Tactics of resilience Playing with ethnographic data on classroom practice

De Certeau's conceptualisation of everyday practice as the inventive reuse of available resources highlights the 'consumer's' creative modes of production. Research informed by this approach to practice demands methods that can capture the conditions of its situated and ephemeral ontology, then render the fragmented insights gained into a form available to others. For this reason, this chapter treats the reportage of research as an aspect of method. This chapter draws on a project involving classroom ethnographies of eight classrooms produced under the extended compulsory education of Australia's 'earning or learning till 17' Compact with Young Australians. The project ultimately aimed to help pre-service teachers understand how teachers worked in these typically fractious settings. A verbatim play was crafted from interview data because it provided a sufficiently refractive genre that allowed the teacher participants' voices to speak to the pre-service teacher as audience. By doing so, the play as research reportage invites audience members to make their own readings of the various tactics and subversions the teachers described. As a genre, it thus resists the conceit of proclaiming one authoritative interpretation or definitive generalisation about how practice in such sites should be done.