A matter of scale: multi-scale ethnographic research on education in the United States

ABSTRACT

In recent years, cultural anthropologists conducting educational ethnographies in the US have pursued some new methodological approaches. These new approaches can be attributed to advances in cultural theory, evolving norms of research practice, and the affordances of new technologies. In this article, I review three such approaches under the rubric ‘multi-scale ethnography’. Each approach responds to the desire to understand cultural forms that extend beyond single sites and the capabilities of single researchers; each pursues cultural forms that ‘travel’ across spaces, levels, and times. The three approaches are multi-sited ethnography, meta-ethnography, and comparative case study. I view these approaches not as replacements for older forms of ethnography but as complements that extend the contextualisation and generalisability of traditional ethnography.     

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.     

Investigating the lives of new teachers through ethnographic blogs

This article addresses key issues embedded within what some commentators are describing as a ‘virtual’ or ‘digital’ ethnography. Namely, that through the adoption of new (virtual) spaces for ethnographic inquiry it is possible to trouble previous notions of site, place, space and meaning when collaborating in online fields. This article is located within a growing international debate in the field of education concerning digital ethnographic methods. While addressing the issues of what is ‘virtual ethnography’ the article draws briefly upon research based on a period of online ‘field work’ which has lasted for 18 months, exploring the transitional habitual social practices of new teachers as they enter first-time full-time employment in the UK This inquiry positions both the researcher and participants as co-constructors of both the site of virtual interaction, and to a certain extent, as collective decision-makers as what contributes as field and field notes. The article will explore the emerging methodological practices behind this virtual ethnography, exploring the potential use of blogs as an ethnographic tool.     

Researching school choice in regional Australia: what can this tell us about the ethnographic imaginary?

This is an exploration of methodological debates related to ethnographic research. Reflection on conducting research on school choice in an Australian regional centre is the beginning point for a discussion of what Appadurai describes as a dialectical relationship between the neighbourhood and its capacity to exist and reshape itself in relation to outside forces. The place of the researcher is considered in relation to a regional context and the possibility that within such a context, the urban researcher could be a ‘stranger’. The notion of the ‘strange’ researcher is used to explore belonging and through it, geographic imaginaries of regionality. The case is made that the production of locality in this region contributed to a researcher ‘lock out’ because local knowledge about school choice was being unsettled. The paper takes up the question of how research in a region can contribute to understandings of ethnographic research as unbounded.     

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.     

Making links: on situating a new web site

Visual ethnographers increasingly use hypermedia for research, representation and teaching and learning. This article discusses these uses by reflecting on Visualising ethnography, a teaching and learning ‘gateway’ web site about the visual in the ethnographic process housing interviews, authored works, exhibitions, introductory texts and links. Here I situate the web site in relation to other visual anthropology web sites, discuss key characteristics of hypermedia for teaching and learning and representation and analyze both how authors, the web developed and I constructed our contributions, and users' responses. Finally I discuss the role and potential of such web sites for contemporary representation, teaching and learning in visual ethnography. Many new web sites are developing; how might they ‘live together’ and interrelate online? And what are the implications for the sorts of teaching and learning sites that might be developed in the future?     

The importance of familiarisation when doing research with young children

Becoming familiar with ‘the field’ location and its inhabitants is a natural and important part of ethnographic research. However, little has been written about how operationalising a ‘familiarisation period’ within an ethnography can form the foundation on which fieldwork can be built. By reflecting on the experience of employing a familiarisation period within an ethnography with young children, this paper explores how key principles may be used to enhance research practice. The paper argues that the outlined principles of familiarisation are an important aspect of ethnography which need to be engaged with at the start of a study and also form a part of the reflexive process of ‘being in the field’. It is also argues that the familiarisation can be an important tool in effectively accessing children's ‘voice’ and working with so-called ‘hard to reach’ groups.     

Choosing not choosing: the indirections of ethnography and educational research

This paper argues for the importance of ethnography in the conduct of educational research and the ways in which it can threaten, in a good sense, the certainties and dominance of performativity. The paper uses the poetry of Emily Dickinson to signal the importance of indirection in the conduct of ethnographic work and, more specifically, the ways in which she ‘chooses not to choose’ in her work. Her work is used to illustrate the complexities of meaning in what we see and hear in the conduct of research, the impossibility of mapping (in any ultimate sense) experience and identity and the indeterminacy we need to ‘hold’ in the stories we tell. The intention of the paper is to underline our necessary obsession with language in the processes of educational inquiry. The paper deliberately tries to echo its ‘message’ in refusing to ‘spell things out’ too closely for the reader.     

