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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
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- Serie: Wiley Handbooks in Education
- Sprache: Englisch
A state-of-the-art reference on educational ethnography edited by leading journal editors
This book brings an international group of writers together to offer an authoritative state-of-the-art review of, and critical reflection on, educational ethnography as it is being theorized and practiced today—from rural and remote settings to virtual and visual posts. It provides a definitive reference point and academic resource for those wishing to learn more about ethnographic research in education and the ways in which it might inform their research as well as their practice.
Engaging in equal measure with the history of ethnography, its current state-of play as well as its prospects, The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education covers a range of traditional and contemporary subjects—foundational aims and principles; what constitutes ‘good’ ethnographic practice; the role of theory; global and multi-sited ethnographic methods in education research; ethnography’s many forms (visual, virtual, auto-, and online); networked ethnography and internet resources; and virtual and place-based ethnographic fieldwork.
- Makes a return to fundamental principles of ethnographic inquiry, and describes and analyzes the many modalities of ethnography existing today
- Edited by highly-regarded authorities of the subject with contributions from well-known experts in ethnography
- Reviews both classic ideas in the ethnography of education, such as “grounded theory”, “triangulation”, and “thick description” along with new developments and challenges
- An ideal source for scholars in libraries as well as researchers out in the field
The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education is a definitive reference that is indispensable for anyone involved in educational ethnography and questions of methodology.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Structure and Chapter Disposition
Chapter Contents and Main Messages
Note on Terminology
References
Part One
1 Recognizable Continuity
The Nature of Ethnography
The Pervasiveness of Interviewing
The Nature of Interviews
The Validity of Interviews
How Is High Status Given to the Accounts of Participants’ Perspectives and Understandings?
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
2 Lived Forms of Schooling
Education as Schooling
Ethnography
Ethnography and Its Four Elementary Forms
The Ethnographic Imagination
References
3 Tales of Working Without/Against a Compass
Introduction
Ethics and Methodological Theory
Doing Educational Ethnography Ethically or Thinking “Ethics” through Educational Ethnography
(Re)thinking Ethnographic Ethics Aloud
References
4 Communities of Practice and Pedagogy
All Too Familiar
Apprenticeship
Situated Learning
Modes of Enculturation
Some Key Examples
Higher Levels of Learning and Teaching
Studying the Tacit
Conclusion
References
5 Critical Bifocality
Studying Privilege: Middle‐/Upper‐middle‐class Parents, Schools, and Students Working inside the Press of Economic and Social Restructuration
Situated Class Analysis: Insights Gained through the Lens of Critical Bifocality
Dispossession Stories: How Public Space Becomes a Private Commodity
Critical Bifocality and Circuits of Privilege: Concluding Thoughts
References
6 Ethnographic Writing
Writing – Field Notes, Memos, and Main Narratives
Conclusion
References
7 What Can Be Learnt?
Introduction: Educational Ethnography as a Complex Array of Things
A Sociology of Knowledge Framework of Educational Ethnography
Ethnomethodology: Interaction and the IRE Sequence in Research on Instruction
Conclusion
References
Part Two
8 Changing Conceptions of Culture and Ethnography in Anthropology of Education in the United States
The Centrality of Culture in American Cultural Anthropology
The Tradition of Educational Ethnography in the United States
Changes in Conceptualizing Culture and Ethnography
The Turn to Interpretive Logics
The Turn to Culture as Empowering and Disempowering
Discussion/Conclusion
References
9 Ethnography of Schooling in England
Feminist and Anti‐racist Interventions
The Shift to Policy Scholarship
The Influence of Postmodernism
Conclusion
References
10 Latin American Educational Ethnography
Introduction
The Beginning: The First 30 Years
Most Visited Topics and Issues
Conclusion: Looking Critically at the Present and Foreseeing the Future
References
11 Curriculum, Ethnography, and the Context of Practice in the Field of Curriculum Policies in Brazil
Introduction
Ethnography in Stephen Ball’s Studies: Introducing the Practice in the Policy
Ethnographic Research about Curriculum Policies in Brazil: The Risk of Realism
For a Discursive Comprehension of Context in Ethnographic Research
Final Words
References
12 Ethnographic Research in Schools
Developments in Educational Ethnography in the USA and UK: An Overview
The German Sonderweg and Its Connections to the Anglo‐Saxon Debate
Switzerland: A Multidisciplinary Position Betwixt and Between
Conclusion
References
13 Ethnography and Education in an African Context
Introduction
Defining Meta‐Ethnography
The Ethnography of Education: Studies in an African Context
The Value Provided by Ethnography to Understanding the Education Processes Studied
Conclusion: Contribution of Meta‐ethnography to Ethnography and Education as a Combined Research Area
Appendix
References
Part Three
14 Visual Ethnography in Education
Participatory Photography in Education
Examples of Different Ways of Using Participatory Photography in Ethnographic Research in Education
Existing Photographs as Part of Visual Ethnographies
Participatory Video Research in “Education”
Some General Methodological Questions
Analysis of Visual Ethnographic Studies
Ways of Communicating Visual Ethnographic Studies in Education with Audiences
Ethical Issues in Visual Ethnographies
Concluding Thoughts on Visual Ethnographies in Education
References
15 Lost in Performance? Rethinking and Reworking the Methodology of Educational Ethnography
Drama Not Theatre
Audit Culture
The Research Act
“This Is
My
Ethnodrama!”
