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175 METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX: STRATEGIES, DECISIONS, AND POSITIONS IN THE FIELD Risky Lessons began in community forums, newspaper editorials, and radio call-in programs on abstinence-only education. I listened and read as educators and parents advanced visions of how schools can help girls and boys survive what most participating adults perceived to be a late-twentieth-century crisis of promiscuity, pregnancy, and disease among young people. I was interested in the process and outcomes of these debates. I also recognized, however, that administrative and legislative decisions were only moments in an ongoing process of curricular negotiation (Schaafsma ) that involves legislators, school boards, administrators, teachers, students, and community advocates. Thus, in addition to attending school board meetings, I sat in on middle school sex education classrooms to study the informal negotiations that would help determine what North Carolina’s abstinence legislation would mean for the state’s communities, schools, and students. I attended classes in each school daily or every other day, as the school’s and my schedule allowed. At the public middle schools, Southern and Dogwood, I sat in the rear of the classroom and acted as an observer. When time and the classroom layout facilitated more interaction with the students, I assisted girls and boys with their work (with the teacher’s permission) and chatted with them before class. The classroom at the private Fox Academy was more intimate—smaller and with fewer students . There I sat with the teacher and the students in a circle and participated in class activities. I was comfortable at each of the three schools and established especially strong rapport at Southern and Fox middle schools, where longer curricula allowed the teachers, students, and me time to get to know one another. The teacher and students at these schools threw going-away parties and designed thank-you cards for me at the close of my fieldwork. These relationships and observations helped me to explore how teachers carried out, resisted, and revised directives from administrators and politicians. I was also able to examine how students received, resisted, and revised teachers’ lessons. After each meeting, school day, or other event, I wrote fieldnotes about what I observed in the setting and my impressions and reactions to my observations. Appendix.qxd 4/12/08 7:32 PM Page 175 By interviewing members of all relevant stakeholder communities, I made sure to explore perspectives rooted in and out of the classroom and considered public debates, classroom practices, and private opinions. I spoke with community members and teachers in their homes, at coffee shops, and in their offices. I interviewed community members once and teachers twice. I also spoke with teachers between classes, over lunch, and after school. These conversations were less structured; but I often jotted notes during the exchanges as a sign to the teachers that they spoke “on the record.” Both the casual conversations and the interviews gave adults an opportunity to elaborate stories, share responses, and otherwise expand upon information I had gathered in participant observation. With parental permission, I interviewed students during sex education class or what one school called “unstructured time” (I knew this time as “recess” when I was a child). I did not interview students at Dogwood Middle School. Given the brief time she had with students, Mrs. Wilkie was reluctant to give me time during class to conduct student interviews, and the students, whom I did not know well, were unwilling to sacrifice free time for interviews. Interviews helped me understand students’ twofold perspectives: first, their reactions to the sex education they received at school, and, second, their feelings about the debates swirling around them, their sex education classes, and their emerging sexuality. Not interviewing the Dogwood students and spending less time with them in the classroom mean that I learned less about them and their experiences. Overall, interviews lasted from thirty minutes to three hours. I tape recorded and, with the help of paid transcribers, transcribed all the interviews I conducted. Like other feminist researchers (see, for example, Bordo ; Haraway ; Kleinman ; Reinharz ; Smith ), I recognize and even insist that my fieldwork and analysis reflect my social position, biography, and commitments. Within a participatory model of ethnography, the influence of these personal investments and history is “not just a problem to overcome” (Teunis and Herdt , ). According to Russell Shuttleworth, one becomes a participatory ethnographer through either a shared identity or “a prolonged intimate association with the researched group or research issue” (, ). My research indicates that...

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