Told and untold stories: Finding new ways to represent the voices of culturally diverse learners through narrative vignettes

Introduction

This paper reports on a reflexive journey as we collaboratively and critically re-examine the use of narrative vignettes in Dakin's (2013) one-year critical ethnographic doctoral research that explored the experiences of newly arrived children entering primary school in the UK. As Creese et al. (2015: 266) note in referencing Rampton, Maybin and Roberts ‘ethnographies involve rhetorical forms, such as vignettes and narratives that are designed to provide the reader with some apprehension of the fullness and irreducibility of the “lived stuff” from which the analyst has abstracted structure’. Blackledge and Creese (2023: 142) note that ‘personalising, aestheticising and poetising sociolinguistics through forms such as ethnographic drama, ethnographic poetry and research vignettes expand and elaborate social phenomena, rather than reducing them’.

We argue that narrative vignettes are creative and powerful devices that capture lived experiences and meaning making in the everyday. We define narrative vignettes as a hybridisation of traditional storytelling (Clough, 2002, 2004) and ethno-drama (Cannon, 2012) constructed from a polyphonic blend of data (Blackledge and Creese, 2023) of both large and small stories explored within the research.

Through our re-examination, set out as a dialogue between the authors based on notes made during and after many virtual meetings via Zoom, we discuss how decisions were arrived at, at the time of the research and, in returning to the data, consider what issues and questions are relevant to those choices now. How did our own identities, as student and academic supervisor at the time of the research and now, as co-authors, affect our perceptions of narrative vignettes as a vehicle for representing and drawing out young learners’ voices? With the passage of time and new theories to draw on, does a return to this same data alter or strengthen our interpretations of their effectiveness as a methodological tool? As we reopen conversations between us in a different time and space, we consider how our creative dialogues return to the politics and ethics of representation and voice, and ask what can be learned by looking back? (Critical Methodologies Collective, 2022).

During this process we draw also on the embodied, emotional and affective labour of research in its varied phases and the way that research is shaped by relationships with participants and between researchers. We spotlight how research foregrounding the conceptual work on embodied, emotional and affective labour can offer us new ways of thinking and feeling about the data – more specifically the humanising of the experiences of learners as captured through told and untold stories. In addition, we use these conversations to draw attention to untold stories and discuss what they offer us now in understanding the stories that were chosen for inclusion in the research.

Theoretical framework

In this section we outline our theoretical framework starting with our understanding of critical ethnography, the affordances of working from this approach and our commitment to unravelling and making visible the reproduction of power through specific discourses within educational institutions.

Firstly, we define critical ethnography as a site for both researcher observation and participation which seeks to recognise the ideologies, power structures and participant identities (including the researcher's own) within the setting in order to highlight inequalities and, in doing so, affect change where possible. Rooted in anthropology (Blommaert and Jie, 2010), critical ethnography is human centred with researchers’ multiple identities affecting the data as much as their participants (Giampapa, 2011). Powell (2022: 29) summarises this methodology as ‘unpredictable’ and advises on the need to continually search for and reflect on methodological and ethical challenges, such as how to elicit, listen to, and represent children's voices, or how to ‘be’ and ‘act’ as a researcher in a primary school.

Selecting what information to omit from the final research is as much a part of the process as deciding what to include. We would argue that returning to the data enables researchers to reconsider their positions in relation to power and the politics and ethics of representation, drawing stories in from the margins and opening conversations around ‘new ways of seeing’ (Clough, 2004: 375). To demonstrate this, we consider our reflexive positions as researchers in relation to the research, the data and the ways in which we now revisit the told stories and re-present the data through learners’ untold stories.

