Further education sector governors as ethnographers: five case studies

This paper considers how governors in the English Further Education and Skills (FE) sector examined their practice as ethnographers. The paper locates both FE governance and ethnography within the challenges of the performative and Panoptic environments facing English education. In doing so, the paper explores how the informants’ mobilisation of ethnographic methods revealed a novel lens on both governance and the role of ethnographer. Employing Grounded Theory, the paper considers how the participants negotiated philosophical questions regarding evidence, objectivity and truth. The paper suggests that despite the deep-seated complexities inherent in conducting ethnography in performative contexts, the participants generated data which painted a unique and revealing picture upon their practice as governor and researcher.     

The role of the narrator in narrative inquiry in education: construction and co-construction in two case studies

This paper explores narratives as an effective means of capturing multiple identities of research participants in complex social environments in education research. In doing so, it explores the role of the narrator in two case studies in two modes of narrative inquiry. Both studies present narratives of young people, focusing on multiple identities which are influenced by a variety of cultural and sub-cultural contexts which the participants inhabit to varying degrees. In the first case study, the researcher is the narrator; in the second, it is the research participants. The paper uses the two case studies to discuss three challenging areas in narrative research: participant voice, contextual complexities and researcher positionality and how the researcher responds to these challenges through construction and co-construction of the narratives. The authors share their strategies for addressing these three challenges in relation to the role of the narrator.     

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.

     

Writing culture; inscribing lives: a reflective treatise on the burden of representation in native research

This paper complicates the contested assumptions surrounding native research by exploring the burden of representation placed on native researchers because they are seen as insiders. This particular issue of representation is important for native researchers to consider, especially in instances where the research is on an understudied or politically charged group, because of the ways in which the socio-political climate influences both the telling and the reading of such research. Drawing on the author’s personal struggles as a Pakistani researcher conducting ethnographic research with Pakistani immigrants in the United States in the post-9/11 climate, this paper explores and critiques the role of the native researcher and the issues involved with representing understudied groups. Specifically, the paper focuses on authenticity, positionality, audience, and accountability. Thus, the paper is a call for researchers to be more reflective and to think more deeply about their positionality and its impact on the various constituents as they research and write. To encourage such reflexivity, the article provides a set of questions for researchers to consider at different stages of the research and writing process.     

Rapport and friendship in ethnographic research

Most ethnographic fieldwork texts advise us to develop rapport with research participants. Fewer warn us of the problems that might ensue. This paper focuses on rapport's relationship to friendship in ethnographic work and discusses the instrumental role of rapport, the problematic role of friendship, and confusion in interpreting rapport‐building behavior. In traditional ethnographic research, rapport is a trust‐building mechanism that primarily serves the interests of the researcher. Friendship is different from rapport and can confound research objectivity. Yet the similarity of rapport‐building behavior to friendship‐developing behavior can cause misunderstandings and feelings of deception by the researcher and her#shhis others.     

Research and the ambiguity of reflexivity and ethical practice

This paper examines the methodological dilemmas associated with analytical framing as an aspect of the research process. Doing qualitative research potentially changes a researcher – changes their sense of self, who they think they are, who they want to become. The paper examines the ethical dilemma of what that change might mean – for the project, the researcher and the participants. Would respondents be so open if they were that aware the research(er) potentially could change during the performance of the research project? What are the implications, if any, of engaging respondents with the intention of telling their story as a narrative inquiry, then analysing the data through a feminist post-structuralist lens? How does a researcher honour the perspectives of the participants, while simultaneously bringing to bear the critique and understanding provided by employing a post-structuralist lens? The paper pays particular attention to the interactive interview, as it generated possibilities for a researcher to establish a level of trust and rapport such that (emotional) stories could be heard and then later, represented as interpretations of the researcher.     

诠释：教学研究的另一种范式

教学研究的诠释学范式秉持以理解为核心的研究取向，倡导整体关注的研究视角，在研究的目的上强调教学意义及价值的追问，在研究方法上广泛运用人种志及叙事研究，在研究关系上注重研究者与被研究者平等关系的确立。     

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.     

