ABSTRACT
This book is simultaneously an argument about what reading looks like in secondary classrooms and a report of a specifi c research project. In this chapter, I discuss the methodological issues that confronted me in the course of my research. In what follows, I attempt to represent my methodological choices and decisions as a process, and a rather messy one at that. I explore at some length my role as researcher and my relationship with Monica and Neville, the two teachers whose classrooms provided the site of my research. The negotiation of these roles and relationships was not something that was accomplished prior to the collection of data, but a struggle with issues of research identities, ethics and orientations that continued through every stage of the research, including successive drafts of this chapter. My research has been an irreducibly social process, as fully implicated in the specifi city of history, culture and identity as the reading that is its focus. Over time, too, I have come to recognise that my research is itself a form of reading, an active making of meaning, an interpretation of the complex multimodal text of the classrooms.
