ABSTRACT
From the first meeting of the Future Teachers’ Autobiography Club onward, I collected and reviewed meeting tapes, fieldnotes, and the writing done in members’ sketchbooks. As I did this, I framed, pursued, and revised, what Geer (1969) called “working hypotheses.” These hunches framed and focused my investigation of the ways participants were talking and apparently making sense of the books and conversations. I also used a research method called “constant comparison” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), which involves rejecting or refining early interpretations based on the examination of subsequent data. By means of “triangulation” (Gordon, 1980), I tested inferences that I developed in one data source (e.g., field-notes) with information available in other data sources (e.g., meeting transcripts, sketchbooks, and debriefing interviews). And, as is characteristic of ethnographic work, I often got things wrong from the point of view of participants’ experience despite all of these efforts. Thus, as is also characteristic of ethnographic work, focus of the research changed and developed as the study progressed, and the analysis ultimately benefited from a research collaboration with Julie deTar.