Unnatural Representation
Conclusion
References
16 Staging Resistance
References
17 Agential Realism and Educational Ethnography
The Return to Ontology
New Materialism’s Rejection of the Linguistic Turn
Agential Realism beyond (before) the New Materialism
School Resegregation: An Illustrative Example
Methodological Implications
References
18 Multi‐sited Global Ethnography and Elite Schools
Introduction
Multi‐sited Global Ethnography
Global Forces
Global Connections
Global Imaginations
Concluding Comments
References
Further Reading
19 Educational Ethnography In and For a Mobile Modernity
Responding to the Mobility Turn
Ethnography in a Mobile Modernity
Ethnography as Travel Encounter (and Other Unsettling Metaphors)
Educational Ethnography In and For a Mobile Modernity
References
20 On Network(ed) Ethnography in the Global Education Policyscape
Introduction
Policy Networks and Policy Mobilities
Globalizing Networks and Ethnography
Researching Conferences
Concluding Comments
References
21 Autoethnography Comes of Age
Introduction
Consequences and Comforts of Autoethnography Coming of Age
Differentiating “Good” from “Bad” Autoethnography
Ethical Issues in Autoethnography
Autoethnography as a Risky Business and Causes for Concern
Stories from inside the Academy
Closing Thoughts
Acknowledgments
References
22 Positionality and Standpoint
Stances of Insiderness/Outsiderness
Multiple and Overlapping “Situated” Identities
Situated Knowledges, Power, and Positionalities
Examining Positionalities through Reflexivity
Positionalities and Reflexivities in the On‐ and Offline Field(s)
Concluding Remarks
References
Part Four
23 Ethnography of Education
Introduction
Thinking Forward, Looking Back
Legacies and Developments
Postmodernism: Literary and Cultural Turns in (Relation to) Ethnography of Education
Changing Ideas, Changing Practices: New Technologies in the Ethnography of Education
Summing Up and/or Rounding Down
References
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 13
Table 13.1 Selected studies: Ethnography and education in Africa
Chapter 18
Table 18.1 Conceptual matrix
List of Illustrations
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1
Figure 14.2
Figure 14.3 Finland Swedes often have cottages in the archipelago and like being there.
Figure 14.4 Stockmann’s bookstore has many Swedish books.
Figure 14.5 Finland‐Swedishness is to understand other Nordic languages.
Figure 14.6 Finland‐Swedishness is to be special.
Figure 14.7 We Finland‐Swedes have crayfish parties at the end of the summer.
Figure 14.8 No one is alike.
Figure 14.9 I may be Finland‐Swedish – but I refuse to be only that.
Figure 14.10 The Finland‐Swedish go side by side with Finnish speakers, but they may be merged in the future.
Figure 14.11 Almost all clothes and fashion are bought in Sweden! (Student from the Åland Islands.)
Figure 14.12 A treasure. The Swedish Finland is special and unique. I’m proud to be a Finland‐Swede. (Student from rural school in southern Finland.)
Figure 14.13 We will soon fall like the last leaf on the tree. (Student from rural school in southern Finland.)
Figure 14.14 Together. The flowers are close to each other. We Finland‐Swedes are also close to each other. Everybody knows everybody and sometimes others know more about me than I do … (Student from rural school in southern Finland.)
Figure 14.15
Figure 14.16
Figure 14.17
Guide
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The Wiley Handbooks in Education
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The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of EducationEdited by Dennis Beach, Carl Bagley, and Sofia Marques da Silva
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The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education
Edited by Dennis Beach, Carl Bagley, and Sofia Marques da Silva
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Notes on Contributors
Paul Atkinson, PhD (Edinburgh), DScEcon (Wales), is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. His most recent books are For Ethnography (2014) and Thinking Ethnographically (2017). He and Sara Delamont were the founding editors of the journal Qualitative Research.
Carl Bagley, PhD FRSA, is Professor of Educational Sociology and Head of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. He has undertaken research and published extensively in the fields of policy ethnography and critical arts‐based research; pioneering the live artistic performance of educational research data. He is the co‐founder of the Special Interest Group (SIG) Arts and Inquiry in the Visual and Performing Arts in Education within the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He is co‐editor of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) journal Review of Education and deputy editor of the journal Ethnography and Education.
Stephen J. Ball is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology of Education at the University College London, Institute of Education. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006; is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Society of Educational Studies, and a Laureate of Kappa Delta Phi; and has honorary doctorates from the University of Turku (Finland) and the University of Leicester. He is co‐founder and managing editor of the Journal of Education Policy. His main areas of interest are in sociologically informed education policy analysis and the relationships between education, education policy, and social class. He has written 20 books and over 140 journal articles. Recent books are Edu.Net (with Carolina Junemann and Diego Santori, 2017) and Foucault as Educator (2017).
Dennis Beach is Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and at the Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT at the University of Borås, Sweden. He is a member of the Nordic Research Council Excellence Centre for research on education justice and chief editor of the international research journal Ethnography and Education. His main research interests are in the sociology and politics of education and ethnography.