Secondly, we draw on Georgakopoulou (2015, 2016) and Frank (2010) to enable us to identify untold stories that sit inside data but were unused at the time of the research. Georgakopoulou (2016: 267) describes these stories as small, often ‘fragmented’ and ‘open ended’ in their telling, ‘exceeding the confines of a single speech event and resisting a neat categorisation of beginning-middle-end’. While small stories, as meaningful narratives, are always contextualised at the time of telling, each has ‘the potential to be lifted from its original context and to be re-contextualised, that is, to acquire new meanings in new contexts’ (Georgakopoulou, 2016: 268). As a methodology, narrative vignettes seek to uncover and understand participants’ identities, offering the chance for ‘counter-stories’ to emerge that, ‘do not fit expectations of who the tellers should be and what stories they tell’ (Georgakopoulou 2015: 263). In addition, Frank (2010: 3) reminds us how participants’ stories (and our representations of them), ‘work on people, affecting what people are able to see as real’ and are therefore bound up with the emotional and embodied experiences of doing research (Wetherell, 2013).

Finally, we revisit the importance of reflexivity in requiring researchers to acknowledge the role and influence of their personal ontological and epistemological standpoints (Corlett and Marvin, 2018) while demonstrating how these affect their interpretation of big (Bamberg, 2006) and small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2016) hidden in data, along with their perceptions of participant identities. Critical ethnography, modelled on ‘reality’ as a social construct, co-created between participants and researcher in a particular time and space, requires levels of reflexivity to reveal the researcher's position on knowledge production within the research setting and how their positionality affects this production (Corlett and Marvin, 2018). Mindful of this, we acknowledge researcher reflexivity as an integral part of the process of researching and writing a critical ethnography, and of our current conversations around the politics and ethics of representation and voice (Critical Methodologies Collective, 2022). These were central to the creation of narrative vignettes at the time of the research, but equally relevant to our reflexive stance of looking back at those choices to see their relevance today.

Snapshots of our conversations are shared in vignettes throughout the paper as we foreground the lived experiences of two particular newly arrived learners – Gloria and Cecile. ¹ Justine:

While I was gathering data in school, I remember being particularly struck by newly arrived learners in KS2 and how they struggled with very little or no English. I worked a lot with Gloria and Cecile as a support teacher. Their day-to-day struggles struck a chord with me because they were very different physically, culturally and intellectually, yet their needs were similar in lots of ways.

Methodological positioning: looking back, moving forward

The basis for this article is a year-long critical ethnographic study that examined the processes and procedures for welcoming and inducting newly arrived learners into a small primary school. It also considered how young learners, with little or no English language knowledge, were assigned identities by teaching staff, and how the learners were agentive in negotiating or rejecting these identities. Here we define agency, drawing on Blackledge and Creese (2023: 131) who propose that,

individuals come to occupy the position of the subject through language. The subject is discursively constructed and emerges as agentic through interactional relations with others.

Creating narrative vignettes was an iterative process. Initially, Dakin categorised data using Cummins' (2001) theory of intervention for collaborative empowerment which created four chapters of the thesis based on this framework: Cultural and Linguistic Incorporation, Community Participation, Pedagogy and Assessment. However, as the focus for Cummins’ theory is the definition of educator roles within these four areas, including the beliefs and practices of teaching staff, Dakin was keen that learners’ voices be equally represented.

This led to conversations with her supervisor about methodological choices which we recall below: Justine:

I remember you advised me to look at the work of Peter Clough and I was totally spellbound by it. It really spoke to me! I wanted learners to be three dimensional, to be represented in a way that revealed their multiple identities and their stories. So, using verbatim quotes and narrative details offers readers a more realistic picture of what it was like to work with them as their support teacher and as a researcher.

To create narrative vignettes, Dakin returned to the data, this time using the learners’ names as categories for analysis. This built a portfolio of information on each participating learner. Gradually, this became refined to Cecile and Gloria, as Dakin worked more extensively with them in her role as a language support teacher. By examining their actions, emotions and words, recorded across different data forms, Dakin decided that she could construct a fictional lesson to best represent the learners’ emotional and embodied experiences of being newly arrived in school. As a literary device, an English lesson authentically recreated the many hours she had spent with the learners as a teacher and researcher. It also opened a space for verbatim data to be woven into a fictional lesson by juxtaposing many snippets of informal chatter and longer semi-structured discussions into a larger, coherent whole. The ‘narrative’ element encapsulated the physical, mental, social, and emotionally embodied experiences expressed regularly by Cecile and Gloria in a way that conventional transcripts could not.

