Stuff I have cut out of methodology chapter

Although Charmaz (2014) argues that any interpretation of theorising of the teachers’ data
cannot stand outside my own view suggesting there is always an inherent risk of being the modest
witness Haraway speaks of, Burman, Batchelor, and Brown (2001) argue that this occurs as focus
groups members always feel as though they are encountering alien territory brought about by the
researcher’s need to introduce them to the norms of focus group discussions and moderate them.
As a result, spoken and unspoken rules and expectations may exclude certain data (Despret, 2004)
or generate “artificial data” (Demant, 2012).

Yet, what if we stayed with the trouble of a potentially artificial setting? Can a focus group
not be considered a legitimate source of knowledge if those I am working with generate data – even
if it may not be identical to that which emerges in other purportedly more natural settings? I am
inspired by Demant (2012) who suggests that we see our focus groups as active experiments, what I
might consider sites of com-posting where the data generated can be influenced by the groups
composition. Much in the same way compost relies on what is added in, Demant (2012) advocates
for careful selection of focus groups members, not to ensure validity but rather with the aim of
“inviting participants to interact in unexpected ways”. This active intra-action and co-production
between myself as researcher/moderator and people I am working with means focus groups as
method study are anything but a modest observation of facts (Haraway, 1997).

Stage II: Scroll-back interviews with Facebook

The second method I have included as part of my com-posting methodology arose in
response to the findings from the focus groups. However, it would be dishonest to state that this
was the only guiding factor. My own interests, capabilities and skills also shaped this choice, yet the
disruption caused by COVID-19 meant I had to look for creative approaches to explore teachers’
languaging ideologies which kept them and myself safe whilst remaining in accordance with
government and departmental mandates at this time. While I had not initially considered exploring
teachers’ own languaging ideologies on social media, the situation leant itself to the use of online
data whilst the findings from the focus group pointed to the need to better understand the ways in
which teachers embody and perform their languaging ideologies in everyday spaces. An exploration
of teachers’ languaging ideologies in such everyday spaces also had the potential to attend to the
feminist concerns informing my theoretical framework around what counts as valid data, particularly
when social media has been viewed as a source of informal and even unprofessional practice for
teachers (!!! INVALID CITATION !!! ). I was also interested in this approach for two additional
reasons. Firstly, I believed exploring social media data could make visible the ways in which teachers
intra-act with their own social media data to diffract our understandings of Spanish bilingualism and
our response-abilities towards this in the Australian context. Secondly, I was reminded of Haraway’s
(2016, p. 102) call for us to pay attention to our cyborg littermates and see these digital,
technological kin as “imploded entities, dense material semiotic “things”—articulated string figures
of ontologically heterogeneous, historically situated, materially rich, virally proliferating relatings of
particular sorts, not all the time everywhere, but here, there, and in between, with consequences”.
Although this helped me see the utility of social media data for my project, I still had to search for a
method for doing so.
 In December, 2019 at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference, a colleague
suggested we attend a panel where one of the presenters would be describing her honors project
which had used scroll-back method. My colleague explained that scroll-back method was exactly
what it sounded like: “a qualitative research method that works within interviews whereby a
researcher and participant ‘scroll back’ through the social media history of the participant” (Robards
& Lincoln, 2019). Initially, I was unconvinced by the simplicity of scroll-back method; however, after
seeing the honors student present, where she combined the method with Instagram posts and new
material theory in complex, innovate and provocative ways, I was confident that scroll-back method
had the potential to visibilise useful insights into teachers’ digital languaging practices and
ideologies. After the conference I researched the method in more detail, finding that despite the
prevalence of social media as prompts in interviews (!!! INVALID CITATION !!! ), there was little
research on scroll-back method itself (which differed from the prompt approach? in that it highlights
the act of scrolling through together). It can be used with a range of social media sites such as
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn and there are two main approaches to conducting an
interview with scroll-back method according to Robards and Lincoln (2019):

Long narrative scroll-back.

Friending. Participants add the researchers, and both browse each other’s timelines.
Social media patterns. An initial conversation around participants social media use.
However, this step could encompass a discussion of any topics relevant to the project at hand.

Mapping. Participants are invited to map critical incidents over a certain time period on
paper.

Scrolling back. Participants actively scrolling back through their social media timeline and
narrate posts of relevance to the topic.

Back to the future. Participants are asked to speculate about how social media and the
topic under investigation might look in the future.

Short snapshot scroll-back.

