Considering my data

The data I am currently in the process of collecting is in the form of audio recordings of my interactions with teachers in brainstorming sessions and as a researcher-member of an after school discussion group devoted to speaking to the successes and challenges of technology integration at an elementary school in a rural-rustbelt town in the midwest. This is to say, that as I consider this data I have been thinking about where I feel most comfortable as a discourse analyst. After last week's work with CDA and this week's in discursive psychology, and more so in the chapter we read in Jorgensen and Phillips thinking across perspectives, I think I most solidly fit in with the CDA folks.

This is due in large part to my perspectives on social justice, change and power. It is my distinct hope that engaging with this specific group of teachers will benefit conversations around poverty and technology in the US. I thought a lot about what Francesca had to say last week about my epistemological approaches to issues of inequality, and I understood her as voicing concern about a priori (and perhaps savior-y) approaches to inequity. For me, this might leave out the voiced experiences of habitual and accumulated practices that reveal inequity, such as those of the teachers I work with. They continually give voice to and re-produce discourses of poverty connected to their students lives. But I knew this before I met these specific teachers because I had spoken with their principal. And while perhaps the ways the interactions the children in this school have with their teachers and technologies might not initially reveal inequity it does when put in conversation with other interactions, such as those wealthy children have at schools or those that multilingual children have at schools or those that children from different countries but with similar experiences with parents on drugs. So I wonder how focusing on the interaction can fully reveal discourse if we don't put it in conversation with other discourses (the idea of ordering discourses). And I wonder what it means to understand intertextuality if we don't consider other accumulated interactions that built other discourses. It was this thinking that led me to understand my specific 'place' in discourse more concretely.

It is also this point that speaks to my considerations of my data. When I think about the ways this data fits with CDA I at once wonder how critical I must be of my own role in the ways orders of discourse are understood within the analysis. I wonder how to delimit discourses and orders of discourses when I am present. I also wonder how to handle the integration of readings, video and activities I might bring in to the discussion group. Ultimately, the discourse analytic work will have to contend with these pieces - the main purpose for my presence is to support these teachers in what they need, not what my data needs. I think CDA allows for this, but how does it fit and what flak do you get for this?