Angeles Clemente has worked as a lecturer and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, México, for 30 years, where she also founded the research group in Critical Applied Linguistics. She holds an MA in TESOL and a PhD in education from the Institute of Education, University of London, where she was a visiting research fellow during the academic year 2000/2001. Her main research interest is ethnographic studies with vulnerable communities and language teaching and learning in a postcolonial world anchored by a globalized political economy in order to understand the various localized interplays between language, culture, agency, and identity in the context of Oaxaca, Mexico. She co‐authored Performing English as a Postcolonial Accent: Ethnographic Narratives from México (with Michael J. Higgins, 2008) and co‐edited Encuentros etnográficos con niños y adolescentes [Ethnographic encounters with children and adolescents] (2011), Shaping Ethnography in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts (with Michael J. Higgins and Steve Marshall, 2014), and Bordes, límites y fronteras: Etnografía en colaboración con niños, niñas, adolescentes y jóvenes [Edges, boundaries and borders: Ethnography in collaboration with children, adolescents and young people] (2017).
Sara Delamont, PhD (Edinburgh), DScEcon (Cardiff), FAcSS, is Reader in Sociology at Cardiff University. She has received Lifetime Service awards from the BSA and from BERA. Her most recent books are Key Themes in the Ethnography of Education (2016), the third edition of Fieldwork in Educational Settings (2016), and Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Diasporic Capoeira, co‐authored with Neil Stephens and Claudio Campos (2017).
Barbara Dennis is an associate professor in Inquiry Methodology at Indiana University where she studies core methodological concepts through practice. As an educational feminist ethnographer, Barbara has concerned herself with studies of concepts like validity and ethics through research practice in order both to better understand our methodological thinking and to refine the ways in which researchers work in the social world for change.
Norman K. Denzin is distinguished Professor of Communications, Research Professor of Communications, Cinema Studies, Sociology, Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. His most recent book is Indians in Color: Native Art, Identity, and Performance in the New West (2015).
Margaret Eisenhart is University Distinguished Professor Emerita of Educational Foundations and Research Methodology at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She specializes in educational anthropology and ethnographic research methods. Her research focuses on the social and cultural experiences of students in US schools. She has examined racial dynamics and identities in elementary students, gender imagery and relationships among college students, and student experiences of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in high school. From 1999 to 2013 she directed, participated in, and researched after‐school programs in science and engineering, particularly for non‐privileged high school girls of color. Her most recent writings examine high school students’ opportunities to learn STEM and the subsequent pathways they take to college. Some of this research relies on text messaging and Facebook data, as well as more standard ethnographic techniques. She is the author or co‐author of over 100 research articles and three books: Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement and College Culture (with Dorothy C. Holland, 1990), Designing Classroom Research (with Hilda Borko, 1993), and Women’s Science: Learning and Succeeding from the Margin (with Elizabeth Finkel, 1998). She is a member of the US National Academy of Education.
Debbie Epstein is Professor of Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Roehampton, having previously worked at Cardiff University; Goldsmiths College, London; the Institute of Education, London; and the University of Central England. She is joint author of Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization, on which this chapter is based. She has published widely on a range of inequalities. Other publications from this project are listed in the book. Her other books include Towards Gender Equality: South African Schools during the HIV and AIDS Epidemic (with Robert Morrell, Elaine Unterhalter, Relebohile Moletsane, and Deevia Bhana, 2009), Silenced Sexualities in Schools and Universities (with Sarah O’Flynn and David Telford, 2003), Schooling Sexualities (with Richard Johnson, 1998), and Changing Classroom Cultures: Anti‐racism, Politics and Schools (1993).
Johannah Fahey is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She has an international reputation in the areas of intersectionality (gender, race, and class), and cultural globalization. She is co‐author/author of Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization (2017), Haunting the Knowledge Economy (2006), and David Noonan: Before and Now (2004); and co‐editor of In the Realm of the Senses: Social Aesthetics and the Sensory Dynamics of Privilege (2015) and Globalising the Research Imagination (2009).
Michelle Fine is a Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies, American Studies, and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has authored many books and articles on high school push‐outs, adolescent sexuality, the impact of college in prison, the struggles and brilliance of the children of incarcerated adults, the wisdom of Muslim American youth, the injustice of high stakes testing, the racial abuse and mass incarceration of people of color and queer youth. She loves to conduct research with young people who know intimately the scars of injustice and the laughter of surviving the streets of New York.
Martin Forsey is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Martin is an educational sociologist/anthropologist with particular interests in the social and cultural effects of schooling and the internationalization of tertiary education. An award‐winning teacher, Martin has an abiding interest in the scholarship of teaching. He also has an extensive list of research publications, including books on neoliberal reform of government schooling and school choice and a range of papers reflecting his interest in qualitative research methods, social change, schools and society, education and mobility, among other things. His profile also reflects a strong commitment to interdisciplinary research.
Martyn Hammersley is Emeritus Professor of Educational and Social Research at The Open University, UK. He has carried out research in the sociology of education and the sociology of the media. However, much of his work has been concerned with the methodological issues surrounding social inquiry. He has written several books, including (with Paul Atkinson) Ethnography: Principles in Practice (3rd ed., 2007), Educational Research, Policymaking and Practice (with Paul Chapman, 2002), What Is Qualitative Research? (2012), The Myth of Research‐Based Policy and Practice (2013), and The Limits of Social Science (2014).
Gunilla Holm is a professor of education in the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki and director of the Nordic Centre of Excellence in Education “Justice through Education.” Her research interests are focused on justice‐related issues in education with particular focus on the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. She is also interested in and writes on photography as a research method. She is the co‐founder of a new elementary teacher education program at the University of Helsinki with the profile of multilingualism, diversity, and social justice.
