When the Centre Loosens: Research Design, School Life, and the Work of Repair

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’

   — W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Over the past eight weeks, I have been teaching on a Foundations of Educational Research course. Returning to research design and methods in this structured way, after a year spent immersed in questions of space, justice and repair, and amid ongoing fieldwork, has made the familiar feel unexpectedly strange. Ideas I once recognised now look different through the frames shaped by the research I am living. That strangeness echoes through my fieldwork too: the quiet loosening of coherence the moment a research design meets the living complexity of a school. By loosening, I refer to a structural unfastening: the grip of methodological order relaxing and the fieldwork opening to what it did not, and perhaps could not, anticipate. Educational research design matters profoundly because it is the first architecture that meets the life of the school. This piece sits inside that tension, tracing how possibilities for repair emerge the moment a research design begins to loosen under the lived intensity of a school day.

I write from a double position: an experienced teaching practitioner and a doctoral student still learning how research coheres on paper. Methodology has often felt familiar because it asks the same questions teachers live with every day: How do we care? What works here, with these individuals, in this moment? What does this context make possible or impossible? Yet the way we are taught to think about research design can give the impression that the centre holds, that is, that research questions expand into a design, the design yields a methodology, and the methodology gives way to the methods. This sequence produces a reassuring sense of order, enabling researchers to speak to one another through shared structures and intelligible forms. That coherence is not trivial: it makes fields possible, gives methods a shared language, and builds a form of ethical accountability into the work. But that very assurance also hides a contradiction: it imagines a steadiness that schools rarely offer. The coherence we construct on paper, rational and communicable, begins to unravel almost immediately in the field. Not as failure, but as invitation.

When Coherence Becomes Control

Having spent most of my adult life working in schools with children, I often find myself asking who, and what, this coherence in design is really for. Research architecture is not neutral. Its promise of alignment rests on a quiet assumption of control: that if the structure holds, the knowledge produced will be stable, communicable and academically recognisable. But coherence is not passive; it shapes the research, ordering and arranging what counts as intelligible. And yet the field (here the school, the moment, the children) does not always comply. It resists control. It pushes back against the order that the design attempts to impose. This resistance is not surprising given that very few designs originate from the perspectives of those they study. In resisting, it reveals that such coherence serves the academy more readily and unequally than it serves school-based research, and far more readily than it serves the children and communities who inhabit the contexts we study. It risks holding the centre together to preserve an explanation, when letting it loosen might allow an encounter to emerge.

Schools are not stable containers for research. They are complex social worlds, interwoven with families, neighbourhoods, histories and the daily emotional weather of children’s lives. Hundreds of psyches, stories and relationships gather under one roof, reshaping the atmosphere hour by hour. These are profoundly relational spaces. To treat research design as something that can fit into a site like this, even loosely, misses something essential about their aliveness. It is like asking a blueprint to hold still inside a moving landscape. The site shifts, and with it, the design must shift too. We meet time in motion, and when time is in motion, space cannot remain fixed.

The Unheimlich

To follow that question is to move towards the or uncanny (Freud,1919), the place where research design meets the strange doubleness of the school: familiar in memory, unfamiliar in practice, recognisable yet resistant. The space feels known and unknown at once. Most of us have been inside schools; many of us believe we understand them. But none of us enter as children anymore, and researchers do not enter as teachers. This is not an insider–outsider problem but a temporal one. Schools are, not exclusively but predominantly, sites of childhood, and we can no longer inhabit them as children. No amount of expertise or training returns us to that position. This temporal displacement further loosens the hold of any design, unsettling the coherence it imagines for itself. That impossibility produces a particular estrangement, not from the school itself, but from the confidence with which we imagine we know it. It makes visible why coherence slips: we are working in a space that is simultaneously remembered and misrecognised, familiar and unfamiliar, stable in concept yet unstable in practice. This is the work of the unheimlich: it recasts what we thought we knew as something that must be re-encountered, not assumed. And in that recasting, design begins to loosen; the centre does not hold, and in that loosened space, something else becomes possible.

Sitting with that tension, allowing the unfamiliar to remain present, thus becomes essential to designing research that is responsive rather than imposed, and tethered to the practice of repair. The unsettling becomes a point of friction that reveals where the design is out of alignment with the life of the school or its participants, and where repair, attentive and situated, must begin. Repair begins not when something has gone wrong, but when the researcher becomes willing to let the context speak back. From here, a terrain opens that shapes the rest of this reflection: What does it mean to ask a research design that is carefully conceptualised, methodologically coherent, and academically communicable to hold itself together in a space that is alive, porous and constantly in motion? What happens when a design crafted in the abstract meets the specificities of a school day: the noise, the atmosphere, the micro-dramas, the weather, the shifting moods of groups of children who have already lived an entire morning before they arrive in your workshop?

This is not an argument against research design or methodology. It is an acknowledgement that the forms we create on paper are always provisional. Their coherence is, in one sense, a productive fiction, an architecture that enables methods to converse and develop, but also a fiction that reveals its limits the moment it meets a school. Schools move. They shift, gather pace, emotion, interruption and surprise. And when the crafted clarity of a design meets that aliveness, method begins to loosen. Not as failure, but as invitation: an invitation to respond, to adapt, to let practitioner knowledge breathe.

