Making the Private Public: Reflections on Ethics and Analysis of Self from an Ethnography in a Primary School in the North of England

A presentation given to a conference on Public Etnography organised by Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada.
A critical ethnography in a school with a 'notice to improve' is a sensitive and priviledged context for a researcher. Carspecken's (1996) model was used to frame the research however it does not sufficently deal with researcher reflexivity in such an ethically sensitive context. Subsequently aspects of the Voice Centred Relational Model (Mauthner and Doucet 1998)were adopted to explicitly ensure researcher reflexivity and, through the development of 'I poems' to offer the possibility that researcher positionality could be shared in an accessible form with the research participants.