Bob Jeffrey was appointed Honorary Research Fellow at Exeter University in 2012 following retirement from The Open University. He researched from 1992 the work of primary teachers with Professor Peter Woods and Professor Geoff Troman. They focused on the opportunity for creative teaching and the effects of the reforms of the 1990s in England on this form of pedagogy and teacher identities. In the 2000s, they developed this focus to learners and their opportunities for creative learning, including a nine‐nation European study from 2004 to 2006. He also worked closely with Professor Anna Craft developing research and promoting creative teaching and learning in the educational research community. They have published extensively, including a great many methodology articles emphasizing an ethnographic approach, including a focus on cross‐cultural methods. Bob is co‐founder of the Ethnography and Education journal and edited it from 2008 to 2012, also co‐organizing an annual ethnography conference in Oxford for 10 years as well as co‐editing a book series from 2007 to 2012. www.ethnographyandeducation.org.
Carolina Junemann is a researcher and lecturer at the University College London Institute of Education. Her research has focused on the analysis of the participation of non‐state actors, and philanthropy in particular, in global policy networks and global policy communities. Her latest research has engaged these interests through a focus on the development of chains of low‐fee private schools in sub‐Saharan Africa. Her main areas of research interest are in new forms and methods of global education policy and governance and education policy mobilities. She has published on these themes in academic journals and has recently contributed to major international collections such as the World Yearbook of Education 2016 and the Handbook of Global Education Policy (2016). She is the author of two books, Networks, New Governance and Education (with Stephen J. Ball, 2012) and Edu.Net (with Stephen J. Ball and Diego Santori, 2017). She has also conducted research on education privatization for Education International, focusing on the case of the world’s largest edu‐business, Pearson.
Jane Kenway is Professorial Fellow at Melbourne University and Emeritus Professor at Monash University, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia. Her research expertise is in sociocultural studies of education in the context of wider social and cultural change, focusing particularly on power and politics.
Aaron Koh is an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Education. He previously taught at Monash University, Hong Kong Institute of Education, and National Institute of Education, Singapore. He has published in the areas of global studies in education, cultural studies in education, and sociology of education. His most recent publicationa are three co‐edited books: Education in the Global City: The Manufacturing of Education in Singapore (with Terence Chong, 2016), Elite Schools: Multiple Geographies of Privilege (with Jane Kenway, 2016), and New Sociologies of Elite Schooling (with Jane Kenway, 2017). He is on the editorial boards of Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. He is also the co‐founding editor of a Springer book series, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education.
Alice Casimiro Lopes is a curriculum professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She is currently the managing editor of the journal Transnational Curriculum Inquiry and member of the advisory board of the Journal of Education Policy and of many other journals and Brazilian funding agencies. She has authored and edited several books and she has published many papers in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Her research focuses on curriculum policy in a discursive approach.
Anna Lund is an associate professor in sociology and co‐director for the Center for Cultural Sociology at Linnaeus University in Sweden. Her research interests are in culture, ethnography, education, youth, gender, and multicultural incorporation. She has published articles in Gender and Education, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
Christoph Maeder is Professor of Educational Sociology at the University of Teacher Training in Zurich, Switzerland. He specializes in ethnographic research on “people processing organizations” such as schools, welfare bureaucracies, prisons, and hospitals. He received his academic training at the University of St. Gallen, a business school, where he started his career with work in medical sociology. This experience pushed him finally into organizational ethnography. Maeder is a founding member of the research network “Qualitative Methods” of the European Sociological Association (ESA) and a former president of the Swiss Sociological Association (SSA). During recent years he has focused on sociology of knowledge approaches in education. His most recent publication in English is on the use of computer technology in the classroom of a primary school. Currently he is working on an ethnography of the kindergarten together with his colleagues in the research group “Children, Childhood, and Schooling” in Zurich.
Cameron McCarthy is Hardie Fellow and University Scholar in the Department of Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership (EPOL) and in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. He was, until recently, director and divisional coordinator of the Global Studies in Education Program at the University of Illinois. Professor McCarthy teaches courses in globalization studies, postcolonialism, mass communications theory, and cultural studies at his university. His latest books include Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances (co‐edited with Jane Kenway, 2015) and Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization (co‐authored with Jane Kenway, Johannah Fahey, Debbie Epstein, Aaron Koh, and Fazal Rizvi, 2017).
Jim Mienczakowski studied at London University’s Central School of Speech & Drama and King’s College London. His first ethnographic study researched the working lives of teachers in Extra Priority Area (EPA) schools in inner London during the early 1980s. His subsequent ethnographically derived research work involved interdisciplinary academic teams researching the experiences of young people stigmatized through crime, addiction, and circumstances of health and entailed the development of critical ethno‐drama and performance as a means of presenting and testing research reports. He is currently working in Borneo on a multi‐media mode of research reporting.
Diana Milstein is a professor at the National University of Comahue (UNCo), Neuquén and Río Negro, Argentina and researcher at the Center of Social Research of National Council of Scientific and Technical Research at Institute of Economic and Social Development (CIS‐CONICET‐IDES), Argentina. She is coordinator of the international network of ethnography with children and teenagers. Her fields of interest are ethnography and education, ethnography with children, anthropology of the body, and art education. She has taught graduate and postgraduate courses in national and Latin American universities. In addition to publishing several articles in international journals and book chapters, she is co‐author of La escuela en el cuerpo [The school in the body] (with Hector Mendes, 1999/ 2017, translated into Portuguese), author of Higiene, autoridad y escuela [Hygiene, authority, and school] (2003), La nación en la escuela [Nation in school] (2009), and co‐editor of Encuentros etnográficos con niños y adolescentes [Ethnographic encounters with children and adolescents] (2011) and Bordes, límites y fronteras: Etnografía en colaboración con niños, niñas, adolescentes y jóvenes [Edges, boundaries and borders: Ethnography in collaboration with children, adolescents and young people] (2017).