With the narrative vignette nearing completion, Dakin realised that her conversations with the learners mirrored Cummins' (2001) framework and that it was possible to preface each of the four thesis chapters – Cultural and Linguistic Incorporation, Community Participation, Pedagogy and Assessment – with a section of narrative vignette that related the learners’ thoughts, opinions and experiences to these areas. Therefore, by deliberately positioning a vignette at the start of each chapter, Dakin ensured that the children's experiences prefaced more teacher-centred discussions on identity, empowerment, and privilege (Dakin, 2017).

Revisiting researcher reflexivity

Justine:

My motivations were political, I realised that then and even more so now as we talk through the data and the memories come back. I wanted to make a difference to the lives of newly arrived learners like Cecile and Gloria, to help them to be seen and heard in their classrooms. I wanted their teachers to be better trained to cope with their needs, to ensure that they were secure, happy and successful at school.

Researcher identities and positionalities: embodied and affective entanglements

Frances:

We’re looking back at the children's experiences, agency, and their voices. We’re not ‘giving voice’ to them or empowering them but extending and using this device of representing them.

Giampapa (2011: 134) notes that ‘researchers as social agents are located by and produce discourses that shape the ways in which we negotiate, challenge, and manage identities and positionalities in the field’. As such her positionality is shaped by discourses and her multiple identities as a ‘Canadian-born, heterosexual female of Italian heritage, raised in an Italo-Australian context by working-class immigrant parents’ which are ‘embodied and narrated across space and time’ (Giampapa, 2011: 134). Her identities are also shaped by her childhood experiences of being an ethnic minority multilingual child entering monolingual, monocultural English, Canadian and Australian mainstream schools that did very little at the time to acknowledge let alone harness linguistic and cultural forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1991). These multiple cultural and linguistic identities affected her own doctoral research journey amongst the Italian Canadian community and informed our discussions around the politics and ethics of representation. The nature of our collaboration made Dakin more aware of her ideological position and multiple identities at the time of the research and steered the research towards a critical ethnography with its potential to affect social and political change (Powell, 2022).

By revisiting the process, our collaborative discourses reopen conversations that shed new light on how researchers continue to interact with both their participants and the research process across time and in new spaces. While we agree that representation is ‘deeply implicated in power relationships… (and) is always a political endeavour’ (Critical Methodologies Collective, 2022: 2), we also recognise the process as an affective and embodied experience for both researchers, and participants at the time of the research (Ahmed, 2004). As researchers, we draw on personal memories ‘to construct a narrative plot which helps us define who we are’ (Ahmed and Morgan, 2021: 3) while aware that learners like Cecile and Gloria may be subject to post-memory, carrying ‘stories of displacement, loss, trauma and violence that they did not encounter personally but whose affective burden is inscribed upon the language repertoires and identities of speaking subjects’ (Ahmed and Morgan, 2021: 3).

It is within this complex process that we seek to position ourselves in order to better understand the power and limitations of creating narrative vignettes in ethnographic research. We also add that the affective and embodied experiences that we have as researchers to fieldwork and to an ethical commitment for working alongside participants draws on a different kind of labour. That is, one that pays attention to ‘embodied states’ (Wetherell, 2013: 352) – body movements, articulation of the senses in relation to an action, event, an entanglement with the material world and others in it. In the process of meaning making of the everyday experiences of others we draw as researchers on our own experiences and stretch ourselves, emotionally and cognitively, to engage with these experiences in a way that tries to keep to the authenticity of the stories brought to us in order to share these with a deeper understanding of the teller's experiences.