Transformative education for culturally diverse learners through narrative and ethnography

This article presents a study of the effects of creating a bridge between the narrative and ethnographic methods and writing processes as a means to more effectively educate teachers of culturally diverse learners. Ten teacher participants from a Masters of Education (M.Ed.) degree program in Bilingual Education at a university in the northwestern United States took a sequence of courses in which instructor-researchers taught them narrative and ethnographic pedagogy, theory, and methodology. Through qualitative methods, instructor-researchers analyzed teacher participants’ personal narratives and ethnographic case studies for generative themes. In discovering the commonalities of themes between these two methods of inquiry, the research reveals the value and transformative nature of building a bridge between narrative and ethnographic methods. The following overlapping generative themes were voiced by teacher participants: (1) awareness of self and others; (2) consciousness of educational issues and their implications; (3) transformative action and advocacy. These themes are substantiated with related literature and further elucidated upon in the paper.     

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.     

Franz Rosenzweig and the Elementary School Teacher: A Midrashic Re-Viewing of an Experiment in Adult Education

This article proposes to read events of the educational past not as history but as midrash. It juxtaposes an historical account of a watershed experiment in adult education (Franz Rosenzweig's Freie Judisches Lehrhaus) with an ethnographic account of a presently practicing elementary school teacher. These accounts are generically different and historically distant from one other, but, through association and conversation, there emerges from them some challenging suggestions about how knowledge is born of speech, how learning includes teaching, and how teaching is predicated on desire. Viewing the Lehrhaus project from a “midrashic” stance, invites an enlarged reading of it as an educational experiment and poses questions about the interpretative potential in the intersections between narrative research genres.     

“Until I Became a Professional,I Was Not,Consciously, Indigenous”: One Intercultural Bilingual Educator’s Trajectory in Indigenous Language Revitalization

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking Indigenous bilingual educator’s trajectory as she traversed (and traverses) from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language revitalization across urban, periurban, and rural spaces. Neri Mamani grew up in highland Peru and at the time I met her in 2005 was a bilingual intercultural education practitioner enrolled in master’s studies at the Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB-Andes) at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Drawing from my ethnographic research at PROEIB that year, situated also within a broader context of my ethnographic research on bilingual education in the Andes across several decades and Neri’s life trajectory across those same decades, this paper analyzes her narrative as it emerged in a 4-hour interview with me. I argue that Neri and her peers’ recognizing, valorizing, and studying the multiple and mobile linguistic, cultural, and intercultural resources at play in their own and others’ professional practices around bilingual intercultural education enable them to co-construct an Indigenous identity that challenges deep-seated social inequalities in their Andean world.     

Parents' experiences of support: co-constructing their stories

The aim of this paper is to present a way of supporting parents that can lead to positive outcomes for families. The findings and processes from a study in England of six parents' experiences of support services for their young children with special needs are discussed in making the case that co-constructing the stories of parent and researcher experiences can become a valuable conduit for improving support. An ethnographic case study approach with narrative analysis was used, and this paper shows how the parents' narratives, interwoven with the reflections of the researcher/early years professional, suggest engaged listening as a way forward for professionals and parents (as well as researchers) to understand each other. Stories that each party is fearful of telling or hearing illustrate the balance of fragility and resilience in their assumptions and relationships.     

Children's Interpretations of Biblical Meal Stories: Ethnographic Intertextual Voicing as the Practice of Hospitable Pedagogy

Based on the ethnography conducted by Magrini in three midwestern United Methodist congregations, this article examines the development of “ethnographic intertextual voicing,” which describes multiple contexts and the ways in which these contexts influence representation of the participants and in turn, create in a community of learning. The ethnography studied children's interpretations of biblical meal stories, Eucharist experiences, and reflections on daily meal practices. Magrini's hospitable pedagogy approach was applied with 25 children ages 5 through 11. The hospitable pedagogy approach created a teaching and learning environment through which ethnographic intertextual voicing emerged. The author argues that ethnographic intertextual voicing is influenced by familial, ethnic, and faith contexts, as well as those of the researcher, and can create a community of learning as a result of the ethnographic research itself through the practice of hospitable pedagogy as a research methodology.     

