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Our research over the past two decades has involved a series of projects researching English Primary School teachers' interpretations of and adaptations to a range of state education initiatives in an era of intensive "reform". In this work we have used an approach to empirical research that has adopted an interpretivist stance underpinned by a loose body of Symbolic Interactionist theory. Social researchers guided by this theoretical framework necessarily need to focus on actors' meanings, motivations and interpretations. Social reality has "many layers of meaning". Our task therefore, was to attempt to penetrate the various "layers of reality" of the social setting of teaching (schools and classrooms). This required understanding the social lives of schools and teachers and that we took the role of the other by putting ourselves in the participants' position, looking at the world with them. What our interpretations of the empirical studies showed was that the effects of restructuring the education system in the UK and the responses of the teachers to the process were both complex and contradictory. Teachers' interpretations and reactions could not simply be read off from official policy prescriptions. Ethnography helped us to understand the implications reforms had for teachers, how they are experienced and interpreted them and the affects on teaching. In order to illustrate the ethnographic approach developed by us in various studies this chapter focuses on one project Primary Teacher Identity, Commitment and Career in Performative Cultures.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_37

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