We are inspired by researchers who have paid attention to affect, emotion and the embodied experiences in research (Ahmed, 2004; Benesch, 2020; Leander and Ehret, 2019; Wetherell, 2013; Zembylas, 2005) and we align with a discursive approach to understanding affect and emotions. Like Zembylas (2005: 936), we assume ‘power, agency and resistance are at the centre of exploring the role of emotion’ and as such emotions are ‘discursive practices’ that are shaped by culture, power and ideology.

The ‘affective turn’ in research (Clough, 2002), moves our understanding along a trajectory that engages with not only what we see and hear but how this makes us feel, and what these experiences evoke for researchers and participants when they engage in conversations. Whether through observations or interviews, for example, ethnographers attend to the rituals and patterns of everyday meaning making and try to understand the experiences of participants from their perspective. In doing so, we are drawn into their stories, the way that they may put emphasis on their explanations accentuating a deeper and more vivid account of their experiences that draws on the sensual and material. We pay attention to our own bodily responses, expressions and the way in which we read and listen to these stories as highly invested participants. These stories leave traces and, in the re-creation and revisiting of stories, we see, hear and feel the memories of these stories and of the lives that have constructed them. In our attempt to ‘feel’ Cecile's and Gloria's lived experiences, we try to do justice to who they are and their desires for a future within an educational system that has positioned them in ways that do not always open up opportunities for them or is understanding of how their pasts have shaped their present. Memory plays a part in aligning actions and emotions as it historically binds these emotions. Triggers of a past act can bring forward an embodied and emotional rush that evokes particular actions that may not be understood within the present set of circumstances or contexts within which students are embedded and inhabit. The narrative vignettes are used to animate, align, engage the listeners in the telling of the stories into a space that seeks to find a common point of contact and bind reader and teller together (Ahmed, 2004).

In the following sections we put forward our reasons for the use of narrative vignettes as a starting point and then move forward as we revisit data from the research, re-examining both what we call the ‘told’ and ‘untold’ stories. We then discuss the data in terms of our conversations today and how they address and extend our previous discussions to pay attention to a number of points elucidated in sections above.

Revisiting told stories: constructing narrative vignettes

The following section moves to revisiting the told stories. It highlights the ways in which we attempted to foreground Gloria's and Cecile's experiences of everyday schooling and how the telling through narrative vignettes drew us closer to hearing and feeling their voices. The extract below, from a narrative vignette prefacing the study's chapter on Cultural and Linguistic Incorporation (Cummins, 2001), shares some of the interactions between Gloria, Cecile and Dakin (support teacher/researcher) as they chat about languages.

“I speak Lingala,” Gloria continued, looking straight at me with the deepest brown eyes you could imagine.

A small story (Georgakopoulou, 2016), emerging from the vignette above reveals how, as an essentially monolingual teacher, Dakin feels ‘ill at ease’ quantifying or judging her learners’ language capabilities while, in contrast, Cecile's and Gloria's multilingualism affords them greater linguistic capital. Dakin experiences momentary isolation within the discourse, acknowledging that her embodied feelings of awe and inadequacy are rarely expressed so candidly in daily classroom conversations between staff and learners.

Re-visiting the narrative vignettes, Dakin recognises the reflexivity they afforded her at the time of writing and how the politics and ethics of representation were bound to her ‘insider/outsider’ position. As a local government advisor and ‘outsider’, she supported schools to create inclusive environments for newly arrived young learners against a backdrop of national government policies privileging monolingualism (Dakin, 2017). However, working at The Cedars as a support teacher over several years, privileged Dakin as an ‘insider’. The successful professional relationships she had forged with colleagues, learners and their families, allowed her to interact with and observe participants as someone familiar and non-threatening, whose professional values were known and shared daily. It also enabled her to get to know Cecile and Gloria in ways that would be less practicable for a class teacher (whose attention is regularly spread across thirty or more learners at any one time) or for an external researcher, who might encounter greater reticence or suspicion from learners defined as vulnerable (DCSF, 2008).

