Ethnographic locations: the geographies of feminist post-structural ethnography

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the geography of ethnography. These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research ‘site’; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in ‘the field,’ the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethnographic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.     

A feminist posthumanist political ecology of education for theorizing human-animal relations/relationships

This paper contributes to a nascent conversation in environmental education (EE) research by using ethnographic data and extant theory to develop a feminist posthumanist political ecology of education for theorizing human–animal relations/relationships. Specifically, I (1) engage feminist methodologies and theories; (2) give epistemological and theoretical attention to nonhuman animals; and (3) address the field of EE’s minimal engagement with the interdisciplinary research agenda of political ecology. The paper begins with a literature review examining how feminist and/or posthumanist scholars have theorized human–animal (or human–nature) relations/relationships. Next, I outline the conceptual frameworks guiding the analyses of ethnographic data I collected at Long Beach, California’s Aquarium of the Pacific and follow with a brief overview of the study. I conclude by outlining the major tenets of this article’s conceptual framework, which contributes to a growing conversation in EE regarding human–animal relations/relationships and lays the groundwork for other political ecologies of education.     

Multi-sited global ethnography and travel: gendered journeys in three registers

This paper joins a barely begun conversation about multi-sited and global ethnography in educational research; a conversation that is likely to intensify along with growing interest in the links between education, globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on an ongoing multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools and globalisation, this paper explores the role of travel in multi-sited global ethnography and offers a feminist engagement with it. It considers the idea of fieldwork as a travel practice through three different travel registers; the traveller’s tale, critical travel studies and travel as exile. In so doing, it illustrates the reflexive affordances each register offers with regard to the directions of our feminist inquiries into elite schools and our feminist ethnographic practices.     

“The question of belief”: writing poststructural ethnography

This article engages current poststructural debates over ethnographic representation. It questions three types of ethnographic authority: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading. In performing a form of self‐speculative critique, the author moves behind the scenes of her own ethnography, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, to consider the problem of what poststructural theories “do” to ethnographic writing. Two related themes are elaborated in relation to how poststructural debates fashioned interpretive efforts: conceptual issues in the poststructural study of teaching and theoretical issues in the production of ethnographic narratives. Can there be an educational ethnography that exceeds the constraints of humanism? What if the ethnographer began not just to question the discourse of others but to engage the relation between the discourses that render ethnography intelligible and the ethnographic report?     

Social identity theories and educational engagement

There is a large body of research in studies of schooling, particularly ethnographic case studies, which posits that collective action among students undermines engagement in school and contributes to educational inequality. In this paper I review studies of engagement from a social identity theory perspective. To what extent can collective action explain why some student groups are less engaged than others? I discuss four approaches to identifying social identity‐related problems of engagement frequently used in prior research. While researchers often find problems of engagement among low‐academic‐status students, research on educational engagement has had difficulty locating the underlying causes of inequality in student engagement. Social identity theories of educational engagement are inherently theories of collective action. I conclude that a fifth approach, large‐scale observational studies of monitoring and sanctioning, provides the best framework for identifying both the prevalence of, and solutions to, this particular source of disengagement.     

Children writing ethnography: children's perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms

This article makes a connection between narrative ethnography, childhood studies and new materialist theories in studying children's perspective on school. It presents ‘children writing ethnography’ as an approach based on complexity and involving participatory research. The question of ‘what is happening in the classroom’ is explored through writings produced in class by 10-year olds. The ‘messy’ ethnographic data are examined within the framework of narrative ethnography using the idea of ‘small stories’ that capture everyday interaction. Furthermore, both material and embodied meanings in the writings are discussed. New materialist theories and the idea of nomadic make it possible to account for the connectivity between the writings, the classroom reality, the child-ethnographers and the research, which are seen as mutually producing one another. The author suggests that engaging with children's free-flowing ethnographic writing serves as a productive way to conduct participatory ethnographic research, as well as to investigate contemporary childhoods in all their complexity.     

Market Movements and the Dispossessed: Race,Identity, and Subaltern Agency among Black Women Voucher Advocates

