Exemplar 5

Let’s take the interactional level (b.) as an example. Consider this extract from an interview with the Director of the science centre we studied:

"Edutainment, I mean, I have, I wouldn't use it particularly comfortably but it's, it's not a word I would - I wouldn't refuse to be described as being involved in edutainment, at least certainly not in the, in the holidays we certainly are."

This extract shows quite clearly a level of ambivalence or even anxiety from the Director about how best to articulate his stance towards the word ‘edutainment’. If we look at the larger extract, including the question asked, we can see that the speaker is framing his response in terms of a discourse of authenticity (attempting to distinguish the science centre from the unreality of Disney and American models). This anxiety is confirmed too in the audio track (this particular extract is situated about three-quarters of the way through the interview; we can hear how the speaker’s voice falters and hesitates, then abruptly shuts off signifying a determination to say no more on this particular topic). The extract shows how the Director attempts to hedge his bets and in the end settles for an answer using a ‘when’ frame (we’re only about edutainment in the holidays). Rather than using the question as an opportunity to articulate the happy conjunction of education and entertainment (as he has done already earlier in the interview), he responds to the interviewer’s specific question about edutainment as though it were a challenge, and reacts somewhat defensively.

Part of this defensiveness is no doubt determined by the way the interviewer has framed the question:

BM: "When I first heard about Techniquest I heard it described as “edutainment” and I was wondering if that is a word that you associate with Techniquest or one that you stay a long way from."

By suggesting in the question that the label ‘edutainment’ belongs to a category of things one might wish to ‘stay a long way from’, the interviewer is, perhaps inadvertently, alerting the interviewee to the existence of ‘scare quotes’ around the term. In this sense, the extract is an enactment of both speakers’ co-construction of edutainment as a term whose context is potentially problematic.

We can see how this extract is traced through with context, in that the wider political-economic relations of the Science centre position it uneasily between a commercial model on the one hand and a publicly-funded model on the other. Wider contextual knowledge about how the Centre is funded and the political ‘problematic’ at the heart of it (should tax-payers’ money be used to fund an attraction that might be suspected of providing more in the way of entertainment rather than education?) enables us to understand both speakers’ circumspection and the interviewee’s hesitation. In choosing to answer the question about edutainment through making a temporal distinction between when the centre is and when it isn’t a place of edutainment, the interviewee shows an impulse both to excise edutainment, but also to acknowledge its presence. In this way he manages to present the Centre as both about edutainment and not about it, and erect an effective temporal barrier between the two. Yet this is not accomplished in a smooth or confident way, suggesting the ambivalences and instabilities at the heart of this issue remain unresolved.

How useful and/or indeed essential is this kind of distal contextual knowledge for re-users to have? We would argue that it is part and parcel of the data. If re-users elect to interrogate the dataset in order to answer different research questions (e.g. perhaps to evaluate what children learn from specific exhibits), it is clear that this context still remains not only relevant but, to a degree, structuring. That is, the particular design of the centre and its exhibits has emerged from within the problematic underlying this context and is conditioned at least in part by it. Unless a re-user knows this context, and is alert to its traces in the dataset, important dimensions of the exhibits’ framing – and hence of the possible ways in which children can interact with them – will remain obscure.

Hence, we would suggest that an important section of the contextual information provided for re-users consists of an overview of the social, cultural, political-economic and historical context that impinges upon the particular field of action. In our view, this course of action is preferable than subscribing to the actually untenable notion that the data can somehow ‘speak for themselves’.

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