‘My giant goes with me wherever I go.’ (Emerson, 1841, p. 36)
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) bemoans the fact that, when travelling, we cannot help but bring ourselves – our ‘giants’ – with us. He describes crossing the ocean and waking up in Naples only to find ‘the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from’ (Emerson, 1841, p. 36). Poor old Emerson, one might say, but what does this have to do with educational research?
As a PhD student I have encountered a similar problem. As qualitative researchers, once we arrive in a research setting how can we escape the presence of ourselves and generate objective data? And the best answer I have come up with is: we cannot.
In other words, I always bring my own giant to the setting. And this being the case, I had better find a way of accounting for my giant’s looming presence.
My doctoral research setting is a forest school. Forest school is a long-term outdoor woodland-based children’s education programme which encourages curiosity and independence (Harris, 2021). As you might imagine, it is a complex site for study. As a participant-observer in the woodland space, I often set out to observe this group of children, or that activity, only to find myself distracted and waylaid, rapidly forgetting whatever I had planned to record. I began to wonder whether my data could possibly be worth anything at all when I was clearly so very involved in its generation.
