ABSTRACT

In this chapter I discuss two dilemmas that I encountered as I worked on, and tried to write about, a qualitative study of parental and community involvement in Toronto schools.1 The first dilemma led me to realize that the epistemological position and conceptual tools that I had planned to use were not adequate for the complexities of the research. The second, related dilemma has to do with the difficulty of writing when positions, tools, and analytic strategies become unclear. Then, in the process of ‘working through’ these dilemmas, new ones emerge, although they may present opportunities as well as obstacles. One question that I keep returning to has to do with how tensions that arise in the conduct and representation of ethnographic and qualitative studies in education are so often lived and handled as individual dilemmas. In the conclusion of the chapter, I reflect on how such tensions might be viewed, represented, and lived differently.