This paper is a personal tale of my journey through a methodological conundrum arising from some interviews of teachers of mathematics to undergraduates in a pre-1992 university in England. Revisiting the data later, I noticed contradictions between what I’d written in my research diary and what appeared in the ‘accounts’ I generated through the transcriptions of the interviews. Mathematics, whether as a core subject or as a generic skill, permeates teaching and learning throughout school, further and higher education curricula. I wanted to investigate mathematics teaching and learning in the university for all students engaging with it, not just specialist mathematics undergraduates. I was interested to investigate who teaches mathematics across the undergraduate curriculum, and what do we know about these teachers? As I found that there are non-specialists teaching mathematics in higher education (with no mathematics qualifications beyond GCSE) just as there are in the school sector (DFES, 2003), the question arose for me as to how these individuals acquired their mathematics knowledge, and what contribution might their experience of learning mathematics make to their pedagogy. Via ‘critical incident interviews’ (see Flanagan, 1954) I tried to elicit from two groups of teachers, a group of ‘specialists’ and the another of ‘non-specialists’, stories from their experience of teaching mathematics. I intended to triangulate the issues raised via group interviews with undergraduates from selected programmes. The extent to which researchers put themselves squarely in the frame of the research has been of significant interest for the last couple of decades, particularly for qualitative researchers, and is frequently discussed in the context of the deconstruction movements. Post-modernist educational writers (e.g. Schostak, 2000; MacClure, 2003) develop the idea of reflexivity and this leads to a theoretical position whereby any text purporting to describe, report on or analyse events in the world inevitably does so only as an interpretation in recognition that the text stands as a mediator between the author (who is indescribable) and the ‘Other’, i.e. outside the author, also indescribable. With the trends for professional doctorate degrees comes a fresh set of practical concerns facing insider-researchers, particularly when researching one’s own practice, as is likely in the early stages of practitioner research. There are potentially clear sets of difficulties to recognise in conducting a research study in one’s workplace in terms of status and what the researcher represents to the other participants. Yet with this style of working comes very privileged access to the informants or participants, although the researcher at work must live with the consequences of their project (e.g. Mercer, 2007; Drake and Heath, 2008). Research in the workplace is likely to be small scale and involve few people. This closeness may seem to compromise the researcher’s ability to critically engage with the information, and so keeping and using diaries to stimulate reflexivity whenever possible is an important aspect of ‘self-triangulation’ of interpetations of the data.

I interviewed 15 university teachers and met with three groups of undergraduate students, from mathematics, from Engineering and from Geography. At all stages people were co-operative and helpful, and were able to confirm my hunch that teaching and learning mathematics were problematic across the university, with much of the mathematics teaching undertaken by faculty who had turned their attention to it within the context of their own discipline. However, the critical incident methodology was unsuccessful and I was perplexed as to why, despite seemingly careful preparation, it was so unrewarding in terms of generating usable data.

In my project, only one person told me clearly identifiable critical stories as asked. I realised that very few people follow instructions in a conversational setting, and concluded that possibly a conversational setting was not the place in which to address my research questions anyway. I picked up the tale four years later, when, as part of my own professional doctorate degree, I wanted to understand what had happened. I braced myself to open the by now dusty box of data, and I re-read my research diary. Out jumped a fresh way of considering the interview data, a way that pushed me to reflect on the process of the interview rather than what people actually said. In particular, by juxtaposing extracts from my diary with accounts from the interviews I show that:· * Personal relations and expectations position everyone in an interview · * Things happen in people’s heads during the interviews that are not recorded. The crux of the problem methodologically was that I had asked the teachers to tell me stories about their experience, but neglected to position myself as storyteller when recording or analysing what they told me. This paper provides an illustration of that position. It is structured so as to: · demonstrate inconsistencies arising from my research diary set alongside some of the ‘stories’ that I constructed from interviews; · discuss how these inconsistencies point to questions of voice, authenticity, power relations and trust in the research process. As a consequence of the above, I consider issues of validity for insider-researchers, using the work of Patti Lather (1991) as a means of self-critique.