In re-examining the interview data from which part of the vignettes emerged, we reflect on interviews as ‘conversational narratives’ that, according to Patiño-Santos (2018: 9), ‘are social activities, which make them apposite discursive sites to reflect upon individual and group memories, specific situations and individual and collective selves’. Davies and Davies (2007: 1157) also argue that interviews ‘produce moments of life as it is being lived’ and create an archive that can be drawn on repeatedly to make sense of that production. It is this archive that we, as authors, re-examine in a new temporal space, drawing aspects of Gloria's and Cecile's identities away from ‘the margins’ of research (Giampapa and Lamoureux, 2011). Our conversations, illustrated as preludes to sections of this paper, add to our existing understanding of who each learner might have been at the time of the research. We are struck by aspects of Gloria's agency, previously un-remarked, which emerges from the stories she selected to share with Dakin during an interview, stories which express important and highly personal experiences from her life that had affected her physically and emotionally. Justine:

Looking back at the data, I realise how agentive Gloria was during my interview with her and Cecile. I noticed how she answered my questions but also how she introduced new themes and expanded on things that were clearly important to her.

Looking back, we recognise how Gloria draws on memories of schooling in the Congo to recall an affective, embodied experience which helps to define who she is (Ahmed and Morgan, 2021). She displays agency clearly in the interview. By using the space to critique staff behaviour, she challenges the notion of the UK offering unconditional safety and security to refugees by implying that she finds the class teacher's shouting scary and unsettling.

Below we demonstrate how this raw, transcribed data was refined into a narrative vignette:

“Miss Jones doesn’t shout,” I laughed, trying to make light of something I knew was completely true. The researcher needed to explore it, dissect it to find the hidden meanings while the teacher felt instantly protective towards her colleague.

We argue that narrative vignettes act as a collage of data, creating a picture of participants’ lives. These embodied experiences become affective, human, and relatable small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2015) where the ‘rippling effect of emotions’ (Ahmed, 2004: 119) can be imagined and explored in the present, retrospectively, and with predictions of how those ripples might affect the characters’ future experiences. Our discussions, which foreground the importance of a dialogic process to re-imagine the powerful ways participants’ voices can be heard in research, exemplify how, on re-examination, Gloria's stories moved in from the field (Giampapa and Lamoureux, 2011) to a position where they were chosen for inclusion in the vignettes. Through a semi-structured interview Gloria, as protagonist, orients towards an embodied and emotional experience that constructs her relationship towards school – both historically and in the present.

However, our present conversations acknowledge how much data still contains untold stories. Further examples of Gloria's agency appeared in fragments of data where interview questions around the physical classroom space at her previous Congolese school were met with stories of threats of corporal punishment if she arrived late. The emphasis shifted again with, ‘I don’t like the Cedars (primary school) …Miss, I can tell you something. It was children here; it was making trouble. Kicking people here,’ (Interview notes, 15/03/11) and a story unfolds of physical attacks in the playground when she first arrived in the UK. In the section below, we continue this journey in examining the untold stories that emerged as we re-engaged with the data.

Notes in the margin: re-examining untold stories

Frances:

And the untold stories? What do they tell us about this process, about the politics and ethics around representation?

On re-examination, the data reminds us how young learners bring with them a multitude of identities, many of which are never revealed, acknowledged, or nurtured in school (Cummins and Early, 2011; Giampapa, 2011). In the extract below, Cecile chats to James. The original conversation was in French and translated by him afterwards from the audio-recording. James:

Do you think you will return to France?