Maropeng Modiba is Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of Johannesburg where, for four years, she was the Head of the Department of Education and Curriculum Studies. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Research in Education. Her current research focuses on teacher education and curriculum literacy captured by studying classroom instructional practices. She pursues this research as a member of the conference “Ethnography and Education – Oxford” and Vice‐President (Africa) of the Board for the International Council on Education for Teaching (ICET). In addition to journal articles and other publications, her latest book chapters include “Teacher Education policy in South Africa: Definitions of Best Practice and Challenges” (2016), “How Do We Educate so ‘that the people of this precious Earth … may live?’: Rethinking the History Curriculum in Zimbabwe” (with Nathan Moyo, 2015), and “Critical Research: Understanding Material Constraints and Engaging in Transformative Action Research” (with Nathan Moyo and Kefa Simwa, 2015).
Joan Parker Webster is a retired associate professor of education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), where she developed the Reading Endorsement for Alaska state licensure and the Master’s of Reading and Literacy program at UAF. Specializing in literacies and cross‐cultural communications, she also taught courses in qualitative methodologies. Currently she is affiliated faculty in the Center for Cross Cultural Studies at UAF. She also works as an educational research consultant, primarily as an evaluator for federally funded grant programs. Parker Webster continues to conduct ethnographic research and publish in the areas of qualitative and online research methodologies, multiliteracies, cross‐cultural communication, and Indigenous education.
Fazal Rizvi is a professor of global studies in education at the University of Melbourne Australia, as well as an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign in the United States. He has written extensively on issues of identity and culture in transnational contexts, globalization and education policy, and Australia–Asia relations. A collection of his essays is published in Encountering Education in the Global: Selected Writings of Fazal Rizvi (2014). Professor Rizvi is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, and is a past editor of the journal Discourse: Studies in Cultural Politics of Education and past President of the Australian Association of Research in Education.
Jerry Lee Rosiek is a professor of education studies at the University of Oregon where he teaches courses on the cultural foundations of education and qualitative research methodology. His scholarship examines the knowledge that enables the promotion of justice, equity, and care in educational institutions. His research has experimented with the use of narrative modes of representations and is informed by revisionist pragmatism, new materialist philosophy, and Indigenous Studies. His writing has appeared in the journals Harvard Educational Review, Education Theory, and Educational Researcher, and his recently published book, Resegregation as Curriculum (2016), won the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum 2016 Book of the Year Award.
Diego Santori is a senior lecturer in education at the University of Roehampton. His interests include the relationships between education policy, economics, and subjectivity and the ways in which their interpenetration produce new cultural forms and practices. Together with Professor Stephen J. Ball and Carolina Junemann, he has recently completed a Leverhulme Trust‐funded research on the role of philanthropy in education policy, with a focus on the development of chains of low‐cost, private schools for the poor in sub‐Saharan Africa. His recent publications include Edu.Net (with Stephen J. Ball and Caroline Junemann, 2017), “Financial Markets and Investment in Education,” in World Yearbook of Education 2016, and “Public Narratives under Intensified Market Conditions: Chile as a Critical Case,” in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (2016).
Anja Sieber Egger, DPhil (University of Berne), is co‐leader of the research group Children – Childhood – Schooling at Zurich University of Teacher Education. She is a social anthropologist with a strong research interest in the anthropology of childhood, in everyday culture in school including processes of doing gender/ethnicity/culture/pupil, as well as (domestic) violence. At the heart of her methodological interest lies ethnography.
Sofia Marques da Silva is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Porto, Portugal, and member of CIIE – Educational Research and Intervention Centre, obtaining her PhD in Educational Sciences in 2008. Recently she has been involved in an online and offline ethnography with young people from border regions. She is the coordinator of the national project Youth, Education, and Border Regions (2010–2018) and coordinator of the Portuguese team in the Project “NAOS – Professional Capacity Dealing with Diversity” (KA2, Erasmus +, European Commission). She teaches research methodologies, sociology of education, and youth cultures, is on the editorial board of several international journals, and is deputy editor of the journal Ethnography and Education. She is the vice president of the Portuguese Society of Educational Sciences (SPCE), an expert of NESET II, and member of the experts group of EACEA (Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency), with experience in assessing and analyzing European projects on youth, migrants, equality, and diversity. She is also part of a working group of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education for promoting digital competencies.
Andrew C. Sparkes works as Professor of Education at Leeds Beckett University in the Carnegie School of Sport. His research and pedagogical interests are inspired by a continuing fascination with the ways that people experience different forms of embodiment over time in a variety of contexts. Andrew’s work is necessarily nomadic in nature and dwells in the fertile cracks between disciplines where he finds much that intrigues, amuses, and baffles him.
Sandra Stewart’s lengthy experience of teaching at primary school level as well as lecturing pre‐set teachers at university level underpins her interest in teachers’ professional development. She is particularly interested in the use of ethnography as a research method to better capture and understand how individuals experience curriculum policy at school level. She has published on classroom teaching, curriculum policy, and teacher development. Contributions are in journal papers and conference proceedings.
