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The field work report

in educational institutions

Martha Esther Faiad

1. Introduction: research writing in education Research writing in the university degree in

humanities materializes in different discursive genres that acquire different names and pursue
different objectives in each degree program and in each subject. Discuss the following questions as
a whole class:

a) What characteristics do the academic genres of research in Educational Sciences have?

Account for its circulation, its objectives and its textualization.

b) In what subjects do they appear? What names do they receive?

Chapter 4 addresses and exercises the monograph genre and training in research writing.

Unit 1 of Chapter 1 explores the relevant dimensions to describe and explain discourse
genres.

In the case of the Educational Sciences degree, research writings are usually reports of small
qualitative investigations or field work, in which an attempt is made to capture the meaning of a
situation or answer a question that the object under investigation generates for the student.
student.

These texts can be requested by the chairs as a second partial, or they can be the final reports of
the field work or research credits of the degree. Read below the definition of fieldwork provided
by the National Institute for Teacher Training (INFoD) and discuss the questions with the whole
class.

Fieldworks

1. Systematic spaces for synthesis and integration of knowledge through carrying out research
work in the field and interventions in limited fields for which there is support from a
teacher/tutor. They allow the contrast of conceptual frameworks and knowledge in real areas
and the study of situations, as well as the development of capacities for the production of
knowledge in specific contexts. As such, these curricular units operate as a confluence of the
learning assimilated in the subjects and their reconceptualization, in light of the dimensions of
concrete social and educational practice, as areas from which problems are collected to work
on in the seminars and as spaces in which workshop productions are tested and analyzed.

2. Field work develops the ability to observe, interview, listen, document, relate, collect and
systematize information, recognize and understand differences, exercise analysis, work in
teams and prepare reports, producing operational investigations in defined cases. It is
important that, during curricular development, successive field work recovers the reflections
and knowledge produced in previous periods, and can be sequenced in four-month periods.
INFoD, 2007
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a) Have you done any field work to pass any subject? Which? What did it consist of? To what
extent did it comply with the INFoD definitions?

b) What role does field work have in career development?

c) Have you already participated in any field or research credit? If so, how was it for you to write
the reports? Did the chairs give you writing guidelines, guidelines, etc.? How was writing
accompanied in the practicals?
To overcome the theory-practice dichotomy, the use of field work as a teaching and evaluation
strategy is very common in higher-level didactics. In the teaching professions and in the Bachelor's
Degree in Educational Sciences, field work is a curricular instance with its own entity. Likewise, many
subjects propose some experience in the territory during their courses. Learning to write this new type of
training involves incorporating new ways of thinking and other professional skills of the Graduate in
Educational Sciences.

2. Reading: qualitative research

The final product of the experience in the territory is a written report that must account for the data
collected through different instruments (participant observation, recording through recordings and
videos, in-depth interview, narrative biographical interview, survey, the analysis of documents, the
teacher's plans and student work, among others), and the analysis process carried out (including refuted
previous hypotheses and even asking for proposals to be prepared.

This academic type of training allows you to acquire ways of thinking necessary in qualitative
research and also trains you in the ability to capture the meanings attributed by the different
actors to the situation analyzed. Information collected from different sources must be processed
and combined to achieve an accurate understanding. This technique for analyzing empirical
information is called triangulation, “to the extent that they are combined—like the
ancient art of orientation in navigation—on the same object three or more angles of perspectives,
evidence or methodologies providing a more comprehensive frame of reference” (Bolívar, 2001:
263, cited in Alfonso, 2009: 62).
Now, how do you write that field work report? In what way does this genre reflect these cognitive
operations that the student of Educational Sciences or teachers must perform to interpret a school
class? Below are three texts that address the presentation of qualitative research results. Discuss
the questions that follow in groups and then share the answers.

The presentation of the results of the qualitative analysis presents great difficulties. This is due to
the richness of the materials analyzed and the characteristics of the methodological path of
qualitative analysis that involves a multiplicity of records of observations and interviews, a
successive series of schematic and typological approaches, and finally a conceptual discourse
that seeks to interpret a complex reality. starting from some basic concepts, it is difficult
operationalizable, and their interrelation. The presentation of all this would give rise to a
juxtaposition of texts and materials that is difficult to intelligible and surely cumbersome.
In qualitative analysis there is no possibility of making a summary of information like that
obtained through tables and charts in quantitative analysis. The path does not involve, then,
following the steps of the investigation and its successive approximations (which correspond
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more
either to the methodological support or "natural history of the research"), but in the
presentation of the central argument, conclusion of the research, which will always be
hypothetical and provisional, since every reality is susceptible to diverse readings and successive
approximations.
It is important, therefore, that after placing the problem in its context and introducing the
theoretical background and results of previous research, the conceptual argument is developed,
explaining the central concepts and their interrelation and the descriptive information is
presented, which is which exemplifies the conceptual statements and gives evidence of the
reality analyzed. (...)
In a certain way, the ideal presentation of the results goes the other way around the research
path: it starts from the presentation of the conclusions and then goes down the path towards the
descriptive data. But these are not selected at random but must respond to the conceptual
dimensions, since their function is more illustrative than justificatory, in the words of Strauss
(1989), it is an interweaving of discursive propositions with carefully selected information.
Gallart, 1993: 131