Cecile's socio-cultural background and family relations were only transiently visited during the study. On reflection this was due to the dilemma of what to include and, equally, to exclude in answering the study's research questions. Her conversation above with James, and occasional comments during classroom conversations with Justine, recorded as fieldnotes, alluded to migration to the UK because of a family break-up and, as Cecile stated, ‘Because my mother wanted me to come to England to learn English’. The fragmentation of Cecile's family and separation from her brothers and father are, and remain, untold stories. They are only fleetingly referred to in a vignette:

Cecile's linguistic and cultural roots lay in Africa, in Cameroon where her Mum was born. Dad's roots, along with Dad, remained in Paris (Dakin, 2013: 54).

During our discussions, we notice how Cecile's story, encapsulated in a brief conversation, is a ‘counter-story’, one of the ‘stories that are not encouraged or allowed in specific environments’ (Georgakopoulou, 2015: 263). Opportunities for Cecile to disclose these personal details on arrival in the UK only occurred in a safe space with someone who spoke her native French. For school staff to arrange these conditions would imply circumstances where there was a perceived problem that required a solution. Although some of Cecile's family details may have been known to the school through initial welcome and induction meetings (e.g. who her legal guardian was and how many siblings were in the household), the motivations for Cecile's move to the UK were never part of school discourses. Her stories were ones that ‘do not fit expectations of who the tellers should be and what stories they tell’ (Georgakopoulou, 2015: 263). Once identified as an acquiescent and able student, there was never any requirement for the school to delve deeper into Cecile's history. As with all newly arrived young learners, her assimilation into the rituals of school life precluded any need to understand her socio-economic, cultural, political, or linguistic background in any detail. The memories and trauma of this dislocation from one life to another, which were part of Cecile's story and her multiple identities, only surfaced through the research.

A further untold story related to Gloria's previous life in the Congo is highlighted in two field note extracts below.

‘G recognised the Congo on a map and identifies a plant on the illustration that is native to Africa. She tells me a few details about the Congo, ‘Is big’ and how her Nan ‘has the monies’ and is ‘helping the people’. She also talks of ‘killing people, is dying’. She says “I like the Congo” and declares that when she is grown up she will return to see what it's like. Her mum calls people in the Congo. She tells fragmented stories in broken English of someone going to their house, (whose is undisclosed) deciding that they should die and she makes a throwing action with her hand (reminiscent of someone lobbing a grenade into a building) and says then they die. She says, “My dad is here first. My dad say I need to come here and my mum”. G has told Emily (her class teacher) of night raids in the Congo and of being afraid of the dark (Fieldnotes, 31/01/11).

This harrowing information was left out of the vignettes and, years later, as authors, we discussed reasons for the omission. Dakin concluded that the account was so far removed from her own experiences that she didn’t feel capable of representing Gloria's feelings and emotions in a way that would do justice to the experience. Kassan et al. (2020) suggest that researcher identity has a great effect on what data a researcher is ‘attuned’ to, and what shapes the research process. Dakin never asked Gloria about the night raids during the research, which, on reflection, was ethically motivated. Holding conversations in which Gloria offered information about her former life voluntarily felt very different from enquiring directly about experiences that clearly distressed her. In this respect, Dakin exerted an ethical bar or personal moral censorship in the research process, beyond which she would not venture either as a researcher or teacher. However, Kassan et al. (2020) remind us that, regardless of how reflexive a researcher may become, their position is always one of power where it is impossible to achieve a position of equality with participants.

By re-examining the data, we re-open and extend the political and ethical discourses which shaped the initial thesis a decade ago. We acknowledge young learners in the study as living, breathing, agentive people with multiple identities and positionalities yet know that, in choosing narrative vignettes as part of a methodological process, we are not ‘giving voice’ to them. Rather, we are attempting to express their thoughts, feelings and lived experience in a particular moment while positioning ourselves in the research, aware of the sociocultural and linguistic inequalities ingrained in UK school governance, policy, and practice (Dakin, 2017). We discuss visibility, voice, identity, and the embodied and emotional experiences of young learners in relation to ourselves as researchers and participants, while questioning how we can amplify the children's stories to explore and contextualise their everyday lives by revisiting untold stories in the data. Do our representations do justice to young learners? Our new conversations stress the need for integrity in the research process, critiquing the use of narrative vignettes to make participants more visible and questioning whether our representations are ones that the young learners themselves might recognise, then and now.

