63: Whispering Angels: Revisiting Dissertation Data With a New Lens

Graduate students strive to complete their dissertations to make a contribution to the field, and to gain their rite of passage into the academy. The long, arduous, and detailed work in the dissertation process is frequently left behind as newly appointed professors evolve and respond to the research demands and directions within their educational contexts. Some are lucky enough to translate the work into a major publication, but in my experience, most produce a few, brief articles and then move on.

In the late 1980s, I completed an ethnographic study of peer collaboration in a split grade one and two classroom (Butler-Kisber, 1988). It was conducted in an “ordinary way” (Gitlin, 1994) with the usual observations, fieldnotes, interviews, and document collection. The 300-page document produced some immediate, brief work (Butler-Kisber, 1991). The rapid changes in the field of qualitative methodology, with the growing emphasis on emancipatory, postmodern paradigms, pulled me away from this more typical, ethnographic work, and I might have left the work behind entirely, except for two things. The sharing nature of Marj, the classroom teacher in the study, helped forge a strong professional relationship between us that neither of us wished to sever. As well, the work of Erickson and Wilson (1982) convinced me to augment the fieldnotes with videotapes. This decision complicated the research process at the time, but had a significant impact on the life of the work as a result. It allowed me to revisit the data over time, and with the help of Marj, I was able to involve the children. As we conducted these retrospective interviews (Butler-Kisber, 1994), my evolving postmodern interests helped me to look at the data more critically. In so doing, I realized the need to focus on the girls in this classroom, the whispering angels, and to highlight their voices and share the results in a different and more evocative way (Butler-Kisber, 2000).