Critical educational researchers in the United States and elsewhere are missing something essential in their inattention to considerable support among Black urban women for market-based educational reforms, including vouchers. While the educational left has engaged in important empirical and theoretical work demonstrating the particularly negative impact of educational marketization on the disenfranchised, not enough attention has been paid to the crucial role the educationally dispossessed have actually played in building these otherwise conservative reforms. Engaging with Michael Apple’s arguments concerning processes of identity formation within conservative movement-making, we can begin to conceptualize the importance of subaltern groups in market-based educational reforms. Yet ethnographic work conducted with Black voucher mothers, school officials, and community leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, shows that this subaltern process of conservative formation does not always occur in the manner theorized by Apple and his colleague Anita Oliver, in which ideologically relatively unformed parents and families are “pushed” to the Right by an intransigent state. Although the conceptual tools they provide are the foundation of our ability to imagine a more compelling theorization of dynamics and social actors in Milwaukee, significant conceptual—not to mention empirical—work remains to be done. In this essay I renovate Apple and Oliver’s arguments concerning conservative modernization in order to make them more resonant with the processes of race, gender, subaltern identity formation and agency evident in my ethnographic field research with low-income African-American women choosing vouchers for their families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Aided by critical, feminist, and post-structural theorists both within and outside educational disciplines I assess the utility and limitations of Apple and Oliver’s framework in explaining the mobilization around ‘parental choice’ and vouchers in Milwaukee. Based on my conceptual and empirical findings, I retheorize pro-voucher African-American politicians, community leaders, and poor and working class women (and their families) as representative of a subaltern ‘third force’ in conservative formation. Their tactical investments in fleeting conservative alliances and subject positions, I argue, are likely to play an increasingly significant role in educational and social reform both in the United States and elsewhere. Thomas C. Pedroni is an assistant professor of secondary social studies methods, educational foundations, curriculum theory, and qualitative research methodology at Utah State University. His recent research has centered on issues of identity formation and subaltern agency among urban low-income predominantly African-American and Latino parents within otherwise largely conservative coalitions for publicly financed private school vouchers. His research interests also include the development of composite critical and post-structural approaches in educational theory and research, the identification of persistent exclusionary power/knowledge regimes in state-level educational reforms, and the analysis of the increasing colonization of the global educational sphere by neo-liberal and managerial forms.     

论女性主义教育研究的方法和方法论

女性主义教育研究方法是对现有多种教育研究方法的“女性主义方式”的运用 ,这主要体现在实验法、人种志和元分析等研究方法上 ;从哲学认识论层面和与社会实际生活相联系的意识形态倾向性层面来看 ,女性主义教育研究方法论的根本特点是 :反对实证主义唯科学论的男性霸权 ,科学研究也要为妇女解放服务。     

Professionalism and performativity: the feminist challenge facing early years practitioners

In this discussion paper, I seek to understand the complex interaction between notions of ‘professionalism’ and gendered identity constructions against the backdrop of increased state regulation and demands for performativity in the early years. I seek to explore the ways in which ‘teacher professionalism’ is constructed by government and how this transcends into a ‘discourse of derision’, which then becomes a subtle, yet powerful, means of controlling this occupational group. I conclude by presenting an alternative feminist conceptual framework for assessing the gendered nature of identity formation, and as an opportunity to consider the role agency can play when seeking to resist/renegotiate the rapid and powerful policy reform agenda in the early years.     

Funds of relationality: social bonds and science learners

In this response to Konstantinos Alexakos, Jayson K. Jones, and Victor H. Rodriguez, I will focus primarily on the importance of relationality for the development of a science learner identity. Along the way I will review (1) The cultural dynamics involved with the formation and sustenance of relationships in social life; (2) The methodological advantages of ethnographic inquiry for exploring funds of relationality; (3) The importance of relationality for science innovation throughout the pipeline of scientific training from K-12 schooling all the way through scientific breakthrough; (4) The absolutely vital role that relationality plays in creating a science learner identity. Finally I highlight how collaborative ethnography, in particular, is an excellent tool for seeking out funds of relationality that can be marshaled in the classroom as well as contributing to conceptual advancement in the theoretical vocabulary of relational sociology.     

Moving Away from “Failing Boys” and “Passive Girls”: Gender meta-narratives in gender equity policies for Australian schools and why micro-narratives provide a better policy model

In this paper I argue that the move towards devolved modes of educational governance provides significant opportunities for feminist and pro-feminist constructionist research to impact on the types of “gender work” used by schools. Research-based understandings of gender in schools have been on the defensive in Australia and elsewhere for a decade, as demands for performative social justice policies coalesce with popular and governmental attention on the educational problems of boys. However, feminist and pro-feminist researchers can re-attain legitimacy in the policy field by marketing localized understandings of gender micro-narratives as improvements on the negative “failing boy” meta-narratives pursued by mainstream gender equity policy interventionists. While the popular, media-driven understanding frames gender as a constraint on educational access and participation, constructionist research identifies masculinity and femininity as changing constructs that produce highly specific and localized power relations. In the final part of the paper I consider the positioning of constructionist gender research in the federal government commissioned report Meeting the challenge: Final report on the boys’ lighthouse project, which demonstrated that feminist and pro-feminist readings of gender can attain legitimacy at the local level.     

Critical intercultural conversations: using activity systems analysis as a tool for educational ethnography

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the tensions that exist between the recognition of the importance of ethnicity and culture for individual and group identities without essentilisation, by reframing conceptualisations of multi- and interculturalism. Drawing from our ongoing ethnography conducted with a research community of Alaska Native PhD candidates involved in participatory action research, we examine how situated and multiple positionalities enacted through participation in Engeström’s concept of an ‘activity system’ can: (a) contribute to the ‘doing’ of ethnography and provide an analytic framework for ethnographic research; and, (b) contribute to understandings of multi- and intercultural education that promote the questioning of hierarchical power structures through dialogue aimed toward equity and social justice.     

