Researching Early Schooling: poststructural practices and academic writing in an ethnography

Abstract Locating oneself as a poststructuralist not only emphasises multiple readings of texts, but generates data comparable with this location. This article considers some possibilities in researching everyday happenings at primary school. Reading and producing discourses, rather than texts only, involves bringing into play our own subjective understandings. Writing differently then becomes a methodology for the analysis of what we have recorded as research data. For the study of sites and events, one possibility is for deconstructions to follow a form of ethnography. However, with poststructural theories and their related academic practices, the research choices are different. An effect of this difference is that the timings and resolutions of gathering, presenting and analysing data are dislocated. These dislocations may be read as an enactment of a radical philosophy. They may also be read as a puzzle to be resisted, but which is nevertheless constructed to match today's cultural shifts and to challenge the nature of researching.