(Re)searching methods: reading fiction in literary response groups

The trouble with education research is that the research is burdened with trouble before it begins. Working as a poststructural education researcher and engaged in a recent research project that sought to engage with questions of teacher identity, I employed an alternative data elicitation method of literary response groups – similar to that of book clubs. This paper will illustrate a rationale for literary response groups, my experiences of using the method and the subsequent interpretive engagement required, namely, symptomatic analysis. Influenced by poststructural and psychoanalytic theory, I will illustrate the ways in which the literary response groups provoked the participants’ understandings of the normative discourses of “teacher,” their own desires of being and becoming teachers, and the inevitable tensions in which these discourses exist.