Conceptualising technology practice in education using Bourdieu's sociology

Evidence from large-scale studies of primary and secondary students’ technology practices at school over the last decade show disparities in student practices and suggest that schools need to do more to cater for all students. Research that explores the influence of social and cultural factors may be useful for understanding such inequality in student practice. Bourdieu’s theory of practice [(1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. London: Cambridge University Press] is proposed as an example of a sociological theory that can be adopted in educational technology research to move towards understanding the wider complexities of technology practice. To encourage discourse and application of Bourdieu’s sociology in the field of educational technology research, this paper provides an introduction to the theory, a review of its application in research of primary and secondary students’ technology practice and relevant conceptual work. The paper presents a conceptual framework based on Bourdieu’s theory that has been developed through two recent studies, and review of empirical and conceptual works and invites its application in future research so that it can be critiqued and further developed.     

Shifting positions in physical education – notes on otherness,sameness, absence and presence

Currently, ethnographic interest in leadership is relatively sparse. This paper's focus derives from research about integrating diversity in leadership, and how some leaders are included and excluded from organisational influence in Further Education. Specific interest is in methodological opportunities to research leadership as observed behaviours in sensitive contexts of diversity. Three issues are foregrounded. Firstly, it is argued that notwithstanding the importance of interviews and biographies, research without observation underestimates the significance of whether what leaders do in relation to diversity is what they say they do. A second issue lies in considering whether data collected over seven months during intensive two-day case site visits, might legitimately be labelled ethnography. Thirdly, the ethical issues in defining and researching the diverse characteristics of actual and potential leaders are considered. Conclusions confirm a need to research leadership ethnographically not least to prevent critical perspectives about leadership, diversity and equality being air-brushed from studies of educational administration.     

Becoming artist,becoming educated,becoming undone: toward a nomadic perspective of college student identity development

In this article, I place my ethnographic project among undergraduate university art students and their professor in dialog with Rosi Braidotti’s figuration of the nomadic subject and her reflections on the importance of creating theoretical alternatives for mapping the embedded and embodied social positions that we inhabit. As educational interlocutors, college students must negotiate expectations and categorizations about age-appropriate relations, career paths, and identity passageways, which are always already framed by Western psychological development discourses. Interested in loosening the grip of these closure-seeking and normalizing discursive practices, I argue for a revision of identity development grounded in a nomadic theory of the subject and engage my data through an alternative analytic of arts-informed assemblage in light of Braidotti’s ideas. In so doing, I uphold my feminist commitment to do theory as both critique and creativity, bringing into view poetic-enough writing and imagery as a response to the question how is it to be in the process of becoming?     

People,process, and paradox: qualitative research as journey 1

Qualitative researchers have made some provocative assertions about ethnography: [a] in research on dynamic processes, questions change, and therefore research tools change; [b] in ethnography, the researcher is the instrument; and [c] ethographic research is characterized by researcher “self‐doubt.” This article reflects on the nature of ethnographic research in light of experiences I gained while investigating the role of literacy in the lives of Hmong refugees in Philadelphia. By discussing three people that I came to know, I explore each of the assertions and examine my own shifts in perspective during the research process. Finally, I reflect on the idea of self‐doubt and suggest that it may characterize not only the research process but also the lasting consequences of inquiry. The paper illustrates the paradox that the dangers and discomforts contribute to the power of the ethnographic enterprise.

     

Critical ethnography: The reflexive turn

This paper explores the recent debates on ethnographic writing by explicating four types of reflexivity: confessional, theoretical, textual, and deconstructive. It then illustrates how the author has incorporated such reflexive practices into his recent ethnographies. The paper generally advocates blending autobiography and ethnography into a ''cultural Marxist'' standpoint. This perspective also draws upon multiple epistemologies and feminist notions of science, and it highlights the importance of writing in ordinary language. Such narrative experimentation aims to replace the old scientific ethnographic realist narrative style with a more reflexive realist narrative style. The author argues that reflexive epistemological and narrative practices will make ethnography a more engaging, useful, public storytelling genre.     

Ethnographic approach to second life in education: a focus on technological difficulties

This paper moves from the data collected during an ethnographic research conducted in Second Life, which focuses on the observation of different technological difficulties in educational experiences. The main research interests focused on the social dynamics of educational experiences in Second Life and the opportunity to develop a proper research methodology. The main goal is to evaluate the educational experience in such a particular context through the stories of participants; therefore, the most appropriate methodology for researching the subject has been considered to be ethnography. As result of the research, it is observed that an appropriate use of the available tools and the adoption of innovative teaching strategies can promote the improvement of the educational experience in online worlds. This paper suggests interesting elements from the analysis of the data collected, which may help to adopt an innovative point of view on ethnographic research in an online world in education.     

Telling better stories: Toward critical,place-based,and multispecies narrative pedagogies in hunting and fishing cultures

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the ethical and educational functions of storytelling in fishing and hunting practices and pedagogies. I explore various psychological, anthropological, and ethical theories surrounding storytelling as a way of encouraging deeper, more robust engagement among humans, nonhuman animals, and myriad beings that exist alongside of us in our multispecies communities. Drawing on animal studies, narrative theory, and critical pedagogy as well as ongoing qualitative research, I offer potential ways of incorporating a wider “ecology of stories” into situated hunting and fishing practices to engage more ethically with the people and beings that dwell in a given place.