The importance of looking at someone looking through a pirates telescope. Reflections on the making of knowledge from empirical data

• Published in: Nordisk Barnehageforskning 2015
• Main Author: Ødegaard, Elin Eriksen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Barnekultur / Children's culture; Narrativ teori / Narrative theory

This article will address methodological issues concerning the making of knowledge. Drawing on a recent case study from an early childhood educational setting, I will give detailed descriptions of the process of video analysis including the process of transcription and the uses of logs. An aspiration is to create transparency by displaying an analytical process as dynamic, and show how theoretical positions and the researcher her/himself is intertwined in the construction of the empirical base, and thereby in the construction of knowledge. A meta-case is made, and will thereby serve as an example of epistemological reflexivity; how a process of analysis gives certain views and certain truths. To put it in a narrative idiom, this article contains a researcher’s learning story about the importance of looking at someone looking through a pirate’s telescope, to put it in words indicating a meta perspective on a case study called Captain Andreas and his Crew (Ødegaard 2006a, 2007). The article will also, on the basis of a creation of a meta-case, contribute to rethinking truths of children’s meaning-making, gender- and identity-work; boys using swords for battles, as the mention of pirates indicates. The article will problematize whether boys using swords for play battles necessarily can be seen as gendering stereotype masculinity.