ABSTRACT
Anna's letter to our research group, quoted on the cover page, tells of the mutual relationship between the researcher and the person supplying the data in interview situations. It is seen by Martin Hammersley and Paul Atkinson (1979, p. 116) as a 'research bargain', and by Ivor Goodson (1991, p. 148; 1992) as 'trading' between the researcher and the participant or between the life history 'taker' and the life history 'giver'. As Lynda Measor and Patricia Sikes put it:
The research bargain is a social construction, the result of assessments by each side of what the other has to give and what they are prepared to offer in return for these things (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1979, p. 120).... Respondents are not fearful victims who open their lives and souls because they are told or asked to. People have boundaries and strategies to protect themselves in research situations. (1992, p. 230)
Norman Denzin makes his stance on the ethical code of the life history researcher very clear:
... we must remember that our primary obligation is always to the people we study, not to our project or to a larger discipline. The lives and stories that we hear and study are given to us under a promise, that promise being that we protect those who have shared with us. And, in return, this sharing will allow us to write life documents that speak to the human dignity, the suffering, the hopes, the dreams, the lives gained, and the lives lost by the people we study. These documents will become testimonies to the ability of the human being to endure, to prevail, and to triumph over the structural forces that threaten at any moment to annihilate all of us. (1989, p. 83)
The study in this book deals with the place and meaning of education and learning in people's lives. The data was collected at a time
when governments, corporations and bureaucrats were planning new systems of lifetime learning for people without listening to and hearing people's own voices. More recent programmes of critical pedagogy seem to describe the research bargain beyond our study very well. For example, five of six specific features of critical pedagogy presented by David Livingstone are:
First, critical scholars must thoroughly appreciate that the prime task of educational scholarship is not merely to convey naturalistic understanding of educational practices but, as Walter Feinberg (1983, p. 153) puts it: '... to reflectively understand these relationships as social constructions with historical antecedents and thereby to initiate an awareness that these patterns are objects of choice and possible candidates for change. Thus educational scholarship adds a consciously critical dimension to the social activity of education.' Secondly, such research can only be adequately accomplished through identifying discrepancies between dominant versions of reality promulgated in formal institutions and the lived experience of subordinate groups in relation to such institutions. Thirdly, such identification requires scholars to attempt to take the vantage point of the subordinated, and this vantage point can only be sustained in contemporary critical inquiry if scholars remain engaged in collective dialogue with people more fully immersed in oppressive social relationships. Fourthly, the dialogue of critical pedagogy should not be restricted to narrow educational concerns focused only on the schools alone or including mass media and family spheres, but should facilitate popular efforts to make sense of the entirety of everyday life in relation to practice. Fifthly, it is through subordinated peoples' own discussion, growing self-consciousness and informed action in relation to their social reality - their appropriation of cultural power - that more no-elitist democratic forms of education and other societal institutions are most likely to be generated and sustained. (1987, p. 10)
Life-history studies is an emerging field in education now. It is vital, therefore, to remember that 'major shifts (in methodology) are more likely to arise from changes in political and theoretical preoccupation induced by contemporary social events than from discovery of new sources or methods' (Popular Memory Group quoted in Goodson,
1992, p. 248). In the 1970s, interactionist and ethnomethodological methods emerged in the shadow of predominantly quantitative functionalist and structuralist studies both in the mainstream and in Marxism. The situation most commonly focused on in interactionist and ethnomethodological studies was school lessons; biography was still neglected (Goodson, 1981, p. 67). After the destruction of such meta-stories as Enlightenment and Marxism (Lyotard, 1984), the field of life history has expanded.