Levels of knowing in ethnographic inquiry

Many texts that offer guidance to beginning researchers suggest that the competent ethnographer, while attempting to portray participants’ ways faithfully and accurately, should also demystify the research process through open revelation, self‐monitoring, and self‐evaluation. This paper illustrates the complexities of ethnographic inquiry by examining critically a study of literacy‐related activities of nursery school children and their teachers. Four stages of researcher development are proposed and described as a heuristic device in order to trace and expand issues germane to ethnographic research. The paper attends to some current concerns about contemporary discourse on research methodology, particularly how to make sense of the content‐specific issues that surface as a result of research, and also the experience itself of doing the research.     

Strength,Sharing and Service: Restorying and the legitimation of research texts

This article uses data from a longitudinal qualitative research project exploring the experiences of elementary teachers as they both learnt and taught science in the transition from a pre‐service to an in‐service situation. Interviews, journal entries and observations were the original data sources from which case studies were derived by narrative analysis. The material used in this article concerns a single participant. The purpose is to examine a narrative device, restorying, and explore its usefulness as a way of enhancing legitimation in narrative inquiry. Three sets of criteria for legitimation of qualitative studies are suggested; a set that requires research to be conducted in ways that provide evidence of thoroughness and fairness; a set that allows the reader to experience vicariously the world of the participants; and a set concerned with the ways in which education is enhanced for researcher, participants and reader. The authors suggest that a single text cannot fully satisfy all of these criteria sets but that by using multiple tellings or restorying, the legitimation of findings in qualitative research can be enhanced.     

How a verbatim drama based on the lived experience of women casual academics in Australia resonated with its audience and transformed a narrative inquiry into an action research project

This article discusses how a performed drama based on a narrative inquiry into the lived experience of women casual academics in Australian universities is understood by an audience. The audience, principally comprised of casual and ongoing academics, described the drama as authentic and personally recognised many of the main scenarios and preoccupations re-presented. In particular, they identified that the drama’s re-presentation of casual academics’ feelings of insecurity, precarious collegial relationships, and a lack of belonging and voice strongly resonated with them. The presentation also provoked them to communicate their own lived experiences of academia, which constituted a second set of narrative data. Moreover, when the audience was invited to engage with and respond to performed data they became active and collaborative participants in the research project by sharing personal insights and narratives which extended the scope and depth of the initial research project. Therefore, a public re-presentation of narrative research can transform narrative inquiry research into an action research project if the researcher adjusts her/his research approach and accepts that the audience narrative response can function as a second phase of data gathering. Adjusting to the emergent generation of data in turn further democratises research processes and relationships.     

Taking a Cue in the Inner-City

This article uses a narrative analysis approach to explore the stories of student teachers' experiences developing a teaching persona during student teaching. In keeping with the narrative format, the researcher presents the participants' stories in a first-person narrative. The participants had similar experiences in the realm of developing their teaching personae: two common themes included their ideal versus actual personae and past and present influences on personae. Findings indicate that pre-service teachers carefully consider their teaching personae and draw on various sources to construct the personae that they believe will be successful.     

FUTURE HOMEMAKERS AND FEMINIST AWAKENINGS: AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AS A METHOD IN THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

The author describes a project that illustrates the use of critical ethnography as a research methodology in religious education. The article focuses on a facet of critical ethnography known as autoethnography. Autoethnography refers to the researcher's use of portions of her own life story in an ethnographic project. It allows the researcher to interrogate her reasons for engaging in a specific field, in this case, female adolescent voice. In her research with adolescent females, the author weaves memories of her own adolescence, especially those memories of significant adult mentors who helped her come to voice. Through the use of such autobiographical narrative, the researcher acknowledges the situated nature of her observations and reveals the connections between herself and the topic under study. In keeping with significant work in the field of anthropology, the author argues that this turn toward autoethnography allows for research that engages scholarly passion, enabling the researcher to effect change.