Self‐reflection and resilience in educational research

This article revisits the critical realist ethnographic process that was adopted in my doctoral thesis, which was concerned with the experiences of ethnic identity of white British and Pakistani British children as they started kindergarten in the northwest of England. The article focuses on the ethnography that emerged from the visits that I carried out alongside staff to children's homes before they started kindergarten and on the way in which these were portrayed and analysed in the final thesis. I conclude that the process of observation, writing field notes and then producing a fuller ethnography produced a very partial representation of the empirical world. This was problematic in that, in critical realism, what is observed in the world of the ‘empirical’ and considered in the world of the ‘actual’ forms the basis for understanding the underlying causal tendencies which point to the underlying explanatory concepts in the world of the ‘real’. I argue, however, that more careful critical realist ethnography has the potential to be a powerful methodological framework which accepts the contested nature of reality but which, unlike postmodernism, provides a means of addressing possibilities and of moving beyond ‘undecidability’.     

What is ethnography? Can it survive? Should it?

This paper notes that, in the field of education and beyond, the term ‘ethnography’ has acquired a range of meanings, and comes in many different versions, these often reflecting sharply divergent orientations. I argue that this is a major problem that requires attention; particularly since today there are some serious threats to the practice of ethnographic work, on almost any definition. However, while we need to forge greater agreement about the meaning of the term, this is a challenging task. Indeed, if we take ‘ethnography’ to refer to a whole methodological approach little agreement will be possible. I argue that it may be feasible if we treat ethnography as one methodological strategy among others, each having varying advantages and disadvantages for the purposes of investigating particular topics. However, the fundamental disagreements among ethnographers today about ontological, epistemological, and axiological matters render even this by no means unproblematic.     

The ‘will to give’: corporations,philanthropy and schools

In contemporary times, corporate philanthropy is positioned as an effective means to ‘solve’ a variety of social problems. Childhood obesity is one such ‘problem’ that has captured the interests of schools, corporations, industry groups and a number of ‘not-for-profit’ players. In this paper, I critically examine how the private sector uses the notion of philanthropy to shape school-based solutions to obesity and unhealthy lifestyles. By conducting a critical ethnography in two New Zealand primary schools and drawing on Foucauldian notions of government and ‘practices of assemblage’, I illuminate how a number of organisations officially planned to employ philanthropy as a means to govern others, as well as what actually happened when these plans met their intended targets: children, teachers and principals. Although corporations, charities and schools were assembled together through their combined ‘will to give’, the notion of philanthropy helped to re-assemble and re-invent private sector organisations so that they were seen to be socially responsible, healthy, and even educational. Philanthropy also worked to mask private sector players less altruistic interests: branding, public relations strategies, avoidance of stricter regulations and legislation, and the desire to profit.     

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.     

Ethnography: problems and prospects

This article reviews a range of difficult issues that currently face ethnographic research, and offers some reflections on them. These issues include: how ethnographers define the spatial and temporal boundaries of what they study; how they determine the context that is appropriate for understanding it; in what senses ethnography can be—or is—virtual rather than actual; the role of interviews as a data source; the relationship between ethnography and discourse analysis; the tempting parallel with imaginative writing; and, finally, whether ethnography should have, or can avoid having, political or practical commitments of some kind, beyond its aim of producing value-relevant knowledge.     

Constructing and educating 'problem children': the case of post-communist Estonia

Estonia is a post-communist Baltic state in which neoliberal market ideologies and still prevailing socialist norms exist side by side in educational policies and practices. It is no longer self-evident what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘problematic’. Special education class for students regarded as having problems is a new innovation in Estonia. The paper analyses the history and current changes and discusses how a ‘problem child’ is constructed in Estonian teachers' perceptions and in the pedagogical methods used with these children. The paper draws on teachers' writings and on an ethnographic study in a special education class. Some comparisons with Finnish educational policies and ethnographic research on secondary schools are made. The findings suggests that in Estonia, a ‘problem child’ is a student who does not conform to the norms of the school, and in focus is behaviour that disturbs the teacher: problems in relation to schools' regulations of time, voice, embodiment and equipment, lack of engagement and unruly behaviour. We reflect the Estonian case with some comparisons with Finland using the concept ‘professional pupil’ introduced in an ethnographic research.     