Mats Trondman is Professor of Cultural Sociology at Linnaeus University in Sweden and a visiting professor at the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. He is the founding editor of the Sage journal Ethnography together with Paul Willis. His main focus is youth culture in relation to conditions of existence, forms of self‐understanding, and agency, within areas such as schooling, sports, and the arts. Trondman also has a deep interest in social and cultural theory which often combines with political philosophy.
Maria de Lourdes Rangel Tura earned her PhD in education at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is associate professor at the Graduate Program in Education (ProPEd) of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her studies are based on ethnographic research, which has been the object of publications in books, book chapters, and papers in academic journals.
Gisela Unterweger, DPhil (University of Zurich), is co‐leader of the research group Children – Childhood – Schooling at Zurich University of Teacher Education. She is a European ethnologist and has a research background in childhood studies, everyday culture in school, and the construction of identity as a pupil. She works with ethnographic research strategies to explore and investigate the cultural dimensions of schooling.
Geoffrey Walford is Emeritus Professor of Education Policy and an Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. His main research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, private schools, choice of schools, religiously based schools, and qualitative research methodology. Professor Walford is currently engaged with various scholarly writing activities, working, in particular, on issues connected to private schooling for the poor and social justice.
Lois Weis is State University of New York Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA. She has written extensively about the current predicament of white, African American, and Latino/a working‐class and poor youth and young adults, and the complex role gender and race play in their lives in light of contemporary dynamics associated with the global knowledge economy. She is the author and/or editor of numerous books and articles relating to race, class, gender, education, and the economy. Together with Michelle Fine she is a winner of the outstanding book award from the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
Paul Willis has a wide range of interests in lived and other cultures in a variety of locations, institutional, formal and informal, commercial and non‐commercial, work related and leisure. Significant publications include Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977), Profane Culture (2015), and The Ethnographic Imagination (2000).
Introduction
Dennis Beach, Carl Bagley, and Sofia Marques da Silva
In the past 30 years ethnography has grown from an emerging tradition in education research to one of the important research methods in the field. Impulses in this development have come from different national directions and disciplines. Predominant amongst them, however, have been influences from the UK and the USA and the disciplines of sociology (in the UK) and anthropology and sociology (in the USA) respectively. Following this, as discussed by Paul Atkinson (2005), the position has changed significantly. Ethnographic research has flourished; methodological reflection has grown. There is now extensive writing around matters of research methods and a need to return to some fundamental principles of ethnographic inquiry, along with a desire to describe and analyze the many modalities of ethnography that now exist. These developments have led to Wiley‐Blackwell’s interest in creating the present volume and our desire to edit it.
When editing the Handbook we have tried to be open to new developments and challenges, whilst also being cautious, by locating these within a wider ethnographic framework. We want to both recognize and give space to intrinsic principles of order and explore new challenges and new ideas and practices. This means that both classic ideas in the ethnography of education, such as “grounded theory,” “triangulation,” and “thick description,” will be reviewed in various chapters, along with newer ways of trying to be faithful to the phenomena under investigation. In addition, we acknowledge the need to respond to a range of new developments associated with globalization, mobility, technologies of communication, and changes in concepts of culture.
Methodological reflections and intellectual challenges posed by changes in society and culture have influenced and shaped generations of ethnographers of education and the Handbook has been composed with the need for continuous methodological reflection and intellectual development in mind. The selection of chapters and authors has been made on this basis: each chapter has been specially commissioned and represents an original contribution.
In this regard, the scope of the Handbook and its various chapters does not rest simply in repeating, rehearsing, and renewing ethnographic principles and reaffirming their importance. Indeed, while the concept of education ethnography is now well established, a lot of the work of establishing the discipline rested fundamentally on these principles being repeatedly tested and challenged in and by empirical, philosophical, and theoretical research in education, sociology, and other disciplines (see, for example, the chapters by Hammersley and Eisenhart in the present volume, as well as the chapter by Trondman, Willis, and Lund). As Martyn Hammersley recently substantiated during a plenary presentation at the Oxford Conference on Ethnography of Education (Hammersley 2017), there are serious new challenges for the discipline to meet that differ from the challenges identified in the past; the Handbook therefore tries to do as much justice as it can to these challenges (see, for instance, the chapters by Mienczakowski and Denzin around politics of representation, the chapter by Rosiek addressing new materialism, and the chapter by Junemann, Ball, and Santori with respect to global networks and education policy research).
One of the problems that was identified by Hammersley in his talk concerned the pluralization and diffusion of the concept of ethnography of education. As Hammersley pointed out, the term “ethnography” has acquired a range of meanings, and comes in many different versions, often reflecting sharply divergent orientations. This is also discussed by both Walford and Jeffrey in their chapters and is implied to be a problem that requires attention in terms of possible threats toward the practice of ethnography and to the quality of ethnographic work. Walford, for instance, argues for the need for a basic agreement about the meaning of the term with respect to certain specific principles among ethnographers as to ontological, epistemological, and other matters.
Another problem identified in the plenary presentation by Hammersley was the growing demand for education research to be accountable in very narrow terms, such as through demonstrable impact and knowledge transfer. This has serious restraining effects on ethnography of education, according to Hammersley, and restrains its possibilities for critical engagement (see also chapters by Dennis, Weis and Fine, Denzin, and Mienczakowski in the present volume). Moreover, it is part of a long‐term shift away from a state‐patronage system of research funding toward an investment model, according to Hammersley, which demands that the returns on specific projects be identifiable.
