Session Information
19 SES 16, Ethnographic Accounts on Knowledge and its Conception Part 1
Symposium to be continued in 19 SES 17
Contribution
This paper aims to render an account of the meaning of professional development, taking examples from critical ethnographic research and how it can contribute to develop knowledge for researchers, professionals and researched situations. The aim is to analyse how interaction between researchers and participants influenced both the unfolding research process, the practices that were researched and the perspectives held by practitioners on these practices and the contexts they were part of. Theoretically the research has be couched in transformation theories. The concepts of catalytic validity (Lather, 1986), concientization (Freire, 1970) and ethnographic explanatory critique (Maisuria and Beach, 2018) have been important. The data consists of ethnographic work in three projects in Spain in rural and urban schools. These schools differed in terms of context. Schools and classroom observations, interviews, informal conversations, document analysis and virtual ethnography were carried out during the research. From this data, the analysis of the data and the theory informing the analysis the paper compared the different projects and their results, and will consider (1) the relevance of ethnographic research in a critical perspective for researchers trying to produce genuinely valuable practical knowledge for social transformation, (2) the characteristics of this knowledge with respect the concept of catalytic validity and concientization and the conditions of (3) schools and teaching for justice and equity within the political situation of the global hegemony of education market policies. The comparisons will be based on ethnographic data and analyses that initially produced individual case studies but were then exposed to a meta-ethnographic analysis. Different examples show how interaction between researchers and participants were important to develop the knowledge in different ways and that researchers and participants increased their knowledge in a dialectical way between them. The participants experience a professional knowledge from the reflection and the interaction. Time, Space and commitment of the researchers and participants were important. Ethnographic explanatory critique and thick description and the active involvement of participants in research analysis all contributed to catalytic validity. Social transformation occurred in relation to researcher-researched roles in these circumstances. Extensive theoretical elaboration and deconstruction of politics of the market are needed to conscientize and transform current educational macro-politics.
References
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2007 edition. Lather, P. (1986). Research as Praxis. Harvard Educational Review: September 1986, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 257-278. Maisuria, A. and Beach, D. (2018). Ethnography and Education. Oxford Research Encyclopedia http://education.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-100
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