Constructing a report, as a narrative text, is carrying out a hermeneutic interpretation, where

each part acquires its meaning based on the whole, and the report as a whole depends—in turn
—on the meaning of each part. The researcher is situated between his experiences and texts
from the field, and his effort to make sense of what he experienced/collected. The selection of
episodes, voices, observations, and especially their arrangement and conjunction, create the
history of the case.
Although we have some rules for analyzing and writing the report, it is also an artistic task;
similar to the good journalist who constructs an excellent description of a reality from a case.
Clandinin and Connelly (2000) refer to the tension inherent in the researcher engaged in the task
of writing a report, situated between lived experiences and their inevitable reduction into a text.
In this situation, the researcher must deal between formal or reductionist treatments and the
faithful collection of people's words as if they were transparent in themselves. The experiences
lived or the stories told, in any case, require a “transformation”
from the personal level to the public report. (...)
Turning to alternative forms of representation (more strongly narrative, in literary and
experimental ways of writing stories, up to fiction), as argued from post-structuralism, is still
problematic. What are the valid (i.e. accepted) forms of presentation? It is a decision that
depends, as I pointed out, ultimately, on those that are accepted by a scientific community. In
any case, one thing is evident: quantitatively reducing the qualitative dimensions of experience
has begun to become problematic.
Any alternative form of representation can be employed, says Eisner (1997), as long as they
better stage experience and increase understanding. Some alternative forms of representation
have, among others, these advantages:
a) They provide a sense of particularity (individual character, distinctive qualities,
authenticity) that abstractions prevent.
b) The material presented in these alternative forms is usually more evocative than
denotative, as it is presented in a text that is more open to multiple interpretations,
which gives it a “productive ambiguity.”
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c) New modes of representation expand our ways of seeing and approaching problems,
increasing the questions we can answer.
d) Qualitative modes of representation make it possible

The teaching practice, the class situation, constitutes the empirical field where the events take
place. Analysis is a methodological and theoretical work that orders and relates various
moments, aspects, actions carried out, transforming facts into constructed data and placing
them in a network of meaning. Analyzing also includes capturing the meanings that these
practices have in their here and now for the teachers and students who carry them out in order,
based on this description full of meanings, to advance in a process of reflection that includes and
leads to an interpretation from diverse theoretical references.
It is about putting into play a process of understanding, not explanation, where meaning is
achieved from within the events and not from a position of exteriority that seeks causal
explanations.
The reference to theories arises from the data themselves, from their understanding. They ask
for the theoretical reference necessary for their elucidation. For this reason, the theoretical work
is not external, it is not the application of statements to a particular case, it is not deductive but
rather starts from the fact, transforms it into data, and requests theoretical readings that
collaborate in the understanding and interpretation, attributing new meanings to that studied
reality. It is a purely reflective and dialectical process.
It is not about making simplifying readings that fragment the facts, transforming them into
isolated objects, but about contributing to the elucidation from different readings that focus on
the complex field from some perspectives without exhausting its understanding. For this reason,
theoretical multi-referentiality is necessary that approaches the field under study from various
disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, each with specific constructions, with its own
languages, with modes of approach and construction that must be respected but that once
carried out, seek possible articulations that overcome partial and fragmented views. Articulation
and non-integration. Plurality of readings and not uniqueness. It is about establishing a
relationship, linking, articulating, conjugating what may have been fragmented. It is about
understanding, clarifying, elucidating a complex object from conjunction and not from
disjunction, but respecting the particularities of each perspective and not attempting to simplify
them from an integration that
violates the plural nature of events.
From a linear model that seeks unique meanings we move to another reticular, matrix type,
which allows the plurality of meanings and the mutual interpellation between them.
Souto, 2008: 61

Reading Guide
a) What place do descriptive data and their theoretical interpretations occupy in
qualitative research reports according to Gallart?
b) Why does Bolívar Botía maintain that constructing a case report as a narrative text is
an artistic task? What would be the benefits of this alternative way of reporting?
c) How are data and theories linked according to Souto?
d) What does Souto mean by “theoretical multireferentiality”?
Discussion
a) Relate the concepts of “theoretical multireferentiality” and “data triangulation”. Why does
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educational research work this way? Take into account the specificity of the act
pedagogical as an object of analysis.
b) What weight do the description of the observed classes and the
interpretation of them in the field work report

3. Exercise: use of data sources When constructing the report of the experience in the territory, it
is necessary to clarify from which source we collected the data: from the interview with a key
informant? From a curricular document? From the establishment's website?
All these crude sources must be present in the annex of the report. In its “Guide to field work”, the
Middle Level Didactics chair offers the following guidelines for the presentation of didactic
analysis:

It includes the analysis of the interviews and observations carried out. The presentation will
depend on the selected object of study. All analyzes must be carried out from the bibliography
given by the chair, and especially, from the bibliography corresponding to the specific teaching
chosen, since it is a didactic analysis and not an opinion on them made from the sense
common. When verbatim quotes are made from observation or interview records or
documents, they must be enclosed in quotation marks, with another font or indented and with
clear identification of the source (including the page number of the observation or interview).
Intermediate Level Didactics, “Guide for field work

Below are two fragments of field work reports for this subject. Read them carefully and answer
the questions in groups; then share the answers.