Grounded Theory and Disability Studies: An Investigation Into Leg ...

working out strategies of bringing together meaningful data and eventually trying to adapt existing theories of mainstream learning that were more suited to this pedagogy rather than andragogy. I then reprepared this model in order to make meaning of the activities that I observed in the classes that I started to attend.

As this study developed over the course of the first few weeks, I began to realize that the environment I was a part of had less to do with the students’ blindness per se and more to do with the social and cultural conditions that the participants were brought up in. In particular, I believed that the type of education that the participants had as children, even though some of them were now in their 80s, affected their behaviour in art classes more than their level of blindness did (Hayhoe, 2000b, 2008a). As a consequence, I widened my research to investigate the history of education for early blind students, or those students who were born blind, in institutions such as schools and museums. I looked particularly at students who had been blind since birth or early childhood and attempted to find similar students to see if they were having the same experiences. In addition, I expanded the range of participants in the study, gained permission to work with students in summer courses at Bristol University, and talked to professional artists and school teachers in order to see if there were differences in their experiences and those of the participants in Leicester.

After finishing this fieldwork in Leicester and Bristol more than a year later, I applied a model of social-psychological analysis, based on a framework of beginner versus experienced mainstream students (Doyle, 1979), the closest equivalent I could find to the blind students who had had no or little experience of art education as children. In addition, I presented a history of art education in schools for the blind and museums as a separate study in the eventual thesis and the resulting papers (Hayhoe, 1995, 2000b, 2003, 2008a, 2008b). However, my dissatisfaction with this interpretation of these separate phenomena motivated me to develop new studies.