To a natural scientist (or the teacher with a background in the natural sciences), some research reports in education other social sciences must seem rather personal compared to the dry, third-person accounts they are used to reading.
Many research papers in the social sciences are written in the first person, and have an almost biographical nature.
These accounts may include features of personal history that 'explain' research interests, or include anecdotal material to indicate how hunches arose.
false starts, rather than being omitted, may even seem to be celebrated in some arose.
False starts, rather than being omitted, may even seem to be celebrated in some reports.
This type of writing is not ubiquitous in educational research, but is common in studies from ERP2, where it is recognized that research has a subjective element.
If a researcher sees herself as an integral part of the context being studied, interacting with the informants in a process of co-constructing data (see Chapter 3), then it makes sense to write an account where the researcher's role is recognized rather than obscured.
It is sometimes suggested that when a practitioner writes up their research in third person style (the teacher-researcher interviewed the student', rather than 'I interviewed the student), this is dishonest as it attempts to present to present an objective account that underplays the researcher's intimate involvement in the research context, and so give the impression that the (teacher-)research was able to stand back and observe as an outsider.
Some new teacher-researchers do adopt this third-person style, and usually there is no intended dishonesty, but rather an attempt to emulate what they believe research writing is meant to be like.
The author once read an assignment from a trainee teacher offering an account of both an observation of a teacher's lesson and of how-at the end of the lesson-the observer approached the teacher and offered a rather critical evaluation of the teaching observed.
I was concerned about this assignment at two different levels. For one thing, the trainee was meant to have critiqued his own teaching and not that of one of the teachers working in his placement school.