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Previously, positivistic and post-positivistic understandings of reality as more or less
knowable reigned over the social sciences, resulting in research which expected its
methods to reveal, or at least approximate, truths about the subjects of the research.
Despite good intentions, the conceptions of knowledge inherent in these stillprevalent
genres of research tended to promulgate research methods that assumed the
researcher as more or less unbiased however, and the researched as the ‘Other’ to be
known (Fine & Weis, 1996). However, for those grappling with what it means to do
research after the introduction of poststructuralist perspectives, it had become critical
to attend to how our inquiry affects and (mis)represents the researcher and
researched, how we understand legitimized knowledge, and how social science
research is necessarily a political act. (2005, pp. 401-2)
Rather than being seen as an unconditionally negative component of research, subjectivities
views the explication of potential prejudices and research subjectivities as an opportunity to
position the researcher (in this case, rather than research) within a clearly articulated
framework. Doing so provides opportunities for subjectivities and other potential conflicts of
interest to be openly discussed and made known to the reader, and in a sense, as Lather
describes a “…de-centering of the author” (as cited in McKenzie, 2005, p. 403) takes place.
A further subjectivity to consider is what Derrida terms a researcher’s “textual heritage”
(Berry, 2006, p. 87) in relation to research methodologies. Applied to a bricolage approach,
the following statement from Derrida demonstrates the importance of the researcher to clearly
frame disclosures, “the activity of borrowing from one’s own textual heritage whatever is
needed to produce new and different texts, with an emphasis on intertextual borrowing for the
purposes of textual construction” (as cited in Berry, 2006, p. 87). The textual heritage, of
myself as a researcher, comes primarily from the discipline of history and critical literacy in
the discipline of English. In order to construct a strong methodological bricolage for this
dissertation, I am stepping outside of a singular textual heritage in order to ensure a
strengthened reliability and validity of data analysis. This has resulted in a variety of theories
and philosophies being explicitly incorporated within this research, aligned within a bricolage
approach. These approaches take into consideration the following statement by Telles:
My past as a student, teacher, and artist was linked to my focus of interest in the
subject-matter of the thesis – teacher education and critical language awareness.
Intuitively, I sensed that many links existed. Making them explicit was the
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