A third threat identified by Hammersley is related to the above. It concerns the currently growing ideological and financial support that research financing agencies and national governments are devoting to pushing back the dominance of qualitative methods in favor of statistical analyses. One example identified by Hammersley is the renewed stress on randomized controlled trials as a gold standard. Another is the large amounts of money that are being devoted to quantitative methods training. Besides being bad for the prospects of ethnographic research possibilities, echoing Blumer’s (1954) critique of the expansion and flaws of variable research, these developments also imply serious problems for critically reflective research in the education field, with such research being displaced in favor of so‐called evidence‐based best practice research.
Finally, from the list of problems presented by Hammersley we want to draw attention to the changed conditions of work in universities and in the employment market for academics. These changes, which variously refer to the commodification and neoliberal restructuring of the higher education sector, and the introduction of new forms of governance (often termed “new public management” or NPM), has been extensively researched in recent decades. Changes have been seen to put extensive pressure on postgraduate students to complete their research work in a fixed (and quite limited) period of time, whilst at the same time also forcing them to feel compelled to display employability by teaching along the way. In some cases this means that the time that can be devoted to long‐term participant observation and analysis in ethnography becomes ruptured, and the work becomes fragmented. Changing conditions of labor in academia are resulting in threats to the practices of ethnographic research. Changes in culture more broadly are doing so too (see the chapters by Hammersley and Eisenhart in this volume).
Structure and Chapter Disposition
In compiling the Handbook we have attempted to produce a foundational benchmark regarding the issues introduced above, together with a presentation of what conceptually and empirically characterizes current thinking about good educational ethnographic practices. Our hope is that we can present an authoritative reference point and a valuable academic resource for those who are either planning to conduct ethnographic research in education or simply wish to learn more about this kind of research. We hope and anticipate therefore that the book will be read by:
researchers in education around the world;
graduate students and academics in fields such as special education, general education, disability studies, and teacher education;
administrators, at school, district, and/or state level who are responsible for establishing and evaluating educational programs, services, and curricula.
The Handbook has been edited with the anticipated needs of these groups in mind and at a level that we anticipate will make it accessible to a wide range of researchers, educators, and administrators as a reference and as a textbook for graduate‐level courses in research methods. It has been organized into different sections, each with chapters of between 8,000 and 10,000 words that examine a specific subject in depth. These are related either to established standards of good ethnographic practices that form a picture of what has come to characterize the ethnography of education, or to various developments and different positions, values, principles, and commitments that both influence and challenge the ethnography of education. Thinking about these issues is then used to compose ideas about the future of ethnography of education. The Handbook will in this way be valuable not simply for those looking to ethnography as a method, but also for those looking to find answers to assist with their existing research practice and those seeking to modify or extend their practice further. In essence, the Handbook strives to situate the past, underscore the present, and reflect on the future of educational ethnography.
Chapter Contents and Main Messages
The first chapter, by Geoffrey Walford, is entitled “Recognizable Continuity: A Defense of Multiple Methods.” Walford’s chapter recognizes that although ethnographic traditions change, there is a need for some strong and recognizable continuity, including resistance to efforts to equate ethnography with forms of qualitative research. Positioning ethnography as just a qualitative methodology shears it free from independent meaning, according to Walford, and also actually misrepresents the ethnography of early practitioners, who often generated quantitative data as well as qualitative field notes and descriptions in their research. Another problem is an overreliance on interviews. The details of social organization and social action can be uncovered through observation as well as through talk and Walford argues strongly that a greater emphasis on observation in all its many forms, using all of the five senses, may improve the quality of ethnographies immeasurably. Ethnographic research benefits from more time being spent in observing the activities of others and recording these observations in field notes and less time being spent in trying to construct “hard” data from ephemeral conversations. These concerns ally well with some of those expressed by both Hammersley and Atkinson, referred to above.
Chapter 2, “Lived Forms of Schooling: Bringing the Elementary Forms of Ethnography to the Science of Education,” by Mats Trondman, Paul Willis, and Anna Lund, follows Walford’s chapter and adds further theoretical reflections and historical relief to those presented by him. Looking back in history to debates within ethnography from the beginning of the twentieth century, the chapter analyzes what ethnography can do for education when it is taken as a proper object from the ethnographic point of view. The best ethnography, the authors suggest, recognizes and records how experience is entrained in the flow of contemporary sociocultural history, recorded as sociomaterial structures, meanings, and trends, and where human beings are both subjects, objects, and the voluntary agents of their own involuntary determination in a specific world of meaning. This world of meaning is not fixed and inviolable, however, but rather fully dependent on the whole to which it belongs. In such a context, the “truth of each fact depends upon the … coherence of the facts which compose it” (Oakeshott 1933: 113). Specific lived meanings relate to already existing repositories of meanings that lived experience more or less consciously and overtly enacts, and from which individuals and groups selectively and creatively take on lived identifications and meanings.
