The session focuses on reflexivity as a dimension of the ‘re-visiting’ of research spaces and participants over long periods of time. In particular, we focus on the affordances of long-term research for learning about children, families, and educational spaces.  However, engaging in long-term relationships with participants or in particular sites, requires particular awareness of self and one’s own positionality. To frame the session, we draw on Grenfell’s notion of “reflexive objectivity” (Grenfell & James, 1998) to examine our own positionality within longitudinal research spaces.  The session takes a series of sustained ethnographic studies and ‘re-visits’ them with attention to reflexivity. Our aim is to illustrate how this revisiting was carried out and what results. Our papers feature examples of reflexivity related to education, language, and literacy in various contexts.

Objectives: Language and literacy educational scholarship has a long history of longitudinal ethnographic research (i.e., Heath, 1983, 2012; Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). The longitudinal nature of these studies raise critical issues related to objectivity and reflexivity. In this session, we engage in reflexive analyses of our research. Bourdieu (1977) maintained that a ‘reflexive approach’ entails both ‘research object construction’ and ‘participant objectivation’. Key to this work and a principle of his own research process was the need to constantly and continually re-visit large ethnographic data sets to reconsider findings in terms of the theories and practices that underpin them and thus affect their further elucidation.  This reflection invites differentiated and nuanced points of view about research contexts by framing the subject/researcher as object while exploring self within the context of the ethnographic data sets.

The principal objectives of the session are to: 1) revisit longitudinal and sustained examples of ethnographic literacy research; 2) revisit research conclusions related to theory and practice based on longitudinal self-reflection of research object and self; 3) offer a framework for reflexivity to serve researchers who have established long-term commitments to particular spaces and communities.

Overview: The core of the symposium will be a series of empirical language/ literacy studies, which have included longitudinal ethnographic data collection. These will be ‘re-visited’ by the original researchers in order: 1) to reconsider method and findings; 2) to extend theoretical explication; 3) to develop a more coherent understanding of reflexivity in practice from this perspective.

Scholarly Significance: Ethnography is an extremely common approach to research into language and education. Sustained research is comparatively rare but offer important findings with respect to issues of literacy, language in education, and teaching and learning. Although reflexivity is often addressed in such studies, it remains fairly limited in application.  The session is therefore extremely significant in terms of scholarship and offers a seminal account, which can shape future research.

Structure of the Session: The session features four empirical studies involving education, language and ethnographic methods in which researchers have returned to ‘revisit’ original data and findings through a reflexive mode. 

Bourdieu, P., (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. New York: Cambridge University Press. Heath, S. B. (2012). Words at work and play. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gonzalez, N., Moll, L. & Amanti, C. (2005). Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Grenfell, M., & James, D. (1998). Bourdieu and education: Acts of practical theory. Psychology Press.