Postscript to Part II: A Commentary on Our Analyses

In the three chapters of Part II, we presented distinct analyses of the anglophone auto-ethnography data. Our analyses were done separately, though Lisa participated in two of them, and so it is important to take into account our backgrounds described in the introduction to Part II. Here we will compare our analyses, acknowledge similarities and differences that arise from these varied perspectives, and then reflect on influences our perspectives might have had on the analyses.

In Chapter 6, Richard and Lisa were inspired by teachers’ own recognitions of commonalities in pedagogy to seek out other utterances that showed similarly how teachers make sense of their pedagogy discursively. In this chapter, they searched the transcripts for a specific type of utterance, namely, one where teachers came to some agreement about their shared pedagogical practices. The teachers had not been tasked with looking for sameness; they were simply asked to identify videos that were somehow representative of mathematics teaching in their province. In the course of these discussions, they indicated and negotiated samenesses, which then became available for analysis. Other parts of the transcripts may have contained interesting insights but were not included in the analysis. In Chapters 7 and 8, the authors examined each regional transcript as a whole. In Chapter 7, Lisa and Ellen’s analysis utilized a thematic approach, whereas in Chapter 8, David’s analysis looked at transcripts to code the general topic of utterances. We first compare the two similar approaches in Chapters 7 and 8, and then examine the emerging ideas from Chapter 6 in relation to this analysis.