Chapter 8: Exploring Uncertain Territory: Stepping Into the Unknown

This chapter outlines the unpredictable pathway our research followed, for us as researchers and for our participants, and how the research relationships we developed helped us to navigate that. The endeavour of researching out-of-school learning places researchers in unforseeable, uncertain and at times unknowable territory. The context of school is, to some extent, predictable and structured. This means that research activity can be planned around that context: researchers can know in advance what kinds of activities people are likely to be doing, when and where they will be doing them and what the agenda of that activity might be. Researching families' everyday lives, however, does not provide such predictability. We cannot know in advance what people do in their everyday lives, or when, where, how and why they do it. This means that it is hard to design context-appropriate research methods before a research project begins: everyday lives have so much potential for variation so it is impossible to predict in advance what kinds of methods would be most appropriate for participants to engage with, and for researchers to use. Participants in researching out-of-school learning, then, have a significant role to play in helping researchers understand this context (Clark & Laing, 2022). As we progressed through the Economic Activity project and through the Everyday Maths project, then, and gained more of a sense of how we could access an understanding of participants' family lives our projects' focus and methods took shape.