Chapter 3, “Tales of Working Without/Against a Compass: Rethinking Ethical Dilemmas in Educational Ethnography,” by Barbara Dennis, addresses questions of ethics in the ethnography of education. As discussed by Dennis, the ethical education ethnographer enters the field legitimized through approvals by ethical review boards, as a hopefully self‐aware and reflective researcher, with basically good intentions. However, this awareness and the good intentions are often challenged when facing encounters in the field, as the question of what it means to be an ethical educational ethnographer is not isolated from how we contemplate, confront, engage ourselves in, and are contemplated, confronted, and engaged as ethical beings with/in the world with others in the research process itself, in the entanglements “we” help enact and the commitments “we” are willing to take on (Dennis, this volume). This is about how ethnographers act in the practical domain of everyday life where the course of ethical actions is both interdependently and situationally forged. The question of “what it means to be an ethical ethnographer” is transformed here into a question of how we can engage in and rethink ethics for ethnography. Following post‐qualitative deconstructions of the modern subject, this calls, according to Dennis, for a more participatory approach to ethics, one that involves collectively creating a space of opportunity where behaving ethically means engaging with imaginative possibilities within activities where one’s both open and fallible researcher self is at stake.
The idea of researching across and within communities of practice and pedagogy is addressed in Chapter 4 by Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson. This chapter argues that ethnographic studies of education need to encompass a wider range of settings than is currently the case, as it is important for researchers to de‐familiarize educational settings if they are to keep their analytic perspectives fresh, and extend their ideas about educational processes. The chapter points out both that and how research on schools and classrooms can be enriched through theoretically informed studies that encompass comparative perspectives. Socialization and instruction take place in many contexts beyond schools, colleges, and universities and many communities of practice are also communities of pedagogy, such as craft studios or sports coaching. Occupational and artistic apprenticeship are among the modes of practical pedagogy but there is a continuing need for detailed studies of how knowledge, skills, techniques, and judgments are transmitted and learned. Ethnographers of education need to pay attention to studies of such settings that already exist. Ethnographies that pay close attention to the concrete practices of practical learning and instruction are advocated. They are of significance in their own right, but studies of diverse settings of instruction also help to throw social processes in conventional educational settings into relief.
The concept of remaining critical when researching educational settings is addressed in Chapter 5, “Critical Bifocality,” by Lois Weis and Michelle Fine. Weis and Fine explore critical bifocality as a theory and method for designing critical research work that moves between educational policy and everyday life in schools, by interrogating how the global and local structural arrangements that are embodied in institutional policy, educational practice, and everyday people – parents, teachers, and administrators – reproduce and embody America’s class structure of the future. The authors theorize and simultaneously humanize the work of social actors across our ever more contentious economic and social structure in a shifting global context. However, above all the chapter elaborates on critical bifocality as a dedicated theoretical and methodological commitment to a multi‐scale ethnographic design that documents the historic and contemporary linkages and capillaries of structural arrangements and the discursive practices by which those on the ground in schools and communities make sense of their circumstances. The chapter outlines a theory of method and chronicles the macro‐level structural dynamics associated with the refractive implications of globalization and neoliberalism. Two recent ethnographic investigations are used as exemplars. They provide a deliberate focus on structures and lives, as paired empirical opportunities, to illustrate how researchers can account for global, national, and local transformations as insinuated, embodied, and resisted, when trying to make sense of current educational and economic possibilities in shifting contexts and circumstances.
The next chapter, “Ethnographic Writing,” by Bob Jeffrey, takes us back to the principled concerns of ethnographers in ethnography and ethnographic representation. The chapter explores some of the major aspects of writing and ethnography. Writing is an integral part of the ethnographic process, particularly in the field. This involves “writing down,” and then re‐presenting an authentic, authoritative, and plausible account of the lived reality of our research site, which is “writing up.” When doing this, ethnographers have to produce characteristics of a site through the production of descriptive data that both reflect these characteristics and provide food for analysis. In the main this involves the ethnographer writing and/or recording descriptions in the form of field notes. Field notes are of different kinds. They may portray the environment, provide a description of how respondents work and live, or make use of many literary forms and persuasive rhetoric to construct data that reflect the lived reality of those we research. The chapter provides examples from extensive research of different types of writing and its implications for the academy. It draws on the author’s extensive experience of ethnographic research to exemplify four field‐note forms of writing. The use of memos, writing main texts, and constructing whole narratives are also addressed.
Part II of the Handbook opens with Chapter 7, called “What Can Be Learnt? Educational Ethnography, the Sociology of Knowledge, and Ethnomethodology,” by Christoph Maeder. This chapter describes the field of educational ethnography as situated within a complex array of disciplines, national traditions, and languages, each with various purposes and institutional functions. In an arrangement like this, ethnography of education is predictably fuzzy, obviously scattered, and theoretically diverse, the chapter argues. Therefore, an idea that brings together such a vast area of scientific endeavor is looked for. The theory suggested as useful in doing so is the social constructionist theory emanating from the sociology of knowledge from the 1960s, along with theoretical concepts from ethnomethodology. From a sociology of knowledge perspective, ethnomethodologists were – and still are – concerned with basic and fundamental questions of how education works. One of their core concepts, the Intervention–Response/Reaction–Evaluation sequence (IRE sequence), is used to explore how the definition of the pedagogical situation as a theoretical prerequisite can yield an exemplary starting point for educational ethnography in general. The overall aim of this chapter is therefore to suggest clearer theoretical underpinnings for educational ethnography, which should not take educational realities and institutions for granted but yet still needs to ask fundamental questions.
The chapter by Maeder opens up questions that are also addressed in Chapter 8
