Geographies of data generation: learnings from mobile interviews with teacher leaders in Scotland

A home office and a housing development, a suburban park and a village football pitch, online networking sites and the physical site where three bridges span an estuary, four cities on four continents, and a ruined chapel perched on the side of an extinct volcano. All these are places I explored between February and October 2022 with educators participating in my EdD study into how teacher leadership is understood and experienced in Scotland, as we generated data together.

The voice of educators who self-identify as teacher leaders is largely absent from the field of teacher leadership research. In this paper, I explain how and why – in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic, an enforced period of immobility, and mindful of equitable access – my interviewees and I undertook interviews in and/or about the places and spaces that were meaningful to them in relation to their lived experience of teacher leadership.

Five of the eight semi-structured interviews were ‘go-alongs’ (Kusenbach, 2003). We met in person and data were generated as we moved through the environment – natural or built - experiencing it together. Three interviews were virtual tours. One followed a route plotted on a digital map. Two comprised photographs of two or three places, most, though not all out of doors. These interviews can be characterised as being mobile due to the explicit focus on place/space, and the use of technology to share (move) this information across space and time (Brooks & Waters, 2018).

In closing, I share insights about the meanings of the chosen locations, the overall contribution of mobile methods to my doctoral study and implications for their use in future empirical research into professional learning in educational contexts.