List of reviewers for 2011, Volume 24

In qualitative research, the researcher’s engagement over time in participants’ daily lives entails the creation and maintenance of favourable and cooperative field relations. With this aim, it is important to build a reflexive component into the research, exploring how the researcher and researched interact with each other within the context of school and how they are challenged by political and ethical dilemmas. Drawing upon my experience while conducting an ethnographic study in an international school in mainland China, I reflected on two issues: what field relations were established in what ways, and what threads to ethics and research validity I encountered in the course of the fieldwork.     

An ethnographic eye on religion in everyday life

There are many pitfalls associated with teaching about religions. One such pitfall entails the risk of presenting religions as stereotypical monolithic systems; that is, all who belong to a particular religious tradition think and act in the same way. I like to call this sort of stereotyping the ‘robotic tendency’ because it has a habit of reducing practitioners to robot-like beings that uniformly perform identical actions. This article concerns how the adoption of what I have termed an ‘ethnographic eye’ can help educators to avoid both unfortunate stereotypes and the robotic tendency when teaching about religions.     

Muslim researcher researching Muslim youth: reflexive notes on critical ethnography,positionality and representation

As a Muslim researcher conducting a critical ethnography about/with/for Muslim youth and their school experiences, at this time of intensified Islamophobia and overwhelming discourses of hate against Muslims, the boundaries of the personal and the academic become blurry and confusing. This paper emerges from my subjective/academic experiences as a Muslim researcher, and my reflections on reflexivity, positionality and representation while conducting my ethnographic research in a high-school setting with Muslim youth. In this paper, I present a review of the different concepts of critical ethnography that are framing my research decisions and I highlight the complexity of the insider/outsider positionality for a Muslim researcher doing research with Muslim youth and the intersections of religion, gender, class, ethnicity and age in positioning her in the field. The paper presents different ethical dilemmas that I have encountered during the first six months of my fieldwork.     

Observant participant: carnal sociology and researcher identity in religious educational spaces

The ethnographer’s embodied action during research is a complex of habit, belief, social and institutional positioning, and intention. This article examines what urban anthropologist Wacqaunt calls ‘carnal sociology’ and considers its implications for ethnographers of religious educational spaces. Contemporary ethnographers of education have renewed their interest in religious educational spaces—religious schools, houses of worship, public festivals. In conducting research in the field of religious education, ethnographers often cross familiar and unfamiliar boundaries, engaging in forms of participant observation and practice beyond their own religious categories: we research in religious spaces and with religious communities different from our own commitments. Drawing on interactional data from a multi-year ethnography of an urban Catholic school and parish in Philadelphia (USA), I consider how my own embodied participation in the religious rituals of the school and parish led to a reflexivity on practice, and initiated institutional and youth-driven social positioning in response.     

Creating class-B: using a key symbol to become literate in educational discourse

This article addresses teacher training as a process of becoming literate in educational discourse. Through ethnographic research of a project for training science and math lecturers in educational practice, I follow how participants created a concept they called ‘Class-B’ to symbolise progressive educational discourse. Bringing the concept of key symbol and a New Literacy Studies approach to the analysis, I show how literacy in educational discourse is worked out and elaborated around the symbol of Class-B. The ethnography teaches us that key symbols can be keys to literacy, and perhaps be considered as a useful tool for teacher trainers.     

From school militarization to school securitization: national security finds its place in schools

This ethnography explores daily life at Milton High School, a US public school with its own specialized Homeland Security program. From ‘military grunts’ serving in distant theaters of war to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents defending the US borderlands to National Security Administration (NSA) technicians monitoring worldwide cyber communications, Milton’s Homeland Security program trained students for the multiple permutations of the global war on terror. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Milton, this article offers an analysis of what I call ‘school securitization’. While growing critical education scholarship importantly investigates the intensification of militarized education evident in the rise of military charter schools and harsh disciplinary regimes, this ethnography documents how other actors like major defense contractors, security companies, and federal agencies contributed to the school’s remaking. Broadening the analytical framework of school militarization to school securitization accounts for the range of actors, institutions, epistemologies, and security-oriented beliefs beyond the military that shape public education for the production of violence.