Pre-interview preparation. Participants are informed that the researchers would like to
collect screenshots of any posts relevant to the topic under investigation and can indicate if they
would like to opt-in or opt-out of this option. The following steps take place if participants opt-in.

Scrolling back. Participants share and narrate their timeline.

Collecting snapshots. Participants can take screenshots during, before or after the
interview to share with researchers.

Although previous research using scroll-back method has tended to use either the long
narrative or the short snapshot approach, I have chosen to use a modified combination of both in
this project. For this project I employed the following steps in the following order: friending, pre-
interview preparation, mapping, scrolling back, collecting snapshots (optional) and back to the
future. I also offered the teachers I worked with the option to download and save their timeline as a
PDF before the interview and redact any sensitive information beforehand to address privacy,
bandwidth and time concerns. The issue of bandwidth was particularly relevant given that all the
interviews had to be conducted online using screensharing technology. As social media timelines
load as a person scrolls through them, this can result in additional pressure on bandwidth when
combined with other powerful programs needed for online video chat and take longer to load which
disrupts the flow of the interview. I also felt that the friending and pre-interview preparation
allowed for the teachers I was working with to better understand the ethical concerns of using their
social media data when other people whose data I did not have permission to access may be
present. Thus, they had the option to redact anyone else’s information before sharing their timeline
with me. Teachers were also informed that they could unfriend me at any time. Through the pre-
interview preparation and mapping, I was able to explain in more detail how the teachers would
need to describe and speak about their social media timelines to avoid accidentally including
someone else’s data. During the scrolling back, teachers were asked to login before sharing their
screen to avoid their password being made visible online and all video chats were accessible via a
password only. It was also important for me to invite teachers to share any snapshots in order to
diffract my data and work towards honouring feminist and new materialist calls for transgressive
data that emerges from what is felt, sensed and unseen (St. Pierre, 1997) and sociolinguistic calls to
value all transemiotic practice as valid (Lin, 2019) by including multimodal texts. By giving control to
the teachers to scroll back through their feed, choose whether the remain friends and whether or
not to share snap shot, I also hoped to deemphasize my privilege as a researcher and position my
teachers somewhat as co-analysts (Robards & Lincoln, 2019).I am, however, aware that there will
always be some privilege afforded to the researcher given the nature of this research method and
my institutional affiliation. Moreover, I see scroll-back method as appropriate for thinking with and
through my theoretical framework as it allows for me to consider the agency of working with
technology as it intra-acts with other phenomena beyond spatial and temporal boundaries through
the embodied and material practice of scrolling (Barad, 2007). Thus, scroll-back method offered an
approach to everyday, transemiotic data attentive to the material and affective processes involved.

I conducted scroll-back interviews with a total of X teachers of Spanish in Australia: X

secondary teachers and X tertiary teachers. The secondary teachers were recruited via the MLTAQ
Facebook page. Tertiary teachers were contacted via email through existing networks, thus, relying
on snowball sampling. All teachers were invited to contact me to express their interest in
participating and sent a copy of the Participant Information Form and Participant Consent Form to
sign if they wished to continue. They were given copies to keep. The interviews took place using
password protected rooms on Zoom and lasted approximately 30 minutes. All interviews were audio
recorded and transcribed with transcriptions sent to participants for clarification, amendments and
confirmation before being finalized.
 Amor en los tiempos de quimera/Love in the time of chimera

Critical discourse analysis from Latin New material diffractive analysis .

American perspectives

What

- Sociolinguistic, linguistics method,

communication, media studies method
- Usually focused on European scholars
- Analysing language for themes in the
ways language is used
- Power structures
- However, a Lat Am perspective invites
non-academic perspectives, Lat Am
scholars and decolonial theory
- Published in Spanish

Why

- Recent developments in the area – two

special issues of journals
- Include Spanish language methods
(Discourse Analysis in 2019 and
Chasqui in 2018)
- Invite certain Latin American
perspectives (particularly decolonial)
into the debate which might be missed
through diffractive only reading
- Transdisciplinary: this method has come
more from linguistics, communication
and media studies (which also makes
sense with social media data)
- Attend to the type of reader I hope to
attract
 - Resist the “either or” urge
- Honour past research but use it to
speculate about the future
- Example of what a more traditional
approach looks like to help others
understand how a diffractive analysis
differs and what it might reveal that this
approach misses and vice versa aka
being response-able to my different
readers and myself (it helps to think
through the data this way first)
- Respond to some of the calls in a
diffractive analysis to deterretorialise
research by situating language education
between many disciplines and
continenets

How (Which data, how exactly?)

Multimodal semiotics, language, themes/content

analysis