Each repair occasion is necessarily local, shaped by the particularities of a moment, a group, a pairing, a room, or a glance, and in that specificity, it expands what method can become. Repair here is not a matter of returning a method to an earlier form or fixing a mistake. It is the counterpart to the productive fiction of design: where coherence enables dialogue, repair demands care. It draws method back into the ethical life of the school, into the rhythms of the children, into the discomforts that ask something of us.

I have come to see repair not as an intervention I apply, but as something the design itself calls for when it meets the aliveness of a school. The moment a design enters that world, it begins to reveal where it needs to bend, soften, or open. Not because it has “gone wrong,” but because the school context is speaking back. Each disruption, each hesitation, each activity that falters is not a failure of method; it is an opening. It asks: Why here? Why now? What is the design not yet noticing? These are, after all, the same questions practitioners ask in the flow of classroom life and naming them so narrows the divide between theory and practice, a small act of repair if we trust their interdependence. And in attending to them, the design becomes more porous, more responsive, more attuned to the specificity of the children and the spaces of a school. Thus, repair is not the mending of a broken method; it is the method becoming more alive to the encounter.

Repair in Practice

One of the earliest elements of my design was a Polaroid camera, chosen through a considered process of imagining what kind of method might invite children to move through their school differently. It had been piloted with a group of graduate researchers, refined through discussion, and brought to the school leadership team, who received it with enthusiasm. The Polaroid felt, at the time, like a tool that could hold several things at once: its tactility, its immediacy, its slight unpredictability. I imagined children walking the corridors, stopping when something caught their attention, capturing details of space that might otherwise remain unspoken or unseen. I imagined the method opening a gentle invitation or an opportunity for noticing, for lingering, for recording the textures of their school as they experience it. In practice, it unfolded otherwise. The 15-minute development time disrupted the session’s rhythm. The wait produced a suspended energy in which the children hovered near the camera, silent, their attention drifting. And when the images finally emerged, their unpredictability introduced an unanticipated shift. A tint, a shadow, an uneven exposure, features I might have read as aesthetic, became for the children signals of error. They compared outcomes, asked to retake their photographs, and worried about having ‘done it wrong.’ Quietly but unmistakably, the method had begun producing a pedagogy of correctness that the time-imposed workshops did not allow me to contest.

As a teacher-practitioner, I felt this discord unfold. Yet as a student-researcher, I was aware of the gravitational pull of the design, of wanting to honour what I had planned, what had been approved, what ‘should’ work. This was my unheimlich moment: the familiar dynamics of classroom life overlaid with an unexpected dissonance. The method did not build confidence; it fostered self-doubt. And that charged discomfort was the signal that something in the design required repair.

So, we paused. I asked the children whether we might use a different tool, one that produced images instantly. We discussed waiting and its consequences, as well as the limits of Polaroid film. Together, we changed course to an instant camera with reams of black-and-white film. This was not a minor correction in service of better data; its significance was elsewhere. It showed that the research design contains the possibility of repair if we allow the encounter to speak back. The Polaroid had not failed. It revealed where the design was insufficiently attuned to the affective texture of the room, to the ethics of care I wanted to uphold, to the children’s experience of the task. Repair, here, was the act of returning the method to relational alignment.

This, to me, is where care enters most strongly. To respond to a context is to care for it. To repair a design in the moment is to refuse to prioritise methodological coherence over the needs, comfort or rhythms of the children in front of me. It is to acknowledge the unheimlich and to let that feeling reshape the work rather than suppress it. The school’s aliveness, its organisation of power and emotion, requires this kind of responsiveness. And in responding, the research design becomes something else: not a fixed plan to be executed, but a living practice of repair.

To close, I draw on a line from Iona Opie’s fieldwork notes, recalling a time when she would arrive in a village playground with a tape recorder and be told by the headteacher, ‘[d]o you want to keep any of the children? Just help yourself’ (Opie, 2014, p.203). We have, thankfully, travelled a long ethical distance from that world. Children are no longer treated as freely extractable; their participation is no longer assumed. But Opie’s anecdote lingers because it exposes that methods, when unexamined, can still behave like that. They can quietly organise children into tasks without attending to their affective responses, their hesitations, their discomforts; they can “keep” children in the service of data while concealing the extractive logic beneath a language of rigour. This is why repair matters.

To centre repair is to centre care: to let the method speak back, to let the children speak back through their pauses, refusals, energies, and uncertainties, and to treat those moments not as disruptions but as invitations to reshape the design. Without this attentiveness, we risk reproducing a procedural ease too close to the extractive comfort Opie describes. Repair reminds us that no, we may not help ourselves to the children. But it does more than refuse extraction. It asks what actions we will take to ensure we do not “help ourselves”: what adjustments we make, what we attend to, what we repair in our designs so that children are not folded into our projects unthinkingly. In this sense, repair moves us beyond reflection and reflexivity. It refuses to let us linger in critique. It requires something of us. It insists that our methods be mended in practice, not only theorised in retrospect. And perhaps that is its most important demand: that educational research becomes accountable not only to what we understand, but to what we choose to do.

References

Freud, S. (1919). The “uncanny” (J. Strachey, Trans.). In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An infantile neurosis and other works (pp. 219–255).

Opie, I. (2014). A lifetime in the playground (Inaugural address to ‘The State of Play’ conference, University of Sheffield, 1998). International Journal of Play, 3(3), 198–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2014.977520

Yeats, W. B. (1997). Michael Robartes and the Dancer. In R. J. Finneran (Ed.), The poems (2nd ed., pp. 177–178). Scribner.