment of student achievement. My research was to be descriptive and exploratory. In the beginning I did not have a clear idea of where my exploration into teachers’ thoughts would lead. I knew, however, I was entering a situation replete with ethical challenges. I did not realise that ten minutes into the observation, I would be uncomfortable with what I saw and so encounter my first ethical decision.

My field of interest chose itself. As a long-time participant in my State education system, initially as the child of teachers and later as a teacher myself, I became fascinated by the culture of my teaching community. I was especially enticed by the intersection of this culture with the complex processes of curriculum change. Over the years, my own conversations with colleagues and friends about schools and learning, increasingly mirrored those overheard in my youth between my parents and their friends. Despite multiple differences in context across the years and generations, these conversations created a recurring déjà vu . In research I have tried to link my cross-generation local cultural knowledge and understandings with my own interest in teasing out a coherent pattern to this reiterative process of change.

I have been asked to write this chapter about the processes of qualitative research so that my experiences as a beginning researcher can be of assistance to others who are also beginners. In writing, I have drawn on the text of my thesis and on my memory of carrying out the research. In the first section of the chapter I attempt to locate my research in the ever-expanding and changing field of qualitative theory. I then describe the data-gathering techniques used and the methods of data analysis I employed. In each case I have attempted to recall my difficulties and dilemmas. In the final section of the chapter I return to the qualitative theme of “self as instrument” in the research process.

My doctoral thesis is about to be examined and is a significant punctuation point in my life. My committed starting point was a meeting with my doctoral supervisor, John Wallace, at an Australian Science Teachers Association conference in Darwin in July of 1998. The story I wish to relate in this chapter started, if a starting point can be put on anything, in 1988 when I was a teacher at Casuarina School in the Adelaide hills. My aim is to describe the genesis of a doctoral thesis and the way in which the researcher as person is intimately bound to the research project. In my case, the journey of exploration into the nature and importance of student images of futures in science learning.

This methodology is underpinned by the notion of culture as a weave of practice and symbol systems in which users of culture share a semiotic field. You might assume that a shared understanding of symbol systems would result in a thickly coherent culture. Although actors understand the symbol systems that help constitute a culture, they do not use these systems in the same way and what emerges is thin cultural coherence and contested boundaries (Sewell, 1999). ‘What are taken as the certainties or truths of texts or discourse are in fact disputable and unstable’, (Sewell, 1999, p. 50). Inconsistencies and contradictions must be a factor within the culture when interaction between symbol systems and practices is not causal. Therefore within cultures such as science and school science, different texts can be represented. These texts can serve to constitute resources. Resources frame cultural structures upon which practices are enacted and which enact practices.

This study examined the experiences of a class of Year 10 students at an independent girls’ school in Perth, Western Australia, who were studying a Biotechnology course based on the topic of human organ and tissue transplantation. One of the aims of the course was to help students develop the skills to make ethical personal choices about organ transplantation.

My research passion is the issue of culture. Although the impact of culture on students’ learning of science has become increasingly important to science teachers over the past few years, this area was only just beginning to raise widespread interest when I commenced my research in 1995.

Emotional turmoil, self-doubt, anger, frustration, and confusion are the stuff of my personal experiences of change in a school within a period of systemic change. I wanted to make the most of these feelings that acted as flags of ‘critical incidents’ (Tripp, 1993) in the writing of a paper as part of my master’s degree because my ego had been tweaked and I needed to ‘vent my spleen’ in some way. In this chapter, I look back at my initial writings on the topic, and retrospectively reflect on my experiences at the time. In doing so, I wish to provide the reader with some insight into my methodological processes of writing and reflecting.