We argue that narrative vignettes add to a polyphonic approach to critical ethnographic research. By drawing on a wide range of data and blending it with storytelling, this methodological approach enables researchers to ‘witness and comprehend the complexity of human experience…and to document (it) more fully’ (Blackledge and Creese, 2023: 143). The approach creates new spaces where a ‘heteroglossic diversity of voices’ (Blackledge and Creese, 2023: 49) emerges from the data, allowing individual participants to ‘speak’ and be heard. While we acknowledge that learners’ voices are only partially represented in any data, and that research does not empower participants as individuals by claiming to give them a voice in ways that can directly affect social or political outcomes (Cook-Sather, 2006), we believe that the process of writing narrative vignettes, ‘requires that we listen to the multiplicity of polyphonic voices involved in research’ (Blackledge and Creese, 2023: 143). This opens up opportunities to see, hear and feel connections between what De Fina (2008) describes as the macro and micro elements of storytelling, or big stories (Bamberg, 2006) juxtaposed with small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2015, 2016). Gloria and Cecile's experiences foreground past political, historical, and humanitarian struggles which our conversations today view contemporaneously, assessing and questioning whether creating narrative vignettes represent their lived experiences as authentically, rather than as ‘truthfully’, as possible.

Through Gloria's control of the interview narrative, her storytelling exposes both a local, micro view of her education in the Congo with a transcultural, macro commentary on the similarities and differences between a central African and UK system. She sheds light on social and cultural behaviours (with her comparison of teachers’ pedagogic approaches), symbolic and cultural capital (and the requirements of paying for education in the Congo or suffering exclusion), and translanguaging (displayed as a commonplace skill of her linguistic repertoire). These insights into her life and experiences show how stories ‘act in human consciousness, with individuals sometimes being aware of what story is acting and sometimes not’ (Frank, 2010: 14). Frank (2010: 13) suggests that ‘After stories animate, they instigate’, leading to the creation of further stories which draw in new storytellers or listeners. By revisiting the data, we, as authors, have become part of those further stories.

Concluding thoughts

Our conversations and reflections, then and now, with participants, each other, critical friends, and researchers, foreground the importance of creating powerful and ethically driven methods through which research participants’ stories can be heard and amplified, and of revisiting those methods – which is both a political and ethical action. Vignettes composed of verbatim quotes from the narratives of young learners, as discussed in this article, become a form of storytelling that is a ‘type of discourse practice’ in itself (De Fina, 2008: 422) and has the potential to identify small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2015) that might otherwise be lost across broad data sets.

Through our approach of looking back in order to look forward, we continue to recognise that there are ethical issues needing further consideration. For example, how anonymised can data remain within narrative vignette writing when, ‘The more context and detail offered in a narrative account… the greater the chance of compromising anonymity’ (Willis, 2019: 446). A further political consideration of narrative vignette writing, and one that relates to the politics of representation, is a researcher's ability to selectively include or exclude data when fictionalising participants’ stories. This places the researcher in a powerful position where an ‘evidence-saturated culture will continue to police stories of the moral and political in educational settings into the margins’ (Clough, 2004: 372–3). However, our paper shows that the reflexivity afforded by a methodology that incorporates narrative vignettes, enables critical ethnographers to reveal their political objectives, of showing ‘otherness’, of glimpsing the experiences of people who have lived beyond the UK but now find themselves embedded in a new and unfamiliar culture.

As we discuss the research today, we are mindful of the fact that we cannot fully understand Cecile and Gloria, or the communities they represent and that this means,

carefully reflecting on the practice of creating representations of other people, while not letting those critical reflections lead to a state of not being able to do any representation at all (Critical Methodologies Collective, 2022: 3).